BY A. 3. ARDERRY
The Koran Interpreted
Schehererade
Sufism
The Holy Koran
The Seven Odes
THE FIRST CHAPTER
IN ARABIC LITERATURE
A.J. ARBERRY
Free Public Library, Newark, #22
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY‘Inst PusLIsHED mV 1957
“isk is oy nt he Bene Coveon
[at Se i ee
aon fa ee Se te grat af
eae a eh cn
a Gy cen eal lett
Tere, ae oe mito to
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
in 12 point Fournier type
BYR. eR. CLARE, L3D,, EDINBURGH
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
The Golden Poems page 7
ONE
The Wandering King 3
MU‘ALLAQA OF IMR AL-QAIS or
Two
Whom the Gods Loved? o
MU‘ALLAQA OF TARAFA 83
THREE
The Moralise 9°
MU'ALLAQA OF ZUHAIR 14
FOUR .
The Centenarian 119
MUTALLAQA OF LABID 142
FIVE
The Black Knight 148
MUSALLAQA OF ‘ANTARA 179
SIX
The Regicide 185
MU‘ALLAQA OF ‘AMR 204
SEVEN
The Leper 210
MU‘ALLAQA OF AL-HARITH aaa
EPILOGUE
True or False? 228
INDEX 255PROLOGUE
The Golden Poems
O: 4 September 1780 William Jones, barrister, poet and
linguist, wrote to his friend Edmund Cartwright: ‘The
hurry of the general election to a professional man, has
obliged me to suspend till another long vacation, two little works,
which I hoped to finish in the remainder of this. The first is a
teatise On the Maritime Jurisprudence of the Athenians, illustrated
by five speeches of Demosthenes in commercial causes; and the
second, a dissertation On the Manners of the Arabians before the
Time of Makomer, illustrated by the seven poems, which were
written in letters of gold, and suspended in the temple at Mecca,
about the beginning of the sixth century. When they are printed,
I shall be proud in submitting them to your judgment, as their
excellence is well known.’
This is the earliest extant reference to Jones's intention to
publish for the first time in print the poems which constitute the
theme of the present book. Since men’s motives in the work they
undertake are at least as interesting as what they eventually
achieve, it will not be superfluous to consider briefly the back-
ground to what a young Welshman, the son of a distinguished
mathematician and the grandson of an Anglesey farmer, was
Proposing to attempt in the summer of 1780 but found himself
obliged to postpone, as he then thought, for another year. Cart:
wright was among those who had persuaded Jones to stand for
Parliament in the general election of 1780. Lord North’s Tory
administration seemed at last to be tottering to its fall; Whig
hopes were high; the war in America was going from bad to
7