So spoke Malik b. al-Rayb (d. 677), a soldier in a Muslim army of conquest, about his experience. The distress about being far from home and his family, in a hostile environment, condemned to die alone is palpable even in this one verse. We will see that Malik was not the only one. There were many other Arab soldiers who, like Malik, lived and served under the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads (661–750), and composed, similar to him, poetry about the hardships of a life in the army and the alienation they experienced on their expeditions in faraway places, especially on the eastern frontiers. Surprisingly, they show little interest in these new environments; rather they look back in time or space with longing. The voices of these soldiers are rarely given attention in historical scholarship on the Umayyad period.Footnote 3 In this article, I collect verses that best illustrate these sentiments to show that this poetry represents a unique source that can enrich the study of different aspects of Umayyad history.
First, I show that this poetry can add nuance to the traditional representations of the Umayyad period. The dominant narratives of the rise of the Islamic empire derived from the Muslim chronicles (such as those of al-Tabari and al-Masʿudi) are celebratory in tone, depicting the speed and successes of the conquests. Robert Hoyland characterizes these accounts as follows: “The Arabs are everywhere victorious; non-Arabs everywhere submit, convert, or are killed; and Islamic government is everywhere imposed.”Footnote 4 The verses under study, in contrast, bring to light the gradualness of the process and the breaking of former bonds, complicating the triumphalist narratives. We will see that this poetry records the suffering and complaints of the common soldiers in the conquering armies, who did not always embrace the jihad spirit in whose name the battles were led.
Second, although most of our sources for this period record the perspectives of the elites, Umayyad poetry also records voices usually not heard, voices of more ordinary Arabs. In this article, I limit my selection to poetry that was composed away from centers of power, poetry that was not written on behalf of a powerful patron or a religious group, not pronounced when the poet was acting as a spokesperson of state or another power. I call it here “personal poetry.”Footnote 5 I hesitate somewhat to say that the perspective of these soldiers represents the perspectives of non-elites. They were, after all, part of the conquering armies and therefore participated in all the plunder and violation of local populations that conquests usually entailed. However, they do offer a broader horizon, which goes beyond the religious and political elites who are the usual protagonists of narrative sources. Our poets stood apart from politics and courts; they were not commanding the battles in which they fought nor writing their official histories.
In surveys of Arabic literature, Umayyad poetry is usually framed and taught as political and ideological, with the famous trio of the court poets al-Akhtal (d. 750), Jarir (d. 728), and al-Farazdaq (d. 728) placed front and center.Footnote 6 Although these poets were socially and politically important in their time and left behind large diwans of poetry, it also is worthwhile to consider the more obscure and lesser known poets from the Umayyad period, who were not connected with courts or religiopolitical institutions—not only because these poets record less ideologically charged poetry, but also because it could be argued that they better represent Umayyad poetry. Looked at through the prism of the autochthonous Islamic tradition, the ʿAbbasid-era collections of poetry, such as al-Ḥamāsa (Valor) by Abu Tammam (d. 845), became canonical for centuries to come. In these early ʿAbbasid collections, the lesser-known poets dominate, creating a polyphony of voices from centers and peripheries (both social and geographical) that interact with each other.Footnote 7 From among this polyphony, I follow here the nostalgic trend.
Third, this poetry can contribute to the history of emotions of this period. It is a trope to say about Arabic poetry that it is the archive (diwan) of the Arabs. The trope is attributed to old luminaries of Arabic literature like Ibn Sallam al-Jumahi (d. 845) or Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), and it is often evoked to highlight the importance of poetry as the historical record of Arabs, especially preceding the written chronicles of the early ʿAbbasid era.Footnote 8 This is worth reiterating because we must understand (against the grain of our modern sensibilities) that Arabic poetry was not an elite entertainment but rather a communal and commonplace activity, particularly in the Iraqi garrison cities of Kufa, Basra, and later Wasit, where the Arabs lived in districts (khiṭaṭ) that were organized according to their tribes and continued to cultivate their tribal lore, of which poetry was the central element. Anyone and everyone could memorize large quantities of poetry, and many would compose their own verses as well. Writing (an elite skill) was not necessary, and poetry was therefore accessible to people across different social classes. From these Iraqi garrisons many soldiers were sent further north and east, for example to the regions of Daylam, Khurasan, or Afghanistan, and they composed poetry there too. However, Arabic poetry was more than simply oral history of the early Arabs. In addition to providing a record of events, poetry was their primary tool for making sense of the world and dealing with life challenges, frustrations, and traumas. Therefore, it is an excellent venue for understanding how common soldiers in the Umayyad conquest armies experienced the fast-changing world around them and their emotions and sentiments.
