SOURCE: Hamori, Andras. “Reading al-Mutanabbi's ‘Ode on the Siege of al-Hadat.’” In Studia Arabica et Islamica: Feststchrift for Ihsan ‘Abbas on his Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Wadad al-Qadi, pp. 195-208. Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut, 1981.

In the following essay, Hamori explores aspects of al-Mutanabbi's poetry that would have appealed to his contemporary audience.

Among the classical Arabic poems that treat specific events, many are strongly linear.¹ The composition of the work at hand² is best understood as an occasionally intricate variation on an implicit linear sequence. Al-Mutanabbī's mastery of sound and phrase are evident in it throughout, but the design is largely responsible for the power.

The poem—a panegyric—opens with a two-line moral generalization (“what seems great to the mean seems mean to the great,” etc.) that is applied, in vss. 3-4, to the recipient: Sayf al-Dawla.³ In Arabic poetry, generalization followed by specific...