War Songs. 'Antarah ibn Shaddad

North Arabia) for greater discrimination in the use of the label “Bedouin,”¹⁴ and Zwettler would establish “its most restrictive” designation as “the camel-raising and -riding Arab nomads of the late antique Near East.”¹⁵ Whittow has advocated replacing the term “Arab” with the term “Bedu,” in accordance with contemporary anthropological and ethnographic practice.¹⁶ Dostal, arguing for an Iranian (Parthian) influence for the saddlebow and its associated weaponry and cultural complexes (including tent types, customs, and clothing), distinguishes between nomads, “half-bedouins (breeders of small-cattle),” and “full bedouins (camel-breeders).”¹⁷ Retsö, in a bold argument that has not won many supporters, argues that the Arabs were a “razzia-loving warrior caste” and imagines them forming:

      a socio-religious association of warriors, subject to a divinity or ruler as his slaves … separate from ordinary settled farmers and city-dwellers, living in their own lots often outside the border between the desert and the sown.¹⁸

      The notion of a “socio-religious association of warriors” (one that celebrates the desert wastes, wherever their residence may be) is appealing. The lifestyle would have been typified by unsettledness, by the rapid shifts from sedentary to nomad and back again.¹⁹

      Whether or not we accept Retsö’s suggestion of a “socio-religious association of warriors,” during these centuries the northern Arabian peninsula witnessed the emergence of aristocratic “rider-warriors” (the term is Walter Dostal’s), adept at warfare with both horse and camel, implicated, to varying extents, in the Roman and Iranian imperial reliance (in North and Central Arabia) of confederations of rider-warriors as mercenaries or proxies, and characterized by developed military technology such as body armor and the lance.²⁰ We can perhaps go further and identify these “rider-warriors” as the elites of Maʿadd. In the three centuries before Islam, Maʿadd were:

      predominantly camel-herding … bedouins and bedouin tribal groups—irrespective of lineage or place of origin—who ranged, encamped and resided throughout most of the central and northern peninsula … and who had come to adopt the shadād-saddle and … by the third century, to utilize it so effectively as a means of developing and exploiting within a desert environment the superior military advantages offered by horses and horse cavalry.²¹

      These elites were organized in their various kin groups, and Zwettler notes that their principles of organization were not exclusively based on blood relationship or kinship; rather, they operated as

      colleagues, associates or cohorts in an amorphous, far-ranging, almost idealized aggregation of like-minded compeers and communities who shared many of the same social, cultural and ecological experiences, aspirations, opinions, and values.

      According to Zwettler, this is how, by the middle or the end of the seventh century, “Maʿadd entered the genealogical realm, where it became an eponym for the ‘progressive’ Northern Arabs.”²² As part of this process, tribalism and genealogy emerged as central defining features of the descendants of Maʿadd. It is, then, the inability of the imperial powers of Rome and Iran to control their buffer zones through the Jafnids and Nasrids, and the various mercenaries they relied on, that created in the second half of the sixth century the state of instability and turmoil that characterized northern Arabia.²³

      The elites of Maʿadd shared another important feature: language. The language of these groups was the ʿarabiyyah, the Arabic we encounter today in the poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia. We should not overstate the evidence, but we should bear in mind the observation that the predominance of this ʿarabiyyah is an accurate, if not fully representative, account of the linguistic situation during the centuries under discussion. Jenssen reminds us that “very little … can be known about Arabic before the dawn of Islam.” He notes that of all the varieties of Arabic similar to the Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry, it was only this latter variety that was in fact preserved “in the form of a corpus of text and a systematic description.”²⁴ The survival of the ʿarabiyyah, preserved in a specific corpus of poetry, the qasida poem, suggests that at some stage this “classical” Arabic emerged as a dominant form of expression of a dominant group. The users of this ʿarabiyyah were the masters of qasida poetry: they controlled both language and society, as renowned warriors and chieftains or as figures closely connected to these chieftains.

      ʿABS OF GHAṬAFĀN

      The inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula were caught up in this turbulence that engulfed the world on their borders during the sixth century. Often they were the agents of turmoil. ʿAntarah belonged to a kin group known as ʿAbs, transhumant pastoralists who lived in Najd and belonged to the larger kin group of Ghaṭafān, itself claiming descent from the super-lineage group Qays ʿAylān. Ghaṭafān contained other conglomerated kin groups, including Sulaym and Dhubyān (see Map 1), and Dhubyān in turn comprised three distinct kin groups: Fazārah, Murrah, and Thaʿlabah.

      By the middle of the sixth century, Ghaṭafān was a conglomeration in a state of upheaval. ʿAbs, under the leadership of Zuhayr ibn Jadhīmah, had gained hegemony of Ghaṭafān and over the Hawāzin (see Map 1), who also claimed descent from Qays ʿAylān. Ghaṭafān had to contend with some powerful neighbors, chief among whom was ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿah. The killing of Zuhayr, chieftain of ʿAbs, by a member of ʿĀmir signaled the decline in ʿAbs’s hegemony. Before long, as a result of a power struggle between ʿAbs and Fazārah of Dhubyān, hostilities broke out and quickly escalated into the forty-year War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. This power struggle is expressed in the sources as a quarrel between two chieftain protagonists: Qays ibn Zuhayr (of ʿAbs) and Ḥudhayfah ibn Badr (of Fazārah). A pretext for conflict was afforded by a horse race between the protagonists. Each chief agreed to race two horses, a stallion and a mare. Qays chose to run Dāḥis and his mare al-Ghabrāʾ, but Ḥudhayfah’s men cheated and slowed Qays’s racehorses down, so Qays lost the wager.

      In the war that ensued, ʿAbs initially enjoyed notable successes, but eventually the combined forces of Dhubyān proved too strong and ʿAbs were expelled from their ancestral pasturelands. It was in this crucible of exile and wandering that ʿAntarah’s warrior spirit was tested and found true. We encounter him participating in the battles of ʿUrāʿir and al-Farūq, and repeatedly saving his people from calamity. ʿAbs and Dhubyān were eventually reconciled by the end of the sixth century. In the siege of Medina known as the War of the Trench (5/627), Ghaṭafān, under the leadership of ʿUyaynah ibn Ḥisn of Fazārah, fought on the side of the Meccans against the Muslims.²⁵

      Whatever the historicity of the narrative of the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ, the turbulent relationship between kin groups within the same lineage group over a prolonged period is typical of the kind of turmoil that dominated much of Arabia during the sixth century.

      THE POETS AND THEIR COSMOS

      The elite warriors of sixth-century Maʿadd chose to express their views of the world, their war culture, and their ethos in qasida poetry, which is poetry composed in a prestige language (classical Arabic) in works of varying length and complexity, from simple poems to complex odes.

      Like the society the warrior-poets lived in, qasida poetry was in a state of turmoil. This oral poetry emerged abruptly in the second half of the sixth century, was subject to an astonishing variety of experimentations, manipulations, conceptualizations, and imaginings in the seven or eight decades before the advent of Islam, and continued to thrive well into the Umayyad era (41–132/661–750).

      The poetry of ʿAntarah is one of the many examples of the emergence in the course of the sixth century of the warrior-poet as spokesperson of a war culture, a complex of ideals celebrated in qasida poetry. These ideals were informed by a universal vision of manly virtue (muruwwah),²⁶ at the very heart of which lay a passionate and uncompromising adherence to honor (ʿirḍ), set within “a universal perspective where the paradigm for how one must live and die is founded on the principle of chance.”²⁷

      These warriors were united, yet kept distinct by their scrupulous adherence to an ever-changing and flexible social dynamic of alliance and protection, as well