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Wizards, Wars, and Wives: The Hero in Arabic Legend and Lore: Part Two
| Article
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10795 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
5,073 Words |
| Author
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Jan Knappert
Jan Knappert is a folklorist and specialist in African and
Oriental languages who is based in Belgium. |
In their own songs and poems, Arabia's heroes praised friends and mocked enemies, mourned the dead and glorified war. These warriors of the desert were thrilled by the risk of losing life, limb, and friends. In Arabia, all spoils of war went to the victor: wives and children, slaves and mistresses, all wealth, livestock, and land. Countless stirring legends called into action the valiant and invincible heroes of the Arabian tribes against mighty demons and evil kings in faraway enchanted kingdoms. With dramatic paintings of bloody battle scenes and crackling campfires as visual aids, storytellers' imaginations soared far beyond the bounds of simple geography and historical fact. Drawing back the veil of this ancient world allows us to hear and learn from their stories of bravery and conquest.
Antar
Antar, the first hero mentioned in the Hadith, is one of the most famous Arabian heroes and probably the oldest. His complete sira, or life history, was printed in Cairo under the title of Sirat Antar in 1869 in thirty-two volumes of some 150 pages each and is similar to the great romance of the legendary Amir Hamza.
Antar lived in the sixth century in Iraq on the northern borders of Arabia, where he probably fought in the endless wars between the Byzantines and the Persian kings, serving perhaps either side depending on glory and fickle fate.
At that time most of eastern Iraq was a Persian province. The north was Greek (East Roman), and the western desert was Arabian, with southern Jordan inhabited by nomadic Bedouins, camel herders, and horse dealers. Syria and Palestine were solidly Christian and Greek speaking. All this changed when the Arabs conquered those lands after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in A.D. 632.
When these religious conquests were later incorporated into the Antar sagas, Antar was recast as one of the glorious mujahideen, the soldiers of Islam in its holy wars against the Christian Greeks and the Zoroastrian Persians.
Still later, Antar wanders to Africa where he fights more wars, ranging through Egypt, these Sudan, and as far west as Morocco, as does Amir Hamza. Curiously, that is where the romance now begins its narrative. Obviously, both the oral and the later manuscript versions went through many redactions before being printed and thus frozen in the form we know today, accumulated through centuries of
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