Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology

"It’s published by Saqi, it’s bilingual, and it has a very nice little introduction which leads you through the different periods from 4000 BCE and the pre-Islamic or Jāhiliyyah—which is a term that means ‘the Age of Ignorance’—and then the Islamic period, the different dynasties or era: Umayyad, Abbasid, Andalusia. The poems are arranged chronologically, so it’s a good introduction to women’s writing and history. Al-Udhari was one of the first to put women’s poetry at the forefront. There had been women’s writings in anthologies, the occasional woman poet, but normally they were incidental to the male narratives; lamenting at the funeral of a man, or otherwise supporting men in some way. Udhari grounded these more personal writings by women, and put them in the context of the different societal and sexual freedoms during this period. Some of them are so moving and fresh. Some of the very old poems have a similar style as the contemporary ones, for example Silvia el Helo’s Cure . After 1492 when the Arabs, Muslims and Jews were expelled from Andalusia, you get a silencing of women’s writing on the subject. There was a moratorium of almost 500 years when women stopped writing on love and lust. Some poems exist, which are quite religious, but they are muted, subdued. One of the star poets in Udhari’s collection is Ulayya bint al-Mahdi, the sister of Harun al-Rashid, of One Thousand and One Nights fame. She wrote poems to men, to women, and even apparently a court eunuch. According to scholars, there was greater fluidity regarding sexuality at the time, modern categorisations came in force much later."