Mu'allaqat

The Muʻallaqāt (المعلقات, ʔalmuʕallaqaːt) is a group of seven long Arabic poems. The name means The Suspended Odes or The Hanging Poems, they were named so because these poems were hung in the Kaaba in Mecca, Some scholars have also suggested that the hanging is figurative, as if the poems "hang" in the reader's mind. Along with the Mufaddaliyat, Jamharat Ash'ar al-Arab, Asma'iyyat, and the Hamasah, the Mu'allaqāt are considered the primary source for early written Arabic poetry. Scholar Peter N. Stearns goes so far as to say that they represent "the most sophisticated poetic production in the history of Arabic letters." The original compiler of the poems may have been Hammad al-Rawiya (8th century). The grammarian Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Nahhas (d. 949 CE) says in his commentary on the Mu'allaqat: "The true view of the matter is this: when Hammad al-Rawiya saw how little men cared for poetry, he collected these seven pieces, urged people to study them, and said to them: 'These are the [poems] of renown.'" Orfali suggests that the connection is "the multi-thematic qaṣidāh form". Hammad was a Persian by descent, but a client of the Arab tribe, Bakr ibn Wa'il. For this reason, some suppose he not only received into the collection a poem of the famous poet Tarafa, of the tribe of Bakr, but also that of another Bakrite, Harith. The latter had been a prominent chieftain, while his poem could serve as a counterpoise to Harith's contemporary 'Amr, chief of the Taghlib, the rival tribe of the Bakr. 'Amr praises the Taghlib in glowing terms: Harith, in a similar vein, extols the Bakr ancestors of Hammad's patrons. The collection appears to have consisted of the same seven poems which are found in modern editions, composed respectively by Imru' al-Qais, Tarafa, Zuhayr, Labīd, 'Antara Ibn Shaddad, 'Amr ibn Kulthum, and Harith ibn Hilliza. These are enumerated both by Ibn Abd Rabbih (860–940 CE), and, on the authority of the older philologists, by Nahhas; and all subsequent commentators seem to follow them.