Praising and killing
“المَدْحُ ذَبْحُ
al-madḥ ḏabḥ
To praise is to kill”
This warning[1] captures in breathy rhyme the unwelcome pinch of a compliment, even one that has been earnestly paid. Perhaps it is some ineradicable doubt over sincerity, or maybe it is due to the self-affected smallness of excessive modesty, but something about praise is simply awkward. That there may be real and present danger in praise can't help either.
Sincerity is of little consolation, for praise is near to envy, and as the Greek writer Heliodorus warned, “When any one looks at what is excellent with an envious eye he fills the surrounding atmosphere with a pernicious quality, and transmits his own envenomed exhalations into whatever is nearest to him.”[2]
Praise has not always been on the outs, of course.
"Le Courtesan reforme" by Jean Couvay / The Met
From the time of his death the Prophet Muhammad was the subject of lyric verse (المديح النبوي) in praise of his virtues and character. From later Ayyubid times, Sufi incantation turned on sweet words for the divine. Praise of one kind or another was made to echo not only in the God-seeking heart but in the halls of power as well.
Court poets vying to have their mouths stuffed with gold (as the expression went) leaned on panegyric (مديح, madīḥ) in flattering the all-too-human elites of the early Islamic dynasties.[3] Ruling over urbane polities like Damascus, the Umayyads may have forsworn the austere circumstances embraced in life and verse by their pagan forebears, but they continued to indulge in poetry that was laden with familiar tropes like the abandoned campsite and garnished with images of a bygone nomadic pastoralism.
Court poets monetized the literary topoi of their predecessors while stroking the egos of the newly minted commanders of the faithful-cum-patrons of the arts. They were rewarded not merely for peddling nostalgia but for verbal celebrations of their masters' supposed virtues, commanding prowess, battlefield victories, and judicious rule.
As Irwin writes, the panegyric was redolent of an advertising jingle in that “it has almost certainly been written to extort money from its target audience and so is likely to smell of insincerity.”[4]
How is it that a form of expression with all the integrity of a television spot for breakfast cereal produced some of the most enduring lines in all of Arabic verse? It may be that the panegyric catches in the memory precisely because of the verbal glitter of its shameless exaggeration.
Among al-Mutanabbī’s epochal odes to Sayf al-Dawlah (916-67) one confronts hyperbole such as:[5]
“ولست مليكاً هازماً لنظيره ولكنك التوحيد للشرك هازماً
You were not a monarch who routed his peer, but you were monotheism routing polytheism”
Or a verse crafted to appeal to grammarians:
“إذا ما كان تنويه فعلاً مضارعاً مضى قبل أن تُلقى عليه الجوازم
When what you intend is a future verb (act), it becomes past tense before any conditional particles can be prefixed to it”
The “would-be prophet” and the seal of the poets, al-Mutanabbī saved his most immortal lines and some of his most audacious praise for himself:
“الخيل والليل والبيداء تعرفني والسيف الرمح والقرطاس والقلم
The steed and the night and the desert know me, and the sword and the spear and parchment and pen
”
Fitting then that the poet became the victim of his own self-praise and met his death by highwaymen: though at first he had tried to flee, a valet asked about those famous lines of his, and al-Mutanabbī, ashamed, steeled himself for a vainglorious fight.[6]
[1] I owe this expression to an Egyptian friend who will, I trust, forgive my repeating that his dissertation is first-class. Note that Arabic technically has no infinitive, and this expression could just as well be translated as “praising is killing,” or “praise is slaughter,” ad inf.
[2] Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The Evil Eye: The Origins and Practices of Superstition (1895), 8.
[3] Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (2002), 22-43.
[4] Robert Irwin, Night & Horses & the Desert, An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (2000), 43
[5] A.J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry (2000), 84-90.
[6] Irwin, Night, 221-22.
