White Swords and Black Pages: The Damnatio Memoriae of Abu Tammam

Heavens, what a pile! Whole ages perish there,
And one bright blaze turns learning into air.
                      —Alexander Pope, The Dunciad

Straddling the ancient high road to Tiberias, not far from the fabled pasturage of Job, where rocks were once said to shed out streams of oil, lies the Syrian city of Jasim. It was there, on March 18, 2011, that hundreds of townspeople took to the streets in solidarity with their fellow protesters in the besieged city of Daraa. “People of dignity, people of honor,” imams declaimed from their minarets, “your folks in Daraa are being slaughtered,” and soon some fifteen hundred souls were marching into the centre of Jasim, assembling in a square named after the city’s native son, the Abbasid-era poet Abu Tammam. Under the gaze of a statue erected in that poet’s honour, the crowd repeatedly intoned the word silmiyyah (peaceful), while presenting a deceptively simple demand of “freedom” to discomfited Baath Party officials arriving on the scene.

It was a moment of infectious optimism, but Abu Tammam himself would perhaps have urged caution, for in his poem on the occasion of the sack of the Byzantine fortress of Armorium (838 AD) he asserted that “it is the white blades of the swords, and not the black pages of books, which are decisive in removing doubts and uncertainties”. Abu Tammam’s inversion of a certain hackneyed apothegm would be vindicated in short order by developments in present-day Syrian affairs. The blinding flashes of armaments indeed lit up the region, and the black pages revealed themselves not to be those exquisite Islamic manuscripts with their parchment sheets stained with concentrated indigo, but rather the smouldering wreckage of looted libraries and other cultural institutions bestrewn across the sepia-brown Syrian badlands.

A little more than two years after the Jasim protests, it was the turn of members of the Jabhat al-Nusra militia to file into Abu Tammam Square, but their intentions were anything but peaceable. They had come to destroy the poet’s statue, and so they did, using an explosive charge to perpetrate a gratuitous act of modern-day iconoclasm. As if that indignity was not enough, militants belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took the opportunity, in June 2014, to destroy another representation of Abu Tammam, this time in his final resting place of Mosul.

Gone now are the monuments to the Abbasid poet and his literary legacy, and while the percussion of the militants’ munitions struck a plangent minor chord distinctly audible to those familiar with that legacy, the damnatio memoriae of Abu Tammam, at least with respect to the Arab public square, seems nearly complete. Again, it is probable that the target of these salvos would have been well suited to grasp the nature of the events under consideration, familiar as he was with loss and dislocation. “You are not you,” a melancholic Abu Tammam once wrote with characteristic prescience, “and home is not home.”

In the midst of the present upheaval in the Arab world, with hundreds of thousands of individuals killed, maimed, poisoned, displaced and continually menaced in what has become a vast hecatomb, any undue concern regarding the destruction of a couple of statues of a relatively obscure ninth-century versifier would appear to be an indulgence at best and a callousness at worst. Yet the systematic destruction of Syrian and Iraqi cultural patrimony, taken as a whole, is a matter of no minor significance. Even if its toll rather pales in comparison to that of the innumerable lost and shattered human lives scattered about the devastated cityscapes, jerry-built refugee camps, and besieged mountain-tops of the region, the ongoing despoliation of heritage sites and lieux de mémoire constitutes another truly terrible chapter in the purple testament that has been opened in these our troubled times.

Hardly a day seems to pass without the breaking of some grim news regarding the obliteration of cultural sites, from mosque complexes and shrines to museums and memorials, and even a centuries-old tree in the town of Atmeh which, according to Salafist militants, was being worshipped “instead of God”. Not long after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s forces arrived in Mosul, officials in the soi-disant caliphate promulgated a draconian city charter, Article 13 of which declared that all “false idols” faced elimination. Thereupon did bulldozers and demolition squads fan out across a region that features some 1791 registered archaeological sites and countless other cultural treasures. This wave of destruction claimed the Tomb of Jonah, a sepulchre containing the earthly remains of the thirteenth-century historian Ibn al-Athir, the aforementioned statue of Abu Tammam, and numerous other irreplaceable monuments.

