on 25-Jul-2017 (Tue)

It is well known that the most popular way of vilifying a man in Arab society was, and still is, to impugn the sexual mores of his female relatives, preferably his mother or sisters, implying that the man is unable to control them and preserve his honour. It is still done using common vulgar expletives that one may hear on th street; it was also employed in high-status poetry.

Until recently, modem scholarship has largely ignored these passages even though Jarir has always been highly valued, especially by literate Arabs And even now, many scholars refrain from actual quotation.

Jayyusi admits that the satire is often full of comical imagery, but condemns Umayyad satire about women as being generally 'excessively gross and obscene', too grotesque and lacking humour: 'they cross the frontiers of satire into pornographic fantasies that arrive at absurdity' . 6 Apparently condemning both pornography and absurdity, she does not mention that these two things were precisely what the poet intended.

At least some examples must be given in this article. Jarir mentions the inci- dent involving Jicthin in some thirty of his poems, either very briefly or in more extended passages. All the passages occur in longer poems, in which he inveighs against al-Farazdaq and his clan,

The two words majarr Jicthin, 'the dragging of Jicthin', occur seven times in J arir' s verse; they are meant to evoke the event or rather the more elaborate pas- sages of the fictionalised, imagined rape, such as the following:

The man from Minqar says, after they have made her kneel, 'That's a cheap bride-price for JiCthin, not expensive!' She says, 'You've killed me!', but he says, 'My death? Even if al-Farazdaq would humble himself I don't care!' You praised the Banu 1-Ashadd but they left her with wide-open private parts and a broad piss-hole. When she called for al-Farazdaq they made her moan with many a knob of an enormous prick.

one is disposed to believe, with Yiinus b. I:Iabib (d. 1821798), that when al-Farazdaq covered his chin, Jarir improvised the image on the spot.1

It was this line, too, that prompted al-Jfilfi'.? to remark, in a passage on leprous people: 20 This is merely silliness and obscenity (safah wa-tafaJ:iJ:iush) by means of which one seeks to anger the person to which it is attributed. Angry and silly people, when annoyed, often say similar things. However, when someone says to another, 'You son of such-and-such a woman!' he does not expect people to take his words as a true testimony; he merely vents his anger, wanting to utter obscenities and to infuriate the other. Jarir does not merely want to vent his anger or infuriate and humiliate his opponent, he wants to amuse others. Many of his naqa:ii##BAD TAG##

But almost without exception hij' a) refers to poetry.

This is another reason why 'satire' is an unsatisfactory translation; hija' excludes the various forms of satirical prose, whether short sketches or lengthy 'epistles'.

Another disadvantage of the word 'satire' lies in the several undesirable associa- tions with literary concepts from the Classical and European world, such as the formal verse satire tradition of Horace and Juvenal.