The history of emotions has been a booming field among European medievalists, especially since the publication of Barbara Rosenwein’s seminal book Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Footnote 9 Emotions are increasingly seen as historically significant and culturally and temporally determined. To stress the social and relational nature of emotions, Rosenwein has coined the term “emotional communities” for groups of people with common stakes and values and with shared vocabularies and ways of thinking. She also highlights how different sets of emotional norms and communities coexist in one time and place.Footnote 10 In premodern Arabic studies, scholars also have paid more attention to emotions in recent years.Footnote 11 More specifically, nostalgia was the subject of Jaroslav Stetkevych’s The Zephyrs of Najd, which delves into the emotional and symbolic dimensions of the nasīb, the elegiac prelude of the classical Arabic ode, and follows its transformation from lamentations over abandoned campsites into expressions of spiritual nostalgia.Footnote 12 Related topics, such as homesickness or nostalgia for home, also have attracted attention in modern scholarship, especially because there is an entire genre of medieval Arabic writing referred to as ḥanīn ilā al-awṭān (longing for the homeland).Footnote 13 Wadad Kadi connects the rise of this genre with real sentiments of displacement and alienation among early Muslims produced by defining phenomena of their time, including emigration, raids, and conquests, and also pilgrimage, trade, and patronage systems.Footnote 14 She describes how these produced a sense of alienation that became “part of the fabric of early Islamic society.”Footnote 15 She, however, also observes that the genre of ḥanīn ilā al-awṭān only developed later, after the verses and comments on the topic were collected in compendia during the ʿAbbasid period.Footnote 16 She further notes that the material of the ḥanīn genre, on account of its brevity and fragmentary nature, lacks “the capacity to make powerful, [well] rounded, and hence artistically enduring cases for individual, deep, and overwhelming experiences of alienation.”Footnote 17 This is where I take a different position.
I aim to show here that Umayyad poetry can express soldiers’ experiences and emotions in an impactful and moving way. (I should say that by real emotion I do not mean a direct presentation of social reality—no art does that—but rather a reflection of real and deeper sentiments belonging to a specific time and community.)Footnote 18 It does not diminish the intensity of this emotion in the Umayyad period itself that these came to form a separate category of writing only later, during the early ʿAbbasid era. It takes some time for a historical experience to transform into a literary phenomenon, especially given the fact that no compendia like the al-maḥāsin wa-l-masāwiʾ (merits and faults) literature, which brings together much of these thoughts on homeland, existed to date in the Umayyad period. We will observe different instantiations here of the nostalgia that pervades the poetry of many Umayyad poets. This nostalgia however does not need to be perceived only as passive and acquiescent; we shall in fact note a sense of resistance that was shared by some of this poetry. And although I focus mainly on the soldiers, a few voices of other poets also will appear to show that the spirit of resistance crossed the limits of the army.
Naturally, the question will arise: How personal is this “personal poetry”? In other words, how real are the emotions that these poems convey? Rosenwein sees this problem as inherent in any textual material that records human emotions. But she also observes that it is not insurmountable and that emotions are always delivered secondhand, be it through gestures or words, and therefore some degree of interpretation is always involved.Footnote 19 In our case, we must ask to what extent the poetry’s motifs and images are shaped by the long-standing traditions of Arabic poetry. This is not an easy question to answer, but we are not left without clues. We will observe changes and developments in the poetry’s motifs that reflect the encounter of the old poetic traditions with people’s new experiences. I see this poetry at an intersection of individual emotion, communal feelings, and literary tradition. By personal poetry I mean poetry free of overt ideological ties, not poetry in the vein of the individual Romantic poets. Umayyad-era poets commented on the world within the bounds of a tradition, but it is my claim that despite that (or perhaps because of it) they were able to grapple with the burning traumas of their time.
More broadly, the aim of this article is to showcase the usefulness of Umayyad poetry for writing the history of this period.Footnote 20 Rich a source as it is, Arabic poetry has been too often overlooked in the study of early Islamic history.Footnote 21 In this article, I want to offer incentives for reintegrating it into the historical record, to bring it from a specialization of literary scholars to the purview of historians.Footnote 22 The confidence in old Arabic poetry as a corpus again has grown, and specialists mostly agree that Muslims did not fabricate the whole corpus, although much of it was lost and some of it altered.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, meter and rhyme as well as the keen interest of early Muslim scholars in its authenticity left parts of it in fairly good condition. Here, I should note that Umayyad poetry (especially that taken from the canonical collections discussed earlier) has an even stronger claim to being treated as a fairly reliable source. Neither Taha Husayn or D. S. Margoliouth doubted the authenticity of early Islamic (and therefore Umayyad) poetry. In the Umayyad era, scholars were keenly aware of the issue of authenticity; we know who the rāwīs (narrators) were and that poetry was starting to be written down. The surviving variants of poetry suggest the extent to which it was altered through transmission (that is, individual words that rhyme might be switched, or a couple of lines added or removed), but as a corpus it stands.
How was this poetry preserved? Beginning in the pre-Islamic period, there existed a system of rāwīs who memorized and transmitted poetry, and, often, having had this training, became poets themselves. Toward the end of the Umayyad era poetry began to be collected by philologists in a more systematic fashion.Footnote 24 The first written compilations were tribal anthologies (diwans) that brought together all known poetry and stories ascribed to a single tribe. We only have one extant example: the diwan of the Banu (tribe) Hudhayl, collected by the philologist al-Sukkari (d. 888). The next generation of philologists had different aims; they produced anthologies that curated representative corpora of good and reliable poetry from across different tribes. Examples of these intertribal anthologies of state-of-the-art Arabic poetry are the al-Mufaḍaliyāt by al-Mufaddal al-Dabbi (d. 780–81) and the Aṣmaʿiyyāt by al-Asmaʿi (d. 828).