ISIL’s vandalistic campaign is reminiscent of the Taliban’s targeting of the “shrines of the infidels”, that sustained assault which included the notorious obliteration of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. For fifteen centuries those Buddhist statues looked out over the Bamwam Valley of Afghanistan’s Hazarajat region, their carmine pigments fading, their stucco coating sloughing off, but their sandstone cores showing such resilience that the Shi’a Hazara minority of the region dubbed them Solsol (“Year After Year”), in recognition of their perceived immutability. In March 2001, however, Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered these cultural icons dynamited, primarily as an act of religious iconoclasm, but also as a warning to those in the restive Hazara community who had traditionally sought refuge in the valley’s ancient Buddhist grottos.

It was an obscenity that led the Indian poet Rajagopal Parthasarathy to conclude that the “fabled Silk Road hangs in tatters now … leaving a gap in the world”, but it was more than mere cultural vandalism. As the Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey noted, while discussing this year’s destruction of Mosul’s patrimony:

Maybe this all sounds very distant. But the jihadist appetite for violent iconoclasm already has proved to be tremendously dangerous for the West. Those who claim to speak for a vengeful Allah take great delight in smashing idols wherever and whenever they can get to them. Theirs is a war of symbols. In early 2001 the Afghan Taliban, encouraged by al Qaeda, blew to bits the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan. Western leaders wrung their hands but took no substantive action. A few months later, the jihadists attacked some of the most spectacular icons in the world: the skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

 The vengeful treatment of Syrian and Iraqi patrimony by ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra militants can likewise be seen as prefiguring a broader campaign of cultural extermination and even outright genocide.

Despots, be they of the religious or secular ilk, have from time immemorial demonstrated a certain libido dominandi when it comes to the inconvenient past. As Chateaubriand observed, though a tyrant “dominates the present, the past defies him, and I retain my liberty in all that has preceded his glory”. Little wonder, then, that sites and monuments are so often marked for damnatio memoriae by human rights malfeasors. The destruction of memory is doubly tragic, however, impacting as it does on both our collective past and our collective prospects. The Cambridge academic Garth Fowden, addressing the so-called “paradox of the monument”, proposed that the “unstable polysemy” of a cultural heritage site “ends up making of it the starting point not only for historical memory of a fixed moment in the past, but also for desire, and a new journey”, such that “the stories the monuments tell are our own”.

It stands to reason that the annihilation of the vestiges of the past constitutes the stillbirth of potential outward journeys, and the distortion of cultural heritage into something crude, incomplete and fallacious. Hence the disgust with which one necessarily encounters statements like that of the Serbian politician Branko Zujic, who infamously declared that “there never were any mosques in Zvornik” in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing of that majority Bosniak town, thereby attempting to quarantine both the incontrovertible facts of the past and the possibilities inherent in the future, and somehow perfectly embodying Orwell’s “nightmare world in which the Leader or some ruling clique controls not only the future but the past”.

Whatever comes of ISIL’s reign of terror in Syria and Iraq in the coming months and years, it is not hard to imagine a future denial of the very existence of various kinds of tangible and intangible cultural heritage on a similar basis. In any case, wanton acts of vandalism and iconoclasm encourage the slow but definitive spread of cultural oblivion, to the growing detriment of our global patrimoine. All of which is to say that it is more important than ever that we commit ourselves, in the words of the tenth-century chronicler al-Masudi, the “Herodotus of the Arabs”, to “snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion”.

One of these fragments, undoubtedly precious, and undoubtedly threatened with symbolic consignment to oblivion, is the figure of the poet Abu Tammam. Appropriately enough, it was Abu Tammam himself who showed a particular commitment to that project in his own time. Whilst travelling from Khorasan to Iraq, he paid a visit to the estate of the bibliophile Abu al-Wafa b. Salama in Ecbatana, only for a blizzard to prevent his egress. “Do stay quietly here,” his host entreated him, “for it will be some time before the snow clears,” and so Abu Tammam ensconced himself in the library of the Salama family and, amidst the storehouses of the snow and the treasures of the hail, produced five books on poetry, foremost among which is the vast anthology of Arabic verse known as Al-Hamasa (Fortitude). In this compilation, Abu Tammam sought to demonstrate the “virtues most highly prized by the Arabs”, while excavating the deep history of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry.

