ABSTRACT
The dominant genre of the classical Arabic ode throughout the Islamic period, indeed down through the neo-classical poets of the first half of the twentieth century, was the panegyrical qaṣīda, that is, the poem of praise to the ruler or patron. * The present paper takes as its working premise the need to establish a poetics appropriate to the evaluation of this body of poetry that was intimately and functionally bound up in courtly politics and ceremonial. The paper focuses on a qaṣīda whose ceremonial function and historical circumstance are explicitly recorded both within the poetic text itself and in the commentaries of the scholiasts upon it, al-Mutanabbī’s panegyric rhymed in the letter dāl presented to the Ḥamdānid prince Sayf al-Dawlah on ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā 342/953. My argument will be that ceremonial and ritual are not accidental or circumstantial, but rather constitute essential and formative elements of the poem; and further, that the ceremonial and ritual aspects that are quite explicitly perceptible in this particular qaṣīda are equally present and formative in other poems in which they may have heretofore eluded our detection. In this respect the present study builds upon my earlier work in Arabic poetry (Stetkevych 1991: part 2; 1993; 1994; 1996; unpub.) as well as work in other fields on ceremony and art (see MacCormack 1981; Cannadine and Price 1987; Connerton 1989; Sanders 1994).