Most of the poetry in this article, however, comes from the later, postphilological stage, from the canonical literary works and anthologies such as Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs) by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 967), the al-Ḥamāsa (Valor) of Abu Tammam, the al-Ḥamāsa of al-Buhturi (d. 897), and al-Kāmil (The Comprehensive) by al-Mubarrad (d. 898). These collections emerged after the groundwork of accurate recording and representative selection was done by the earlier philologists. Now, it was for the litterateurs and poets of the 9th and 10th centuries to compile collections of poetry, making their own aesthetic statement on this poetry. The famous Hamasa by Abu Tammam, the celebrated poet of his era, is the prime example. He selected shorter excerpts of poetry according to his own taste, including many obscure and lesser-known poets, as already mentioned, most of whom were from the Umayyad period.
I describe the rough contours of the processes of collection of Arabic poetry here to explain how so much personal poetry has been preserved and so many of the more obscure and lesser-known poets entered the classical canon. This poetry originated as intertribal lore that was memorized by many people of different social classes, and later was canonized through the efforts of philologists and litterateurs. The criteria for selection of these philologists and litterateurs were not ideological. They either were striving for a comprehensive record of (reliable) poetry, or were making aesthetic choices.Footnote 25
All this further increases the usefulness of this poetry: its corpus, however fragmentary, provides unique insight into the wider strata of Umayyad-era Arab society, free of the usual religious and political prisms that are characteristic of other period sources.Footnote 26 I aim to show here that without taking this poetry into consideration we would miss out on a rich and unique group of texts that give a voice to people not usually heard, expressing sentiments not found elsewhere.
Displacement and Migration in the Umayyad Period
The Middle East underwent momentous transformations in the 7th century. Although at its beginning Christianity rapidly spread through the region, and two superpowers—the Byzantine and the Sassanian empires—held its reins, around 630 the situation radically changed. Arab soldiers began to conquer the region and quickly established unified rule over the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain.Footnote 27 The conquests culminated under the Umayyad dynasty, when the Islamic empire reached its greatest extent and became one of the largest in history.
The Umayyad caliphate was, first of all, a conquest society; most of its Arab Muslim ruling elite were part of the army, which was the heart of the state. The Arab Muslims, it needs to be stressed, formed only a small minority, who ruled over a non-Arab, non-Muslim majority, most of whom were Christian, but there were also Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, and others. The Middle East remained predominantly Christian, possibly until the Crusades, or even later.Footnote 28 However small the Arab Muslim elite, it amassed immense power over vast regions and enormous wealth from the spoils of conquests, which inevitably led to internal strife over who had the legitimacy to rule. The Umayyad dynasty came to power through a civil war, led another to maintain it, and came to an end with a revolution. The civil wars tore the Muslim community apart and gave birth to different parties, which would later solidify into distinct religious sects: most importantly the Kharijites, the Shiʿa, and the Sunnis.Footnote 29 The Islamic conquests necessitated large movements of population; thousands of Arabs settled in regions that were new to them, and thousands more were fighting on frontiers even further away. Migration was a defining feature of early Islamic religion and societies.
Migration was also the distinguishing marker of the Arab Muslim military elite. The term muhajirun (emigrants) is today mainly remembered as the name for the group of the Prophet Muhammad’s followers who emigrated with him from Mecca to Medina in 622. However, in the Umayyad period the meaning was broader. Muhajir denoted someone who emigrated, or made a hijra, left their original dwelling, often in the desert, and joined the army in the garrison cities, ideally as far as possible from their original dwellings.Footnote 30 The term carries the connotations of a conqueror and settler and so refers to the army men of the Muslim military elite.Footnote 31 It appears not only in Muslim sources, but also in contemporary non-Muslim, non-Arabic sources, who used it at times to refer to the whole Muslim community: in Syriac it became mhaggarāyē, in Greek magaritai. Footnote 32
Next to the muhajirun, the other important segment of Umayyad society comprised the conquered people: first the mawali, the non-Arab converts to Islam, who throughout the Umayyad period gained social and political power, and then the ahl aḏ-ḏimma, the large non-Muslim populations of the empire.Footnote 33 Most studies of the Umayyad period focus on the dynamics between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Arabs and non-Arabs. This division is stressed, largely as a result of the incentives of late antiquity studies.
But even the Arabs themselves were not a homogenous group. On the one hand, there were the muhajirun, the emigrants; on the other there were the aʿrāb, the nomads, who did not join the garrison cities or the army and preferred to continue their nomadic lifestyle. The aʿrāb had a unique position—although in theory part of the elite (they were Arab Muslims after all), they stood at the same time at the margins of the society. Islam was, from the beginning, an urban phenomenon, and the elites have viewed the bedouin with suspicion.Footnote 34 The Wars of Apostasy, when the Arab tribes rose against the first caliph after the death of Muhammad, did not help. Fred Donner described “the nomad problem” as a major challenge to the building of the Islamic state, and the rise of Islam as a victory of state over tribe.Footnote 35
The nomads in the early Islamic state were in a sense a more marginal group than some non-Muslims. Whereas all other groups paid taxes, like kharāj or jizya, to the state, the aʿrāb only paid the ṣadaqāt, or charity tax.Footnote 36 This tax was, at least in theory, to be redistributed among their own tribes. Therefore, the nomads did not pay the state and did not get paid; they did not participate in conquests. They stood to a certain degree outside the military system of redistribution of wealth.
