Dr. Timothy Winter Qasida al-Burda The Celebrated Poem of the Cloak (Part 12)

Qasida al-Burda: The Celebrated Poem of the Cloak

Dr. Timothy Winter (Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad)

Opening

"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

"Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings."

Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Matters of Faith, coming to you today from Cambridge. We're here at the Muslim College where we're going to be speaking to the dean of the college, Dr. Abdul Hakim Murad. He is a scholar in traditional Islamic thought as well as an expert on Western thought and civilization and has written many, many articles on Islamic matters and is also a very popular speaker on Islamic topics.

And Abdul Hakim Murad has just published a new translation of the very famous poem, the Burda, the Poem of the Cloak. And we'll be talking about that in a minute. But may I ask you to introduce yourself in your own words? There's a lot more to say to your career.

Well, you've summed up most of the interesting bits, I think. Essentially, this is the incipient Muslim college here in Cambridge. I also teach in more mainstream institutions as well in the University of Cambridge.

I give the khutbah, the Friday sermon at the mosque here and some other places. I thunder at my congregations regularly in a vain attempt to make them see sense. I have a wife and three children.

And this translation of the Burda is my latest offering. In fact, it just reached me yesterday. So it's literally almost hot from the press.

It came from Turkey yesterday afternoon. But I published some other things as well, mostly on fairly recondite issues of Islamic law and European British Muslim identity, interfaith dialogue, that kind of thing.

Understanding the Qasida

Before we talk about the Qasida Burda, let's talk a little bit about the Qasida in general so we understand what it's all about.

Could you explain to us the meaning of Qasida? Qasida is an ancient Arabic word. It precedes Islam itself. Its origins lost in the mists of time.

And it was about the only significant cultural production of the Arabs before the rise of Islam. They didn't have architecture. They didn't have calligraphy.

They didn't have anything. But they did have their language. And the pride of their language was these very long odes which they would hear around the campfire late at night when they had nothing to do but hear these wonderful sonorous evocations of the desert, the lost maiden, the wanderer, the camel, the beautiful horses, the search for the encampment, ancient Bedouin themes.

And the Qasida survived the transition into Islam and suddenly, as with all other things, started to bear fruit and blossoms and became an extraordinary vehicle for the conveying not of ancient tribal humanism but of the new monotheistic message. So where previously the nostalgia of the Qasida was the poet standing by the embers of his beloved's campfire wondering where she's gone out into the wilderness. This becomes a metaphor for the lost human soul who has lost God and wants to know where is the beloved, where is Leila, where is my celestial betrothed somewhere out there.

Now I have to become religious which is precisely the quest for the lost beloved. So a very ancient pagan romantic theme really becomes one of the great sacred metaphors of Islamic civilization. So the Qasida doesn't just survive and flourish in Arabic but it becomes a major poetic form and has sub-forms in other Islamic literatures as well.

And people are still writing Qasidas to this day.

Classical Themes of the Qasida

Are these the main topics, the lost soul yearning for God or are there other topics that Qasidas are written about? Well, the classical Qasida and there are said to be seven of them that were so esteemed by the Arabs that they were actually hung on the Kaaba, the great sanctuary in Mecca. The classical theme of it essentially is loss, a sense of bewilderment, a sense that one is in the hands of fate, that one was united with one's people, one's tribe, one's homeland, one's beloved and then somehow it's all lost and one is just wandering in a solitary way in the desert or perhaps on some beautiful camel or horse that he spends a long time describing.

So it is very much about union and then loss and then towards the end sometimes you get he finds the tent, the beloved is in it, he's reunited with her, which of course in Islam then becomes the great metaphor of the rediscovery of the divine beloved, the union with the divine and becomes very explicitly a sacred metaphor. But essentially those are the basic themes, the theme of union and then loss, being lost and then perhaps finding or being found again at the end of the poem. Beautiful.

Music and the Qasida

Now, Qasida is often enhanced by music and poetry in general is enhanced by music. What musical style does the Qasida have if it has any particular style? Well, Arabic is strictly metrical poetry as well as rhyming and that necessarily opens up the doors to the natural musicality of the language. It's not the case with an English poem, particularly a modern English poem, that you can see it and immediately you can think of ten tunes that it would really go with.

With Latin poetry to some extent, which was strongly metrical, you could do that. With the Decca syllables of Shakespeare, for instance, you can do that. With Milton you can do that.

With modern poetry where you have blank verse and the idea of rhythm, of the power of the language recurrently reawakening the sensibilities as you go through each line. Modernity has lost that and so we don't really sing poems any longer, we just hear the poet reciting. But in traditional civilizations, not just Islamic, but classical civilization, Greek poetry, Chinese, there wasn't really a boundary between poetry and music.

