TWO EXAMPLES OF RITHA' A Comparison between Ahmad Shawqf and al-Mutanabbf With the nineteenth century and the emergence in the Arab world of the poetry that has come to be labelled "neoclassical," the well-known custom among poets of imitating specific works of famous predecessors continued to be put to frequent use. While in the eighteenth century this custom of copying classical works had yielded little more than literary curiosities that concentrated mainly on external features of form, such poems gave way in the nineteenth century to works in which the return to classicism became a vehicle for the expression of genuine poetic creativity and vitality. Now poets possessing a "modern" poetic sensibility, formed not only by traditional literary values, but also by Western influences, I were revitalizing the classical forms of expression they were employing. Ahmad Shawqi (1868-1932) was a prime example of such a poet. Like many of his predecessors, Shawqi made general use of many of the con- ventions of classical Arabic poetry and in many instances imitated specific classical poems, shaping a modern subject around the themes, and sometimes even the diction, of his model. In his poem !J1j')l\ ,Lail Shawqi imitated Abu Tammam's famous poem on the capture of cAmmüriyya,3 and for his poem describing Arab ruins in Spain, he took al-Bubturi' qasida on the iwan of Chosroes as a model.¢ In addition to these, Shawqi imitated specific poems by al-Macarrl,5,6 al- 8 Bijiri7 and al-Husri.8 The poems to be considered here are Ahmad Shawqi's elegy in honor of his mother,9 and the poem that served as its model, al-Mutanabbi's * The text of both poems is appended to this essay. 1 M. M. Badawi, A CriticalIntroduction to ModernArabic Poetry, pages 14-16. Cambridge University Press, 1975. 2 Ahmad Shawqi, Al-Shawqiyyat.Volume 1, page 61. Matba'at al-istiqama, Cairo, 1950. 3 Abu Tammam, Diwan Abi Tammambi-sharh al-Khatib al-Tabrizi. Volume 1, page 40. Edited by Muhammad 'abduh 'Azzam, Dar al-Ma'arif (Dhakha'ir al-'Arab Series), Cairo, 1976. 4 Al-Buhturi, Diwan al-Buhturi. Volume 2, page 1152. Edited by Hasan Kamil al- Sirafi, Dar al-Ma'arif (Dhakha'ir al-'Arab Series) Cairo, 1977. 5 Ahmad Shawqi, Al-Shawqiyyat.Volume 3, page 55. Matba'at al-istiqama, Cairo, 1950. 6 Shawqi (5), page 101. 7 Shawqi (2), page 36. 8 Ahmad Shawqi, Al-Shawqiyyat.Volume 2, page 152. Sharikat Fann al-Tiba'a, Cairo, 1948. 9 Shawqi (5), page 146. 19 elegy for his grandmother.1° As was standard in classical tradition, Shawqi here produced a poem with the same meter (tawfo and having the same rhyme (-ma) as al-Mutanabbi's. These two poems provide a particularly interesting opportunity to compare the work of their authors, since the circumstances surrounding their composition were so similar. Shawqi, exiled for his association with the Khedive, who supported Turkey during World War I, was in Spain in 1918 when the armistice was announced. The news had barely been made public, inspiring hope for his imminent return to Egypt, when he received word of his mother's death. For Shawqi's predecessor, al- Mutanabbi, on the other hand, it was his life of traveling that had long kept him from his beloved grandmother. On his way to Baghdad he sent her a letter asking her to join him there, but she died upon receiving this joyful news. The goal of this essay is to compare these two poems and identify some of the features they share as well as their differences. I would hope, in particular, to come to some understanding of how each poem functions as a poetic whole. Indeed, one of the reasons for choosing to examine poems in the elegiac motif is that one might expect the individual character of the poet to come through more powerfully when he is dealing with so in- tensely personal a subject as the death of a loved one. Thus they may pro- vide a clearer contrast between Shawqi's "modern" poetic sensibility and al-Mutanabbi's classical one. Al-Mutanabbi starts his poem with a distinctively Mutanabbian line containing a general indictment of the events of fate. ("I certainly do not show events praise or censure / For their violence is not impetuousness and their refraining (from it) is not restraint. ") In the first hemistich he states emphatically his own position with regard to fate, which consists in his refraining from praising or censuring the turns it takes. The poet's personal presence in the poem is made clear through the use of a first per- son singular verb in the imperfect This statement of his personal at- titude is explained and generalized in the second hemistich. Fate is fickle. What it exhibits are not the human characteristics of jahl and hilm, and for this reason, it cannot be blamed or praised. This verse is built on tibaq, opposition between the two potential reactions to events between the two styles that fate manifests and between the two labels one might be tempted to assign it From the outset, then, the poet has described his stance toward fate, which is capricious. He has also indicated that the presence or absence of 10 Al-Mutanabbi, Diwan al-Mutanabbibi-sharh Abi al-Baqa'al-'Ukbari. Volume 4, page 102. Edited by Mustafa al-Saqqa, Ibrahim al-Abyari, and 'Abd al-Hafiz Shalabi, Dar al- Ma'rifa Offset Reprint, Beirut, 1978. .