RUSAFI 55poet has managed to express in a concise and forceful style his whole philo-
sophy of life, his passionate belief in the ideal of reason, and the dignity of
man, his bitter and angry rejection of all superstition. The overall irony of
the poem becomes apparent at the very end, which is a deliberately designed
anti-climax. We are told unexpectedly that the poet wakes up in the moraing
to find that the sun is high in the sky, and that in truth the whole thing
was no more than a dream — a bad dream, the cause of which was nothing
greater than the poet's having eaten too much watercress before he went to
sleep.
It is strange, however, how many Arab critics and scholars seem to have
missed the poet's ironic intentions, although some have seen even a political
significance in the poem, regarding it as an allegory embodying a rallying cry
for revolution against the contemporary feudal system.^80 The one scholar who
devoted a monograph to the study of the poem, Jamil Sa'id, was not suf-
ficiently aware that it is part of the satiric intention of the poet to introduce
comically absurd elements, like the description of certain aspects of life in
paradise, with the ennumeration of the items of food provided, ranging from
fried fish and roast chicken to the honey puddings of which the ground was
made; he also glosses the overt sexuality of the account of the faithful making
love in public to the houri of heaven causing the beds to shake underneath
them, and fails to notice the deliberate and perhaps slightly sacrilegious bor-
rowing of Koranic images and the verbal allusions to the descriptions of
heaven and hell given in the Holy Book. The result is that although the critic
points out quite rightly the poet's happy choice of mono-rhyme and metre
which allows him an abundance of rhyme words, relatively few forced rhymes
and a rhythm which is close to that of prose, an important requirement in a
work of this length, the same author complains that the picture of hell in
Zahawi's poem is paler or less vivid than that in the Koran and in Ma'arri's
Epistle on Forgiveness. Because of his inability to see the ironic significance of
the whole poem he regards it as an artistic failure. Similarly the irony of the
poem seems to have eluded other scholars.^81 This is unfortunate, because it is
this particular feature of the poem, and not its striking verbal felicities, no
more common here than in the rest of Zahawi's poetry, which renders the
poem a worthy tribute.
Rusafi
Of Zahawi's compatriot and contemporary, Ma'ruf al-Rusafi (1875-1945),
one Arab critic has said, perhaps with slight exaggeration, 'Had his share of
modem education been commensurate with his poetic gifts, the whole course
of modern Arabic poetry would have been different'.^82 Rusafi was of humble
origins: his father was a policeman whose duties necessitated his frequent