“For historical purposes the value of the collection is not small,” wrote the Victorian Arabic scholar Sir Charles Lyall:

 but most of all there shines forth from it a complete portraiture of the hardy and manful nature, the strenuous life of passion and battle, the lofty contempt of cowardice, niggardliness and servility, which marked the valiant stock who bore Islam abroad in a flood of new life over the outworn civilizations of Persia, Egypt and Byzantium. It has the true stamp of the heroic time, of its cruelty and wantonness as of its strength and beauty.

The Kurdish warlord Saladin, for one, memorised the entirety of Al-Hamasa, relishing as he did any opportunity to quote apposite passages, and it was said that throughout the Ayubbid era “people used to learn it by heart and not bother to have it on their shelves”. Having produced such a literary triumph alone would have guaranteed Abu Tammam’s legacy in perpetuity, but in truth it represents only the final act in a remarkable literary career, one altogether worthy of commemoration, and one altogether unworthy of the current state of remembrance.

Born to Christian parents in what was then the modest qarya, or village, of Jasim, and later suspected of Manichean sympathies, Abu Tammam spent his youth employed as a weaver in Damascus, and then as a water-vendor in the Great Mosque of Cairo, where it is supposed that he acquired his knowledge of classical Arabic from the resident Koran readers. Having embarked on a career as a poet, he meandered across the Caliphate in pursuit of patronage, all the while acquiring a reputation for libertinage and religious non-conformism, enjoying as he did “the cup, the lute, and the damsel”. As a flummoxed al-Hasan b. Raga related:

Abu Tammam once visited me for a considerable time when I was in Persia. Since the rumor had reached my ears that he did not perform his obligatory prayers, I ordered a reliable man to watch him and discover whether the rumor was true. It was proved to be entirely so. But when I tried to arouse Abu Tammam’s conscience concerning the matter, he replied: “Do you really think I would omit prayers because of the trouble of making a few obeisances that would certainly be no trouble to me—I who undertook the long journey from Baghdad to come to you here—if I were really convinced that their performance was bound up with a future reward and their omission with punishment?”

“On hearing these words,” al-Hasan angrily concluded, “I felt that I should like to knock Abu Tammam down but I renounced this idea, realizing that such an affair might have unpleasant consequences for myself.” Could such attitudes have earned Abu Tammam his twenty-first-century damnatio memoriae? Or was it his well-known comparison of the composition of poetry to the act of coition? In any event, the protection extended to him by his literary patrons is clearly no longer in evidence.

Though Abu Tammam was not without his critics—some felt that he combined in his works “beautiful and bad poetry, both of the extremest kind,” others that his style was “affected, but also pregnant; wearisome, but sometimes full of peace”—few poets of his or any other generation have left behind a legacy of the kind of admirable humanism evident in his elegies and odes. While he could empathise with those “who have already become the rust of life, as if the world had become a prison to them”, so too could he put his faith in him who “planted his foot in the pool of death and said to it: under your hollow is the place of resurrection”. For the open-minded Abu Tammam, “whoever wishes to gain praise for himself looks upon people as the best ground and upon good deeds as the planting”.

He was ever the devotee of the Bedouin lifestyle, and his Weltanschauung can be found in perhaps its most distilled form in a qasida dedicated to al-Hasan b. Wahb, who had given the itinerant poet a particularly valuable steed:

Whoever has a sorrow that sleeps quietly is as if paralyzed; and a house to which you have grown accustomed is a grave.

What a magnificent possession of this world it is that a beautiful horse, neither small nor heavy, offers you …

The static city, meanwhile, furnished a different set of significations for Abu Tammam, particularly during that martial era. When he encountered the smouldering wreckage of Baghdad in the aftermath of the great siege of 813, he observed of a capital that had been founded only fifty years earlier:

Over Baghdad is stationed death’s loud herald—

Weep for her, then, weep for time’s rapine there!

Erstwhile, upon her stream by war imperiled,

When in her streets its flames were briefly bated,

Men hoped her happy fortunes reinstated.

Now all their hopes have turned to dull despair!

Since she, from youth to eldritch age declined,

Has lost the beauty that once charmed mankind.