Many of the muhajirun who fought in the Umayyad armies turned to poetry to express what pained them and their fellow soldiers, and so did the aʿrāb, who had found themselves in a liminal space within Umayyad society, sidelined and marginalized. Arabic poetry—at that time composed mainly by Arabs—is best fit to bring to light the inner tensions within the Arab Muslim community. It is not only because Arabic poetry was at this time mainly limited to the Arabs, but also because it carried with it its own cultural tradition and set of ideas. Arabic poetry of the Umayyad period was a continuation of a much older poetic tradition that existed a long time before Islam, before the Qurʾanic revelation.Footnote 37 Whereas the Qurʾan and Islam were the products of the settled, urban population of Arabia, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry encapsulated the cultural ideals of the nomads (whether or not its practitioners were in reality nomads or not).Footnote 38 In many important ways this poetry stood apart from the Qurʾanic ethos. The difference lay between the Qurʾanic religious ideals of piety, moderation, humility, and importance of the afterlife and the poetry’s heroic ethos, which praised living life to its fullest, without an afterlife, and with the central topos of a hero on his camel, on a never-ending journey through the dangerous desert. This poetry gave voice to the cultural nomadic elements and tribal ideals of the desert, which had been otherwise set aside but nevertheless still held power over the imagination of soldiers in the Umayyad armies.
Nostalgia among the Umayyad Soldiers
Let us now return to Malik b. al-Rayb, the desperate poet from the beginning of this article who was not enthusiastic about his military experience. In the same poem he says,
These two verses and the earlier one belong to Malik’s thirty-two-line elegy, which he wrote in anticipation of his own death. Here again, we see the distress of the poet thrust into the hostile environment of Khurasan. When he says that he once used to be far from Khurasan’s gates, it is clear that he regrets the choices that led him here. In the next line he promises to himself that under no circumstances will he come back to the army, in the unlikely case that he gets out alive. The bitterness here is palpable.
What is especially interesting about Malik’s desperate desire to turn back time is that earlier in life, he was a highwayman; we can read about him in the Kitāb al-Aghāni (Book of Songs).Footnote 40 In these (no doubt somewhat embellished and fictionalized) accounts, we learn that he used to rob travelers around Medina, but then had to flee to Fars.Footnote 41 There, Saʿid b. ʿUthman, the son of the former caliph ʿUthman and governor of Khurasan (r. 676–77), promised him a good life under the guidance of Islam and monthly pay of five hundred dirhams if he renounced his outlaw existence and joined the Muslim army heading to conquer Khurasan in 676.
Although we may have expected Umayyad poetry to celebrate the famous Islamic conquests, just as narrative sources portray this period, Malik’s verses give us a different perspective. Furthermore, his is not the only voice. Most of the Umayyad-era poets who participated in the conquests did not seem too happy about their military experience.Footnote 42 What were the ailments of the Muslim soldiers?
The verses of Aʿsha Hamdan (d. 702) record some of the horrors that these men witnessed.
The Muslim soldiers in Kabul were so hungry that they had to eat their horses. These lines describe the catastrophic campaign that the governor al-Hajjaj b. Yusuf (r. 694–714) directed at Kabul in 697. The conditions of the men who returned were so deplorable that they were called “the army of perdition” (jaysh al-fanaʾ) in history books.Footnote 44
Another poet, Yazid b. Mufarrigh (d. 688), also offers a grim depiction of the conquests. This time the verses relate to fighting in Kandahar (in modern-day Afghanistan). Yazid captures both the horrifying details of the battle and the courage of his comrades.
The images of severed feet and skulls lying on the ground that appear in these verses act as a tangible reminder that, no matter the justifications and ideologies, wars remained grisly affairs. The Umayyad conquests unleashed wars of extraordinary magnitude and geography. The death of friends and relatives already presented unspeakable pain, but when they died far away from home, and no one remained who could let their families know, as this poem tells, it is even more heart-wrenching. The only consolation that Yazid’s verses offer is the memory of the soldiers’ bravery as they marched toward certain death.
These poems relate tragedies on the battlefield. It is understandable that the poets who witnessed them recorded them in a mournful tone. What about poetry by soldiers who do not mention such disasters? Even then, we do not find much celebratory spirit in Umayyad era poetry. What we find, rather, is a deep sense of estrangement in the new environment. This estrangement is produced by encounters with strange people and their unintelligible languages and the unfamiliar topography. The following verses offer an example. An anonymous poet bewails the unsurmountable distance that divides him from his home while on a campaign in Hamadhan, a region in western Iran. The distance is literally unsurmountable because of the tall snow-capped mountains that act as a physical barrier.
“The snow-capped mountains tops” is a reference to the mighty, almost one-thousand-mile-long Zagros Mountains that divide Iran from Iraq. In addition to being disturbed by the vast distance, the poet also feels like a stranger in this land, where people speak Persian (and other languages), and he does not. He finds some relief from his frustration by mocking this unfamiliar language and people, when he points to the similarity between the Persian zanān, “women” (زنان) and the Arabic zawānī, “adulteresses” (زوانٍ).