So the sonority and the musicality of the language, you just had to make a slight modulation in what you were doing before it would become a kind of chant. And sometimes even the rhythms of Arabic go particularly well with the rhythm of the horse or the camel as you're going through the desert. And it's really boring and you've got nothing to do other than recite all the poetry you know and listen to other people doing that.

And there's even forms of poetry which is specifically there in order to make the camel go faster or slower. It's very integrated into the natural world. And those rhythms give it a tremendous musicality.

So the origins of Islamic music really are in Arabic poetry, particularly the Qasida, as well as also being in its more refined forms in this formal cantillation, the Tajweed of the Quran, which is the basis of Islamic melodics and musicality.

Poetry and Faith

Would you say that the Qasida, this kind of Islamic poetry, actually strengthens the iman, can help strengthen our iman? Yes, because we know that we are, as human beings, very susceptible to our environment. If we're in a beautiful building, we may behave differently than if we're in some car park covered in graffiti.

If we wear beautiful, dignified clothes, our behavior tends to be more courteous and dignified and restrained than if we're wearing a T-shirt and jeans and nobody expects anything of us.

We're very weak and vulnerable to our immediate environment. So when we hear speech that isn't just rapping, for instance, but is something that's transcendently beautiful with the full possibilities of the miracle of human speech, with its endless permutations of adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, we feel that we are in our best modality.

That our lowest modality is the sort of instinctual, inarticulate cry of anger or when somebody steps on our toe, we scream and it's the lowest noise that we make. Poetry and the recitation of scripture and great literature is the highest sound that we can make. And when we move up to that, then our inward state is transformed and we become open to higher realities.

So if you hear a beautiful poem, just as if you hear a beautiful piece of music, but somehow it's particularly the case with the spoken word, your soul is open to reception of higher truths.

The Prophet and Poetry

Well, the Prophet had a great appreciation of beauty. There was a famous hadith that says:

(Sahih Muslim Hadith 91)

"God is beautiful and He loves beauty."

And the Prophet appreciated beauty also in the eloquence of poetry. Could you give us some examples for this? The issue of poetry is interesting because as with music, it can possess us in a way that sometimes can be idolatrous. Sometimes with a very catchy tune, for instance, it kind of takes you over.

You go to sleep and the tune's in your head, you wake up next morning and you're still thinking of the tune and that's not spiritually terribly healthy. And similarly, you can become totally intoxicated by words and by a poem that takes you away from what those words are actually directing you to. So there have to be limits.

And Islamic civilization ultimately is a religion of sahawah, of sobriety. It's about a kind of festive dignity, as somebody described. The Muslim is a person of festive dignity.

He's always cheerful and enjoying life, but he's dignified in the way he dresses and the way he is sober. He doesn't overstep the boundaries. But the concept of verse in Islamic civilization is that it is that great mediator between ordinary factual discourse and saying things that describe the world and uttering things that are about the unutterable and the ineffable.

It forms a kind of bridge. And that's why the content of God's speech itself has that kind of musicality and why Tajweed, the formal recitation of God's word, to somebody who hasn't heard it before, they say, that's amazing music. I do this with my students sometimes.

They don't know what they're about to hear. I come into the lecture and just put on some Moroccan or somebody reciting the Quran and immediately see their body language change. They stop messing around.

They've no idea what it is. But the impact of the word has that effect, even if they can't understand a word of it. And poetry, real sacred poetry, can have that impact.

It's not wahi, it's not revelation. It's the product of human composition. But nonetheless, it can make us shape up in an extraordinarily sacred way, which is what Imam Bursiri was doing in this poem.

The Purpose of Sacred Poetry

But of course, each poem has a different purpose. Imam Bursiri's purpose is the particularly high one of inspiring us with love for the Holy Prophet, (salallahu alayhi wa sallam). And that's the greatness of the poem.

But there's other poetry, which is about particular saints or about holy cities or about practices in Islam or about repentance or about the love of God. And if you read Attar, Sana'i, Fuzuli, all of the great poets of Islam, you'll see they all have their particular preference. Bursiri's great love was the Holy Prophet, and he produced this culmination of our literature.

But it's such a versatile medium that just about any religious sensitivity... There's poems about hellfire, for instance. Some of the great Uzbek poets write mainly about hell. And it's kind of scary, and you get into a state of constriction.

But that was their maqam, that was where they were. That's the power of the word.

Conclusion of Part One

We'll talk more about all of that right after the break. And also the Prophet's, his reaction to the Jahiliyyah poet who came to him to seek forgiveness and to praise him.

Note: This represents Part 1 of the lecture on Qasida al-Burda as provided in the source material. The discussion continues in Part 2 with more detailed exploration of the Prophet's relationship with poetry and the specific qualities of Imam al-Busiri's famous poem.

And Allah knows best.