Through his gimlet-eyed exploration of conflict, impermanence and the “sharp edge of fate”, Abu Tammam amounted to a poet very much of his own time, and very much of ours as well.

It must be admitted that a great deal of Abu Tammam’s work does not survive translation—though the German Friedrich Ruckert and the Englishman Sir Charles Lyall made spirited attempts in the nineteenth century—given the poet’s mannerism and reliance on paronomasia. It is evidently nigh impossible to convey in any other language than the original the sheer richness of his compositions. What may seem like a standard, if somewhat exotic, elegy (“it is as if the Banu Nabhan on the day of his death were stars in the sky, from among which the moon is fallen down”) may in fact contain particular Arabic expressions borrowed from pre-Islamic women’s lamentations, while other turns of phrase (“announce to every living being the death of the champion of the Arabs, since he has encamped at the place of destruction”) may reference archaic language specific to those Bedouin riders tasked with publicly announcing battlefield casualties to shocked communities. But Abu Tammam’s erudition should add to, rather than subtract from, his historical standing, providing as he does such an array of insights into ante-Islamic and early Islamic civilisation in particular and the human condition in general. “Why don’t you write verses that can be understood?” the poet was once asked, and his reply was more than sufficient: “Why cannot you understand what the poetry says?”

It was not so long ago that Abu Tammam was recognised in his birthplace of Jasim, where his Christian father worked as a druggist, and where his Tayy forebears had alternated between nomadic and sedentary lifestyles. And it was not so long ago that he was memorialised in his final resting place of Mosul, where he had been granted the generous sinecure of chief postmaster. Gone now are the statues in his honour, and gone with them is the likelihood of any meaningful material public remembrance of the great poet in two of his most relevant lieux de mémoire. It is a cruel posthumous fate for a man who had done all he could in his own lifetime to preserve the traditions of the distant past, but given rather more pressing contemporary concerns the chances for his public rehabilitation seem, to borrow one of his delicate phrases, “slender as arrows of willow-wood”.

This may seem to many a matter of minimal importance at a time of geopolitical disarray and mounting existential threats, but it should not be given short shrift. It was back in 2007 that the historian David Fromkin furnished the debatable but utterly grave opinion that “the Middle East has no future”. By dint of the iconoclastic campaigns of ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other belligerents, whole swathes of that region are being threatened with the destruction of the past as well. All that would be left, then, would be a lorn and desolate present. The treatment of Abu Tammam’s legacy is part and parcel of this worrying trend, and should neither go unnoticed nor unrectified, for the sake of the preservation of international cultural heritage writ large.

Ultimately, the illustrious career of Abu Tammam should give the lie to his fellow poet John Keats’s later claim that “no Man can live but in one society at a time … We with our bodily eyes see but the fashion and manners of one country for one age—and then we die.” With his Christian familial background and allegedly Manichean mindset, the Muslim Abu Tammam journeyed from the Levant to Egypt, from Armenia to Ecbatana, and from Basra to Baghdad, all the while attired in Bedouin robes, producing verses inspired by polytheistic ancestors, and feeling utterly at home both in the lonely caravan and the lush library. Although the Middle Eastern world of Abu Tammam has been much altered since that time, the present wrack and ruin being wrought by civil war, internecine conflict and widespread insurgencies with respect to the last vestiges of ancient communities and historical landmarks could hardly bode worse for the future of the region.

In one of his many astonishing elegies, the Abbasid belletrist lamented the earthly state of affairs in which “there is no end to our losing the dead”, even those “whose abundant gifts once overwhelmed the calamities of Time”. The damnatio memoriae of Abu Tammam, alongside that of other historical figures—including the biblical Jonah, the medieval Ibn al-Athir, and a myriad of others—threatens to do the same, this time to the invaluable bequests of the dead, thereby endangering civilisation’s rightful inheritance. If we cannot, at least in the near term, undo the physical damage of the ongoing campaign of iconoclasm in the Levant and Mesopotamia, at the very least we might endeavour to preserve Abu Tammam’s less tangible “cloak woven of praise”, and then rededicate ourselves to preserving the remnants of the past on behalf of the beneficiaries of the future.