The sense of estrangement produced by unfamiliar natural elements, like the snowy mountains, is a common theme in the poetry of these soldiers. Other themes that are repeated include the inability to see the star Suhayl and astonishment at the length of the night. Hunduj b. Hunduj offers a beautiful description of a long night. He speaks about the night in Sul, which, according to Yaqut, was a town in the land of Khazars, in present-day Dagestan (much further to the north than what the poet was accustomed to).
There are a number of striking images in this poem. The first one is of the never-ending night, which appears to the poet connected with the one yesterday and the one tomorrow: a necklace of nights. The long night appears also in pre-Islamic poetry (like the famous scene in Imruʾ al-Qays’s Muʿallaqāt), however there the night is used to express the poet’s concern about something (like his beloved). Here, the focus changes. The night itself is the object of the poem. The second image is that of the poet, who cannot sleep. He tosses and turns at night and compares his restlessness to the writhing of snake, attempting to escape the lashes of a whip. The third is the image of a night that is bound to the earth, tied to its surface, unmoving, with its stars as lanterns.
We have heard in this poetry Umayyad soldiers’ frustrations: about their desperation at the loss of friends, about their fear that they will never see their own families again, about the strange and foreign environment and the enormous distance that divides them from home, and about a night much longer than that to which they are accustomed. Their situation grew especially difficult when rulers practiced tajmīr al-buʿūth, “the gathering of frontier armies,” that is, keeping soldiers stationed on distant frontiers for a long time. Historical sources ascribe this practice mainly to controversial figures of Islamic history. Al-Tabari (d. 923), for instance, writes about tajmīr al-buʿūth as the policy of the third caliph ʿUthman b. ʿAffan (r. 644–56).Footnote 49 Ibn ʿAbd al-Rabbih (d. 940) in his al-ʿIqd al-Farīd (Unique Necklace) quotes the feared governor al-Hajjaj scolding his Iraqi subjects and telling them sarcastically that the best medicine he found for their disease, that is their disobedience, was raids and expeditions (maghāzī wa-l-buʿūth). The only unfortunate part is the sweetness of the night when they return.Footnote 50 Although al-Hajjaj’s words could have been exaggerated, one of his strategies does seem to have been keeping local populations from rebellions and occupied at faraway frontiers. Ironically, this very practice was one of the reasons behind the rebellion of the Peacock Army (699-702) led by Ibn al-Ashʿath, the Arab nobleman and military commander, which almost cost al-Hajjaj his governorship and toppled the Umayyad regime. The situation became especially difficult in the decades around the year 700, during al-Hajjaj’s rule, because as the empire expanded into regions like Central Asia and Afghanistan the soldiers could no longer return easily to their families. One of the major frustrations of this period was the trauma of tajmīr al-buʿūth, historical context for the poetry depicting dark images of battles and emotions of estrangement in faraway places in the east and in the north.
The sentiments described here may be brought under the umbrella of nostalgia, understood as longing for a better past—whether implied in the poems or explicitly stated. Already in Malik b. al-Rayb we have seen a man who regretted the decision that took him to the two gates of Khurasan, looking back to the time when he was far away from them. This sense of nostalgia was formulated again and again in prose and in verse, culminating in an entire genre, called al-ḥanīn ilā al-awṭān, or “nostalgia for the homeland,” as mentioned.
In Umayyad poetry, we can observe this theme taking its own shape. With the pre-Islamic yearning for a concrete place, Umayyad poets began yearning for Najd, the vast region of central Arabia. Al-Simma al-Qushayri (d. early 8th century) was one of them. A bedouin from the Iraqi desert, he moved to Syria and there joined the army heading to Daylam, on the coast of the Caspian Sea. He died in Tabaristan, not too far from there. In the nasīb, the introductory part, of a long poem of his, he says,
In the first line of the poem, there is a new take on the traditional theme of the loss of the beloved. In the pre-Islamic poem, the beloved leaves with her tribe, but here it is the poet who is left, alone, while both the tribe of his love, Rayya, and his own tribe remain together. As previously, there is a hankering for the past. But here the poet looks back to the entire region of Najd, which becomes a new topos.
In the Umayyad era, Najd becomes the symbol both of the unattainable home and of an idealized past, which will not return. That Najd is more of a symbol than a concrete place is clear in al-Simma’s poem because, as mentioned, he himself was not from Najd but from the desert of Basra. It is the sentiments of alienation and estrangement documented in this poetry that led to the creation of this rhetoric of longing for Najd.
Yaqut collected some of the verses of anonymous poets on Najd in the entry on Najd in his Muʿjam al-Buldān (Dictionary of Countries). The poets look toward Najd, but of course their sight cannot reach it. They yearn for its pleasant scents and cool east winds. Mighty lightnings bring memories of Najd; long nights remind them that they are far away.
