Sufis, the quest as propelled by the beloved’s departure is the trial. The journey
takes “two notions of stages,” however, as Michael Sells suggests (Ibid. 61).
“The Sufis combined the two notions of stages, pilgrimage stages toward
Mecca and the stages of the beloved in her journey away from the poet,”
resulting in a “mystical bewilderment,” as in the following lines from
al-Qushayrl: “I continued to alight / in your affection, / a way-stop for which /
hearts are bewildered.” (Ibid.) Moreover, the sacred love talk in the ‘Udhrl
tradition of Arab love,^18 made its presence felt conspicuously enough as to
appeal to the Sufis who found in its love-madness and self-annihilation the
right path toward mystical union (Ibid. 69).
Openings or preludes have other functional and psychological justifications.
Poetic tradition resonates with openings and thresholds that are loaded with
accumulated nostalgia for the past, along with convincing pronouncements
of desires and agonies. At times, the opening is an excuse to recapitulate and
accentuate a perspective, and to come up with a prescribed rhetoric. If modern
poetry keeps a distance from the ancient tripartite pattern, it does this in
due recognition of change, making compelling demands on sensibility and
temper. Whenever antecedent authority is present, there is a corresponding
recognition of a thematic-structural rupture that demands a compensatory
design as in al-Sayymb’s “Canticle of the Rain,” and FadwmYnqmn’s “Lan
Abkl” (I Will Not Cry). Yet, poets in the neoclassical mode (since the last
decades of the nineteenth century) are no less drawn to the classical mode in
its normative model as a perpetuating impulse that signals and ensures con-
tinuity. The classical poet, pre-Islamic or Islamic, has the opening as
the “igniting point for memory,” as S. Stetkevych argues (The Poetics of Islamic
Legitimacy, p. 26), which accelerates a structural pattern with codes and tran-
sitions that make up a shared register with the audience. It remains to be
said, however, that the model does not necessarily preclude deviation and dis-
sent, for no matter how closely intertwined with the politics of allegiance,
poetry remains a stage for self-aggrandizement.
When a poet in a neoclassical mode like al-Jawmhirl(d. 1998), for instance,
decided to use the elegiac opening, he only used this as a steppingstone to
impersonate a predecessor like al-Macarrl(d. 1058) in a poem that I discussed
in Chapter 3. Through identifying with him, he called for cultural and social
change. In this poem, the opening cannot lead to more than a bipartite
structure with interventional digressions of both a personal and a public
nature. A different example is from the Moroccan al-MahdlMu.ammad
al->ajwl(d. 1969). Al->ajwltitled a poem as follows: “Waqfatun ‘almal-aylml
wa-khiymb al-shablbah” (A Halt at a Campsite and an Address to Youth).
Instead of asking his audience to halt at a campsite, the poet calls on his people
to “renew the jubilation of these deserted ruins,” for they speak for a glorious
past, “as there is no better evidence than these” of a past worthy of renewal.
Writing in an awakening vein, he calls for the use of science and religious
goodwill to recapture the glorious past and be an effective participant in the
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS