Issue 10/June 1998 

Editor, Prof. Barry Rubin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ARTICLE: Adel Darwish, "NIZZAR QABBANI: THE POET WHO CHALLENGED ARAB TABOOS"

NIZZAR QABBANI: THE POET WHO CHALLENGED ARAB TABOOS

By Adel Darwish*

When Nizzar Qabbani, one of the contemporary Arab World's most celebrated poets, died in London at age 72 on 30 April 1998, leaving a rich but contentious legacy. Qabbani's poetry was romantic, political, erotic, bold and above all controversial. People hated it or loved it.

Events following his demise certainly proved this last point. Some fundamentalist Muslims occupied London Central mosque to prevent his family and friends holding an Islamic memorial service, branding him a "Zendique" (atheist).

A few days later another furious row developed between two producers at a London-based Arab satellite television service, this time over Qabbani's first anthology (Tofoulat Nahd) or "Childhood of a Bosom." The book caused a scandal when it was first published in conservative Damascus in 1947. But the quarrel of 1998 encapsulated the controversy that Qabbani's poems caused in the Arab world. It was a battle between the sexes, between the liberal and the traditional, and--most important--between a self-censoring inner tyranny of the mind and that of the freedom to explore.

The two protagonists were entrenched in their beliefs. The senior, producer was a Palestinian woman in her forties who was infuriated by a proposal to censor the poem "Childhood of a Bosom" out of a two-hour live program dedicated to Qabbani. The male producer, also a Palestinian and in his thirties, argued that "the erotic nature of the verse might offend the sensibilities of conservative Arab sheikhs," in the audience or among the station's sponsors.

Finally the woman producer won he day, albeit by the decision of the male managing director who accepted her argument that it would be better to concentrate the discussion during the live transmission on love poetry rather than risking discussing Qabbani's political poetry, where traditional Arab rulers seldom appear in a favorable light.

The resulting broadcast mirrored the Arab intelligentsia's ambivalent attitude towards Nizar Qabbani. Everyone did, however agree on one thing: Many ordinary men and women, as well as writers and poets were grieving the loss of the master of love, defamation and lament verse who expressed their aspirations and frustrations.

Many scholars believe that in 1947 the young Qabbani had deliberately chosen a provocative title for his poem and anticipated the fury. Controversy had often gone hand-in-hand with the publication of his new work. But, as his later poetry showed, Qabbani was not merely trying to provoke, as he went on to challenge well-established taboos.

By the 1970s, Qabbani's verse ridiculed and decried "Dhuniyat al-Thareem" (from the Arabic word harram, meaning unholy, blasphemous and anti-Islamic, thus a forbiddance mentality). This phrase had been coined by Arab modernists in reaction to Iran's fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie for writing the novel The Satanic Verses.

Several times Qabbani hinted that such taboos were merely tools deployed and encouraged by a patriarchy tyrannical establishment to bar the Arab mind from breaking free from their despotism. These had to be abandoned if the mind was to generate independent and creative interpretation of religious and cultural heritage.

Conservative and authoritarian Arab regimes disliked and often banned his poetry as it embodied assaults on social and sexual taboos. His poetry alerted readers, and listeners--since many celebrated singers like Abdel Halim Hafez, Nagat el-Saghira, Firuz, and Um Kolthoom sang his poetry--with a clarion call declaring that national and social liberation was meaningless without sexual liberation.

His political poetry, on the other hand was nationalistic and glorified violence, placing the abstract idea of armed struggle, killing and martyrdom, before peace and love of life. This often meant exalting dictators who fitted his image of a mythical Arab hero.

Qabbani fiercely resisted the idea of normalization with Israel. He published works like "Why I sing for Armed Struggle" and a poem (later a song) "Now I have a rifle, show me the way to Jerusalem." He styled other poems on the early Bolshevik verse glorifying the revolution and the sacrifices of the masses.

Many of his poems were also not welcomed in Syria by the Ba'th regime. But after his death, Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad sent a plane to fly the dead poet home for burial in Damascus, where a street was named after him in 1997.

Qabbani was born in Damascus on 21 March 1923 to a respected but not wealthy family. His great uncle was Abu Khalil el-Qabbani, a 19th-century pioneer of Arab theater. His niece is the London- based feminist writer Ranna Qabbani.

He joined the Syrian diplomatic service after graduating law school in 1945. His 1954 poem "Bread, Hashish and a Moon" so offended the sensibilities of Syrian parliament members that they demanded his firing and trial. But Qabbani survived this crisis, serving in Cairo, Ankara, London, Madrid, Beijing and Beirut, which he made his home after quitting the diplomatic service in 1966. He was still in Beirut when he met the love of his life, the Iraqi teacher Balquis al-Rawi, during a poetry festival in Baghdad.

Their love gave new power to his talent. After he divorced his first wife Zahra Aqbiq, a Syrian by whom he had two children, Balquis moved to Beirut as a cultural attache in the Iraqi embassy to be near him. He confessed that she inspired his love poetry "like no other woman did." They married in 1973 and stayed most of the time in Beirut during its turbulent years.

