SHABBI 157East and in the West: the stories of Qais and Laila, Jamil and Buthaina,
'Urwa and 'Afra, as well as of Tristan and Isolde. To Eternity is in fact an
eloquent celebration of a highly idealized love, lacking perhaps the fever or
the heat of passion which characterized Serpents, but at the same time much
freer from the theatricality of some of the poetry in the earlier volume, and
there are moments in it of unparalleled serenity, beauty and lyricism. In
the change that took place in his attitude to love Abu Shabaka forms an
interesting contrast to 'Ali Mahmud Taha who moved in the opposite direc-
tion, starting from a position of idealized love and ending with a hedonistic
attitude in which the pleasures of sex are dominant.
Shabbi
There is nothing in the least theatrical about the poetry of the Tunisian
al-Shabbi who is one of the most appealing modern Arab poets. He was one
of three romantic poets who died tragically young, the other two being the
Egyptian Hamshari and the Sudanese al-Tijani Yusuf Bashlr. But Shabbi
was obviously the greatest of them all. More books have been written about
him than about any other romantic Arab poet.
Abu'l Qasim al-Shabbi (1909-34) was born in a town near Tauzer, where
his father was a qadi (judge). After he had learnt the Koran he was sent to
the famous school of al-Zaituna mosque, where he was taught the traditional
Islamic sciences, Arabic language and literature. He subsequently studied
law in the Tunisian Law School, from which he graduated in 1930. In 1929
he first felt the symptoms of the heart disease which was to be the cause of his
premature death at the age^rf twenty-five. His father's death in 1929, which
meant that he had to assume responsibility for the family, cast a shadow
over his life which was darkened by an unhappy marriage. Furthermore he
seemed to have been disappointed in an early love which ended in the death
of the young woman he loved.
Shabbi was familiar with the work of the chief classical Arabic poets such
as the Abbasid Ma'arri, Ibn al-Rumi and Ibn al-Farid (together with Khayyam),
as well as with the writings of the modems, both their original works and
their translations. He was particularly influenced by his readings in Mahjar
literature and in Arabic translations of western notions of literary criticism.
Shabbi knew no European language, but through translations he came to know
something of European thought and literature, including a certain acquain-
tance with Greek mythology. The astounding thing is that his poetry and his
criticism reveal a much deeper influence by, and a much greater understand-
ing of, western literature than that which we find in the works of many
poets who mastered one or more European languages. But it is characteristic