10 - Hunting poetry (ṭardiyjāt)

Summary

Perhaps one of the first types of poetry to have emerged from the framework of the polythematic qaṣīdah as an independent genre – a process often held to mark the beginnings of the development of “modern” poetry – was the hunting-poem or ṭardiyyah. There can be no doubt that the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world have practised hunting in some form or another as far back into the past as our records go. Pre-Islamic poetry, stereotyped as it undoubtedly is, nevertheless records ample vivid descriptions of the oryx hunt, and it is in such poetry that we must look in order to find the origins of the hunting-poems of the late Umayyad and ʿAbbasid eras, although the poetry of the chase of these later periods is vastly different from the compositions of the Arab poets of pre-Islamic days. It was not only the poetic revolution of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbasid periods which brought about this change. The “moderns” (muhdathun) felt no qualms in depicting quarry and hunter which could play no part in the strictly limited area in which the pre-Islamic poet was forced by convention to operate; in addition, the oryx, the Jāhilā hunter's traditional quarry, from an early date was over-hunted and by the time of the ʿAbbasid assumption of the caliphate the animal's numbers must have been seriously depleted. The moderns were thus in part forced, though in part also perfectly willing, to broaden the scope of their poetic descriptions of hunting. Now, too, the Islamic borders were far and away beyond the desert confines of the Arabian peninsula proper. Mountainous and even wooded areas, terrain of relatively high rainfall and dense vegetation, were within the ken of the poet, as was the varied game of such areas, which had to be hunted by much more sophisticated methods than those employed by the pre-Islamic bedouin.