“As a celebratory phenomenon Najd enters its mythopoetic stage rather suddenly during the Umayyad period,” wrote Jaroslav Stetkevych, explaining that it was only when the poet stepped out of the Arabian Peninsula and lost these regions that he could see the whole and realize his loss. These regions were primarily Najd, but also Tihama and the Hejaz. Stetkevych compared the imaginative force of Najd in Arabic poetry to that of Arcadia in classical literature.Footnote 55
In this last example about Najd, a bedouin (Yaqut tells us) reflects on being a soldier:
The poet in the last example expresses once again remorse about earlier life choices—about trading his previous bedouin life in Najd for military service. The term band suggests that he was fighting somewhere near the Byzantine frontier.Footnote 57 More important than the exact the location is the sharp dichotomy that the poet expresses between the bedouin and the soldiers. The bedouin have nothing to do with soldiers, he says, and wishes he could return to his premilitary reality.
The other common reaction to military life and state power that poetry records is a threat to leave the army, the city, and escape to the desert. The desert in many of these verses is depicted as the ultimate refuge, the sole sanctuary beyond the grasp of the state. For example, a certain Saʿd b. Nashib clashed with the vice governor of Basra, Bilal b. Abi Burda (r. 728–37). The dispute was over Saʿd’s proclaimed intent to carry out vengeance for a friend who had been killed. But blood vengeance, once a sacred duty among the Arab tribes, was now deemed illegal and barbaric, and strictly forbidden. So Bilal threatened Saʿd, and Saʿd replied:
Saʿd insists that he and his people are free. Their freedom, he claims, cannot be restricted, even though they are part of the Islamic community. He also threatens Bilal.Footnote 59 The first threat is lightly veiled; Saʿd’s people have not disrupted the unity of the umma—yet. He implies that they could. The second threat is clear: if subjected to mistreatment, they will flee beyond Bilal’s reach—outside Basra, into the desert, away from the military life. The last line presents yet another threat: “Fate’s wheel keeps turning” means that fate always brings about new developments, and Bilal will surely not be in power forever. Saʿd’s verses resonate with a spirit of resistance, implying that the only true freedom from state’s power lies beyond the walls of the city.
The verses of the Kufan poet, ʿAbd Allah b. al-Zabir al-Asadi (d. between 685 and 705), state plainly and clearly that the only hope for a soldier lies in fleeing the city.
The two names represent two options. Al-Muhallab b. Abi Sufra (d. 702) was a great general of the Umayyad period at this time, fighting the Kharijites. So, one option was to join combat on the battlefield. Ibn Dabiʾ was an old man, so the story goes, who asked al-Hajjaj, the governor, for an exemption from joining al-Muhallab’s army and offered his son in his stead. Al-Hajjaj had the old man executed. The other option, then, was death. Both paths are disastrous, as the poet says. But there is a third option—uncertain but present: to ride off into the desert.
Escape from the army was a real danger for the Umayyad regime, not only the poets’ fancy. The term for it was al-taʿarrub baʿda al-hijra, leaving the garrison city and returning to the desert, becoming aʿrābī again, conceived as reversed hijra (in this time meaning, as described, to leave one’s original dwelling, often in the desert, in order to join the army). The city for many equaled the army and the state, whose power rose in Iraq, especially under the rule of al-Hajjaj.Footnote 61 The seriousness of taʿarrub is clear from the fact that for some, it equaled apostasy and was counted among the kabāʾir (sing. kabīra), the great sins in Islam, acts such as killing and shirk, associating someone or something with God, the paramount sin in Islam.Footnote 62 The verses of the poets brought to life a grave difficulty of the times.
This poetry expresses the desire of soldiers in the Umayyad armies to avoid being sent into deadly combat and to free themselves from the shackles of the state. The poets evoke the desert as a symbol of resistance and independence, summoning the cultural ideals of their fathers and forefathers (which had been pushed to the side and deemed inferior) as an alternative cultural model.
Resistance Against the Umayyad State Beyond the Army
The sentiment of resistance was not limited to the poetry of soldiers. It pervaded Umayyad poetry across different genres and social groups. It is especially embodied by the poetry of the so-called brigand poets and highwaymen (ṣaʿālīk and luṣūṣ) who raided caravans or treasure of the state and boasted about it. Since pre-Islamic times, poet-outlaws like these were popular among people and often seen as cultural heroes, in the style of Robin Hood.Footnote 63 Although the tradition of the brigand poets is most famously connected with the pre-Islamic period, it continued well into the Umayyad era. Now, however, the poets did not rebel against their tribes but against the state. Some of them transitioned in and out of the system; remember our first example, Malik b. al-Rayb, who was a brigand first, and only later grudgingly a soldier.
ʿUbayd Allah b. al-Hurr al-Juʿfi (d. 688), in contrast, did not sway from his outlaw ways. According to the stories, he was one of the noblemen of Kufa, who after the murder of Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, at Karbala rejected the unjust rule of the Umayyads and gathered other outcasts around him. With them, he did not steal money from people, not even the non-Muslim dhimma, but from the treasuries of the state in Madaʾin and many other Arabian towns. He distributed the money and goods that he stole evenly among his men, and he freed women from prison.Footnote 64 When he realized that he could not escape, he threw himself into the Euphrates and drowned, preferring death over captivity.Footnote 65 Some of the details of his life may be dramatized, but the tendency of the sources (some of which surely relied on what people narrated about him) to portray him as a popular hero is significant in itself. Al-Buhturi (d. 897) included these two verses by ʿUbayd Allah in his Hamasa:
ʿUbayd Allah’s verses echo the same spirit of rebellion against authority as those of Saʿd b. Nashib in the preceding section, and, like them, embrace the desert as a refuge. He emphasizes that the state is in fact limited only to the two great cities, that is, Basra and Kufa, and that two cities cannot replace one’s tribe.
