Labīd, ʿAbīd, and Lubad: Lexical Excavation and the Reclamation of the Poetic Past in al-Maʿarrī’s Luzūmiyyāt

The blind Syrian poet, man of letters and scholar, Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (363 H/973 CE-449 H/1057 CE) is the author of two celebrated diwans. The second of these, his controversial double-rhymed and alphabetized, Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam (Requiring What is Not Obligatory), known simply as Al-Luzūmiyyāt (The Compulsories), features his uninhibited, often highly ironic and usually pessimistic, religious, and ‘philosophical’ ideas along with mordant criticism of politics, religion, and humanity in general. In his introduction, he abjures the corrupt and worldly qaṣīdah poetry of his otherwise celebrated early diwan, Saqṭ al-Zand (Sparks of the Fire-Drill), to turn in al-Luzūmiyyāt to a poetry that is “free from lies.” In the present study I take a ‘biopsy’ from Al-Luzūmiyyāt of the eight poems with the double rhyme b-d to explore al-Maʿarrī’s excavation and reclamation of meaning from the Ancient Arabian past through the intertwined legacies of philology and poetic lore. The constraint (luzūm) of the double b-d rhyme in these poems leads inexorably to two proper names, the legends and poetry associated with them, and the etymological-semantic complex that yokes them together and generates related names and themes. The first name is that of the renowned poet of the Muʿallaqāt, Labīd ibn Rabīʿah; the second is that of Lubad, the last of the seven vultures whose life-spans measured out the days of the legendary pre-Islamic sage, Luqmān. Not surprisingly, the ancient Jāhilī poet-knight ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ, likewise, cannot escape the pull of the b-d rhyme. The study demonstrates the mythophoric power of proper names from the Arabic poetic and folkloric past, once lexically and morphologically generated by the double consonants of the rhyme pattern, to evoke poems and legends of the past but also, by the force of al-Maʿarrī’s moral as well as prosodic constraints, to be reconstructed in accordance with the prosodic and moral constraints of Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam, into a new poetic form, the luzūmiyyah. Quite at odds with the moral, thematic, and structural trajectory of the qaṣīdah form, the luzūmiyyah is by contrast static, directionless, and oftentimes a dead end.