Eroticism, love, lament, political satire, a heavy sense of history, anger, violence and death could all be found in one verse of his works of the period. His eldest son, from his first wife Zahra, died in an accident in Beirut in 1973. Balquis was killed in 1981 when pro-Iranian terrorists blew up the Iraqi embassy in Beirut where she worked.

He entitled an anthology "To Beirut, the female." Many verses in that book illustrated how he mastered his craftsmanship of preserving the image of the woman he tenderly loved with the herbs of lament, political--often sad--awareness and history. His excellence in expressing the way the Arab female experienced love made Arab women the largest market for his anthologies.

His sister's suicide when she was forbidden from marrying the man she loved, had deeply affected him as a teenager. Another impression was left by his illiterate mother selling her jewelry to raise the cash to publish his first works "Childhood of a Bosom," in 1947. "Wild poems," published later in the same year was about eroticism and gay love, a subject still barred from Arab media of today.

His later poetry reflected the contradictions of contemporary intellectual Arabs. He attacked the tyranny and corruption of Arab regimes yet supported Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and participated in many poetry festivals sponsored and attended by him. In 1991 he published "Writings on the Margins of the Books of Defeat," portraying the Gulf War which pushed Saddam's occupying forces out of Kuwait as "a catastrophic defeat for all Arabs." He worshipped the late populist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who eradicated pluralist liberal democracy from Egypt.

He was impressed by Colonel Nasser's anti-British stance during the 1956 Suez crisis. Then he became obsessed with his romantic idea of one Arab Nation. He established a wider pan-Arab audience with his poem "Attachments to the Book of Naksa"--Naksa was the name given by Nasser and others to their defeat in the 1967 war. The poem was banned from the state-controlled Egyptian media for satirizing autocracy and shaming Arab armies as:

The Sultan's guards,
Who fiercely face student demonstrations,
And turn into ostriches when facing the enemy.

He became awash with guilt when Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970. He called Nasser "the last of the prophets," in a poem lamenting his death, entitled "We Murdered the Prophet," while defaming other Arab leaders as:

The assassins who,
Stabbed the Imam,
During his night prayer.

In the same poem, he portrayed an image of Arab rulers:

Walking behind the prophet's coffin,
Holding their blooded daggers under their mourning cloaks.'

In 1995 the poet of love caused another uproar by declaring the death of the Arabs as a nation:

A horrifying chain of degenerations,
Swiftly soaked us into the age of senility,

His 1990 masterpiece '' Abu Jahl (the father of ignorance) buys Fleet Street'' became a classic reference to the bankruptcy of Arab journalism as it aired the frustration of many Arab journalists who escaped to London and Paris only to become helplessly enslaved by petrodollars in the hands of illiterate conservative paymasters choking their words. The closing stanza was a satirical and bitter attack concealed as an appeal to an unnamed conservative Arab ruler.

O long lived one,
We vow never to seek a share of your rule.
O long lived one,
We vow never even as to look at your throne,
O long lived one,
Go on lashing, as many of the people as you wish
And killing as many of your subjects as you wish,
And fuck as many of your slave girls as you wish,
We only have one wish:
Spare us the words, and spare us the letters.

By the time of his death, his 1990 prophecy was fulfilled: not one single Arab media organization in Europe was left independent to report freely on Arab or international affairs.

* Adel Darwish is a British author and journalist specializing in the Middle East

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Marshall Breger & Thomas Indinopulos, Jerusalem's Holy Places & The Peace Process, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 76 pages. Policy Paper #46.

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Institute of Turkish Studies new site:
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Palestine Online [http://www.p-ol.com/] has a good internet directory.

Islam and Palestine Newsletter of Islamic Jihad: http://www.islam-palestine.org/

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The Jordan Times: http://www.accessme.com/jordantimes

Arabia On line [http://www.arabia.com] includes news, ([http://www.akhbar.com]) business, culture, and lots more data.

The International Relations and Security Network (ISN), one of the world's best international affairs sites, has many new features [http://www.isn.ethz.ch] including search, forum for debate, and new documents daily update.

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Al-Mukhtalif Poetry Magazine, Kuwait: [http://mukhtalif.com] has a new issue.

Museum of Contemporary Iranian Artists has exhibits, recordings, and books by Iranian artists:
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On-line exhibits: Marwan-Portraits 1973-78, by Marwan Kassab Bachi's portraits from the book "A Journey of Life and Art" by Abdulrahman Munif. Arabic Calligraphy-Ornamentation to Abstraction, a mini survey of some noted contemporary artists who use Arabic calligraphy in their work,: www.arabart.com

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November 9-10. Ramat Gan, Israel. BESA Center for Strategic Studies in conjunction with Johns Hopkins U SAIS, "America and Its allies," international conference on the experience of many countries as U.S. allies, past, present and future. Elisheva Brown, [browne@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il.

December 13-16, 6th International Research and Advisory Panel Conference on Forced Migration, Gaza. Paper proposals welcome: [http://www.uni-bamberg.de/~ba6ef3/iasfm.htm

December 14-17, Wilton Park conference, Wiston House, Brighton, England, "The Threat of Nuclear Proliferation.

January 1999. Conference:- Centennial of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: Secretary General of Conference Committee: [dma02@kfshhub.kfshrc.edu.sa

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