The Umayyad state ensured that acts of revolt did not go unpunished, and poetry records the experiences of those who were subjected to it. The punishment varied from being excluded from the diwan and not receiving one’s military salary, to flogging or cutting one’s fingers, to capital punishment, which was the judgment reached on Aʿsha Hamdan, a poet I mentioned earlier.Footnote 67 Prison also belonged to the punitive repertoire of the Umayyad state, although it was still a new and developing institution.Footnote 68 Jahdar al-ʿUkli (d. 718) was a brigand during the time of al-Hajjaj. Here he talks about the prison of Kufa.Footnote 69
Jahdar’s verses offer a poignant depiction of an Umayyad prison. First described as the source of hellfire, then painted as a place full of people who were brought there because of various crimes. The two main social categories for the poet, however, remained the bedouin and the urban dwellers, al-badū wa-l-ḥaḍar. Despite human density, the prison is aloof and cold, literally devoid of humanity, joy, and true human connection.
Next to prison, there were also corporal punishments. During the era of al-Hajjaj, another brigand named ʿUbayd b. Ayyub al-ʿAnbari expresses his vexation at the relentless pursuit and intimidation he faced. In these verses, he addresses al-Hajjaj.
In these lines, the poet shares the perspective of someone who has been on the run for a while, describing a life that has worn him down, exhausting and terrifying. He has wandered from place to place, grappling with the unforgiving landscape of the desert, and now is willing to sacrifice his fingers in exchange for an end to this harsh life and the peace that he seeks.
Another feared Umayyad-era punishment was the destruction of one’s house. This punishment, to my knowledge, does not appear in books on Islamic law, so here poetry serves as an especially valuable source. This fate befell Saʿd b. Nashib, whom we encountered earlier, when he proclaimed his revolt against Bilal. The stories relate that in 737 Bilal destroyed his house to punish him for disobedience. But Saʿd declares once again his defiance:
Saʿd proclaims that he will cleanse the stain of shame with his sword no matter what it takes, even if it means that his house will be destroyed. If it happens, so be it, he will have nothing else to lose, nothing else to be blackmailed with; he will be shielded from any further threats. The shame he wants to clean off himself may be a reference to the unavenged blood of his friend (according to the akhbār, the subject of the conflict described) but it also may mean the ill-treatment that he had received from Bilal. Honor is at play, and it outweighs any possessions. The poet therefore opts to sacrifice his house rather than bow to authority and accept humiliation. His true inheritance, or legacy, are his deeds and honor, and that is what will prevail, regardless of what happens to his house. The last line encapsulates his approach to life: when he sets his mind to something, nothing can stop him. Not even the fear of adverse consequences. Saʿd’s defense of his honor has subversive dimensions akin to those found in the ṣaʿālīk. Footnote 74
Another type of protest can be found in poems that tradition came to call shakāwā al-aʿrāb, “the complaints of the bedouin.” These became especially widespread in the Umayyad period and expand our vision beyond the army ranks to the nomadic populations that did not join those ranks.Footnote 75 Umayyad poetry records many complaints against the suʿāt, the collectors of ṣadaqāt (the charity or camel tax), who often abused their power. Here is a good example—a poem by the famous bedouin poet al-Raʿi al-Numayri (d. 708) from the desert of Basra, directed to the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705).
What was the destiny of this poem? Did it ever make its way to the caliph? Did it have any effect? It is hard to tell. What is clear, however, even from these few lines of a longer poem, is that the complaints it makes are very concrete. Here, the issue is the torture of a tribal chief. This also can be said about the Umayyad genre shakāwā al-aʿrāb more broadly, and in this case they also differ from the later, more abstract ʿAbbasid-era shakwā al-zamān wa al-insān, complaints about time and humanity, or dhamm al-zamān, censure of time.Footnote 77 It may be fruitful to compare the complaints of poets like Raʿi with parallel evidence from contemporary papyri.Footnote 78 We can imagine that Raʿi’s powerful verses raised people’s awareness and perhaps were a catalyst for communal trauma.
While the soldier poets and the brigands were either part of the military and the state establishment or actively defied it, the bedouin stood outside these institutions. Although they became largely irrelevant to the core structures of the Umayyad state, Umayyad poetry preserves their experiences.
Not all bedouin, however, lived far away from centers of power; some attended the courts and made poetry the source of their living in cities. Still, they preserved the poetics and concerns of the desert. The greatest example of this was Dhu al-Rumma (d. 735), a famous bedouin poet, who consciously continued and built on the tradition of desert poetry.Footnote 79 He represents poetry that remained on its own course in a changing world.
