Rihla (The Journey) – was the short title of a 14th
Century (1355 CE) book written in Fez by the Islamic legal scholar Ibn Jazayy
al-Kalbi of Granada who recorded and then transcribed the dictated travelogue
of the Tangerian, Ibn Battuta. The book’s full title was A Gift to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels
of Travelling and somehow the title of Ibn Jazayy's book captures the ethos
of many of the city and country journeys I have been lucky to take in past
years.
This rihla is about the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria and the poetry of
loss.
“I consider Fate to be like the stamping of a blind camel:
he whom
he meets he kills; he whom he misses lives to grow old.”
The Poem of Zuhayr
(Zuhayr bin
Abî Sulmá 520- c.609 CE)
c. 600 CE
The lines quoted above are from one of the famous Seven Renowned Odes
or Mu’allaqât poems that make up the
main corpus of the best of pre-Islamic era Arabic poetry. They were called the Mu’allaqât, or ‘suspended’ poems because
tradition held that,
1. They were hung like precious gems to be considered in the Kabba
in Mecca or
2. They remain suspended in one’s consciousness after hearing them.
The second explanation is more likely as the tradition of
pre-Islamic poetry was intensely oral and these poems were recited in public by
the poet himself or by a rawi reciter whom the poet or sha’ir himself had trained. In Zuhayr’s case he had been trained by
‘Awas ibn Hajar, and he subsequently
trained his son K-ab, who was later to
recite poetry for Mohammed (PBUH), and who then went on to train al-Hutay’ah.
This tradition of formally trained recited poetry was to manifest itself in the
dispersal and recitation of the Quran at an early stage in the Islamic era, and
even today in the training of the Huffaz.
One of the consistent features of the Renowned Odes were the opening
lines or nasib of the poems where the
poet reflects on the deserted ruins of a remembered love or abode. Zuhayr began
his poem with,
“Does the blackened ruin,
situated on the stony ground between Durraj and Mutathallam, which did not
speak to me…”
and in general terms this poetic device of establishing the context
for the poem was known in Arabic poetry as al-waqfa
‘ala al-atlal or “standing by the ruins.”
The meters of Arabic rhythmic poetry are known as “seas” or buhur and in an analogous way I have
always considered the history of the Middle East, from the time of the Ziggurats
of Sumer to the Burj Khalifa tower of modern Dubai, as having the rhythm of a
sea crashing against man-made defences and hopes: tidal, sometimes calm, but
more often violent, destructive, cleansing.
Following an earlier visit to Petra I wanted to see that other great
mercantile city whose purpose and prosperity suddenly evaporated as if
overwhelmed by the sea.
I visited Palmyra, Syria on the 7th October 2010,
travelling the 220km on Highway No. 2 from Damascus. Tadmur, which is the
ancient Hebrew and Greek name of the place, is now the name of the nearby new
town which was established in 1929 after French Archaeologists cleared the
ancient remains of their lean-to dwellings and dwellers.
Palmyra has existed as a defined settlement from about 2000 BCE.
Following the death of Alexander the Great it became a Hellenistic city under
the Seleucids in 300 BCE. It was always primarily a trading city and was to
reach its commercial and political zenith however in the years following the annexation
of the Nabataean capital of Petra by the Romans in 106 CE by taking up most of
the Nabataen trading monopolies. It became a Roman colony in 211 CE.
Under King ‘Udaynath (r.260-267CE) and in particular his wife Queen Zenobia
(r.267-272), in an attempt to separate themselves from being a client-city of
Rome, a brief but brilliant Palmyrene Empire was established militarily,
influenced by Iranian court protocols, that stretched from Ankara in Turkey to
Egypt. Zenobia who was to crown herself the first queen of Egypt after
Cleopatra, was defeated by the Emperor Aurelian, allied with Palmyra’s traditional tribal
enemies the Tanukh, in 272 CE and the Romans occupied the city. Zenobia was captured
and brought to Rome and there is a great deal of uncertainty about her ultimate
fate.
The following year however, following a rebellion by one of her
relatives, Aurelian took the opportunity to retake the city, plunder it for its
riches which he badly needed following his suppression of the Goth invasions and rebuilding of Rome's walls, raze it to the
ground and in echoes of today allow his troops to club and cudgel to death much
of the population. The Romans later regretted the fact that they had destroyed
one of their ‘own’ cities and in particular a city that guaranteed protection
on their desert frontier. The Emperor Diocletian attempted to repair and restore
the city during his reign but the trading emporium that had been so beneficial
to Rome did not recover, destroyed by Aurelian’s avarice.
Political and cultural iconoclasm has been a feature of political
revolution and religious revisionism from time immemorial. Our human psyche
appears genuinely threatened when faced, literally, with the iconography of the
generations that precede us and when allied to a political will and/or
religious ferment we seem all too willing to want to destroy those idols, those
depictions as if some primitive way they
could exert control over us. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as
part of its political and religious orthodoxy is determined to eradicate or erase 'faces' from the past any in addition to
rendering opposition to its remit impotent by sustained and propagandised acts
of selective terror and depravity.
So it was before with the Mongols, the
Nazis, the Khmer Rouge.
The poet Zuhayr wrote about war before ever a Muslim orthodoxy
existed. He said,
“When you stir it up (war),
you will stir it up as an accursed thing,
and it will become greedy when you
excite its greed and it will rage fiercely.
Then it will grind you as
the grinding of the upper millstone against the
lower, and it will conceive
immediately after its first birth and it will produce twins.”
With ISIL, and lets assume with reasonable certainty that they establish so form of a
State that will stretch from Damascus to Baghdad incorporating most of Syria
(apart from Latakia) and North Western Iraq, at some point to protect
themselves from within they will have to turn to governance; providing shelter,
food, jobs, education, trade, utilities for the peoples they have subjugated. Poetry
may even be allowed! However its existence, a bit like the very brief Palmyrene
Empire might be brief. The “twin” wars promised by Zuhayr, from 'within' and 'without', will inevitably arise from within in opposition to ISIL's version of orthodoxy and without from a
militant Shia Iran, a threatened secular Sunni Turkey, but most of all by a
paranoid Israel. The tides of Middle Eastern history will continue to turn!
On the 21st May 2015 Tadmor/Palmyra fell to the ISIL
forces and to date there has not been any reported destruction of the city's archaeological heritage. Truth be told from my observations, such as the already defaced heads shown above in one of Palmyra's tombs or of the statue of Aglibol, the lunar God near the entrance to the Temple of Bel there is very
little of interest, particularly to satisfy an religious iconoclastic thirst,
left in the ruins of Palmyra today for them to destroy. However the political
iconoclasm has been sated where the streets are stained with the blood of
ISIL-executed men, women and children whose “faces” were strongly associated,
as either soldiers or officials, with the former regime.
For them there is only Zuhayr’s lament for the Fate of the people of
Palmyra/Tadmor. Those that ISIL’s “blind” camel (read orthodoxy) have
encountered have been killed, those that have been missed will hopefully live
to old age.