Conclusion
The Sudanese scholar, Abdulla El Tayib, said about the function of poetry, “Poetry is not a science that describes nature, the history of nations, or the extent of their social problems; it is, in the first place, an expression of individuals’ feelings, then, an attempt to make them speak for the feelings of groups, then, feelings of all humanity.”Footnote 80 Therein precisely lies the value of the poetry from the time of the Umayyad conquests. It portrays the individual stories and lived experiences that underlie the terms and events found in legal texts and historical works, like taʿarrub and tajmīr, and sometimes exposes what would have otherwise remain hidden, such as the state practice of demolishing people’s houses. It transforms history from a collection of events to a collection of human experiences; what is more, experiences of people whose voices are often silent. These experiences may not change the larger contours of this turbulent period, but they give flavor to it and humanize it.
They also add nuance to the triumphant accounts of the conquests in Muslim historiography (in the chronicles by authors such as al-Tabari and al-Masʿudi), highlighting the points of friction and recording the voices of resistance of those caught in the circumstances of history. This poetry reveals how people further away from power reacted to the advancing conquests and to the strengthening state power in their time. We have heard not only from the soldiers in the Umayyad conquest armies, who were part of the ruling military system, but also from the brigands and highwaymen who revolted against it, and the bedouin, who existed on its margins. This list is not exhaustive. If we had moved from social divisions to religious groups, we may have noted that the poets of the Kharijites expressed similar antiestablishment sentiments.
This poetry exemplifies the power of desert poetics over people’s imagination.Footnote 81 Umayyad poetry, a continuation of pre-Islamic bedouin poetry, transmitted desert poetics and tribal values from of a stateless society to the time of the Umayyad empire.Footnote 82 The ideas of resistance against authority and desert as a safe asylum from the state; the nostalgia for Najd and the lost tribal life—these were powerful influences shaping the imagination and identity of individuals, especially ex-nomads now enlisted in the Umayyad armies. In line with the tradition of old Arabic poetry, which was for the most part secular, religion is practically absent from this poetry. Poetry offers a different perspective on a society that is usually seen through the prism of religion and religious conflicts.
Whether these verses reflect authentic reactions to the world or simply perpetuate a poetic tradition is not easily known. But there are some things we can learn. Poets used the themes inherited with the poetic tradition creatively; they changed them and adapted them to reflect on their own situation, whether trapped in the distant north with its strangely long nights or expressing nostalgia for the happy days of (real or imagined) premilitary existence. Consider the themes of slighted honor and revolt, expressing defiance against representatives of the state. Although we cannot think of this poetry as radically personal and individual as we usually think of modern poetry, we can presume that the Umayyad soldier poets fused their individual perspectives with those of their fellow military men on the battlefield. And perhaps more so, their poetry is a source for understanding how they felt about the world around them.
This poetry contributes to the history of emotions in the Umayyad period, especially highlighting a shared sense of nostalgia stemming from the shared experience of massive displacement. We usually think of nostalgia as a sentimental longing for the past, a universal human feeling. And surely, longing for the past arises in every age; yet nostalgia has its own culturally bound stories, as historians of emotions emphasize. The history of the term itself is instructive. Nostalgia is a term coined by a young Swiss doctor, still a medical student, who used it in his dissertation to describe something rather different than the nostalgia that we mean today. For him, it was a clinical disease of Swiss mercenary soldiers. Thomas Dodman describes how this term later, especially after the Napoleonic Wars, spread across Europe, with the rise of professional long-standing armies. Doctors documented many cases of soldiers dying from it. In the 19th century nostalgia turned from a disease to a fashion of the age: the émigré became the cultural hero and nostalgia become an inextricable part of a new, modern, historical consciousness.Footnote 83 In the 19th century, therefore, we encounter another age of nostalgia, one that—like that of the early Islamic world—also originated in the experience of soldiers.
Others have drawn attention to the complex and layered character of nostalgia. Svetlana Boym distinguished between “restorative” nostalgia (which seeks to rebuild a lost home, often fueling nationalist movements) and “reflective” nostalgia (which lingers in longing, uncertainty, and irony).Footnote 84 The nostalgia of the soldiers in the Umayyad armies was not just passive and melancholic weeping, it is an active force channeled into a sense of communal resistance, which only later became a literary genre. We can think about it along the lines of Boym’s “restorative nostalgia,” although in this case it served as a subversive force, not a nationalist project. From this perspective, this poetry also can be seen as a force of history. Among the soldiers (and also the highwaymen, the bedouin, and other segments of the Arab Umayyad society), it offered a shared platform inherited from pre-Islamic times and imbued with its own poetics and values; it provided a sense of cohesiveness and a vocabulary for antiestablishment sentiments.
Acknowledgments
I received the first round of thorough feedback in June 2024 at the Balzan seminar, Formation, Maintenance, and Failure of States in Muslim Societies, held in sunny Tunis. I thank the organizers—Michael Cook, Antoine Borrut, and Marie Legendre—and all seminar participants. The second round was no less valuable: anonymous reviewers helped me narrow the scope and sharpen the argument, and Joel Gordon kindly shepherded the process and carefully edited the text. James Weaver and Austin O’Malley provided helpful comments on the translations. Finally, I am grateful to Abdallah Soufan for our many conversations about poetry and for reading several drafts; his enthusiasm for this piece has been a constant motivation.
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