Thread by @PaulMMCooper

One of the most interesting places my ruins research has taken me is into the world of ancient Arabic poetry.

So here's the story of how a tiny fragment from the opening of ancient poems became one of the most enduring poetic tropes in history: that of "stopping by the ruins"

In Arabic literature, nothing is more redolent of loss & longing than the motif of wuquf 'ala al-atlal (الوقوف على الأطلال), stopping or standing by the ruins.

This beautiful motif originates in the pre-Islamic period, & occurs continuously in the history of Arabic poetry.

The motif sees a wandering Bedouin come across the ruin (atlal) of a campsite & become lost in memory.

The word wuquf / وقوف holds the double meaning of standing & stopping, so this portion of the poem usually forms a moment of stillness & meditation, outside of time.

The atlal or ruins motif rarely took up much of the main body of the poem: it was always an aside in the prelude, or nasib, of the longer poem, setting the scene & framing the memories of lost love.

Poets sometimes returned to it at the end, but not always.

The trope appears in the Mu‘allaqāt (“Suspended Odes” or “Hanging Poems”), a famous collection of poems by 7 great masters, thought to have once hung from the Kaaba in Mecca.

Among the most famous of these poems is the one contributed by the 6th century pre-Islamic poet Tarafa.

Tarafa’s Mu’allaqa poem opens with ruins appearing on the horizon like an apparition.

At the ruins of the campsite, the poet remembers a lost love that he once met there. He sees her traces everywhere in the overgrown debris.

Here landscape & memory become one: the ruin becomes a repository for memories that can be accessed by spending a moment of stillness there

This is the essence of the atlal trope: seeing in the remains a reminder of a longed-for past.

For Tarafa, the ruins around him are reminders of the cruelty of fate & the indiscriminate passing of time. They speak of life’s injustice & the inevitability of loss.

You can read a full English translation of Tarafa’s Mu’allaqa here:

scholarship.haverford.edu/cgi/viewconten…

It’s thought that the originator of the motif of the campsite ruin, the atlal, was Imru’ al-Qais, the last king of the kingdom of Kindah, & often hailed as the father of Arabic poetry.

Like Tarafa, al-Qais describes a character stopping for a time at the ruins of a campsite, & remembering his beloved in the ruins.

He opens by describing the desolate place, broken and overgrown by nature.

After reminiscing about his memories of his beloved, al-Qais’ character is brought back to the present by a flash of lightning:

You can hear the Mu’allaqa of Imru’ al-Qais read in full in the original Arabic here:

And read it in English here: sacred-texts.com/isl/hanged/han…

The sentimentality toward ruins shown by Tarafa & other pre-Islamic poets was so pronounced & widespread that it caused later Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās (762 – 813 CE) to remark bitterly,

While Arabic literature has no foundation epic like the Odyssey or the Mahabharata, these ancient qasida (odes) form their greatest literary inheritance.

Just as European poets have rewritten & adapted epics like the Odyssey, so have modern Arabic poets returned to these odes.

Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish is one of the most significant inheritors of the atlal tradition.

His poem “Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh” is only one example (trans. @sinanantoon) of the motif finding new life: jadaliyya.com/Details/23789/…

Darwish’s poem relates his return to the village of al-Birweh, where he was born.

In 1948, when Darwish was 7, the village was depopulated of its Palestinian inhabitants after it was captured by Israeli forces.

The lines of Darwish’s poem mimic the Mu’allaqat of Tarafa & al-Qais.

In the ruins of his former village, the memories of his childhood resurface, just as the medieval poets saw memories of their lost loves.

Another poem by Darwish describes “how place splits and wears the past”, one of the most beautiful description of the condition of ruins I have ever heard.

The modernisation of the atlal trope hasn’t stopped at poetry, but expanded into film, music & prose. Here legendary Egyptian singer Oum Khaltoum sings

“It was a citadel of my imagination that has collapsed,
Pour me a drink and let us drink of its ruins”

The trope of the atlal has also found a new life in Arabic cinema.

In 2010, the award-winning Iraqi film Son of Babylon (ابن بابل) by director Mohamed al-Daradji made heavy use of the motif, having characters wander through Iraq’s ancient ruins & its modern ones alike.

However, rather than seeing memories held by the ruins, al-Daradji’s characters find only blankness & emptiness in the ruins, pointing to the meaningless loss of war.

The film tells the story of a young boy, Ahmed, who is trying to find his father after the 2003 US invasion.

Like Lebanese filmmakers before him, al-Daradji also makes use of the ruins of war & civil strife to bring the atlal trope into a new context, subverting & problematising it for a modern audience.

In their search to find Ahmed’s father Ibrahim, the characters perform a reversal of the ancient atlal trope.

They search the ruins, trying to find any trace of him. But instead of finding bittersweet memories there, they find only absence & pain, a loss without redemption.

Arab novelists have also turned to the atlal trope to address the losses of war.

To take just one example, in his novel The Corpse Washer (وحـدهـا شـجـرة الـرمّـان), Iraqi author Sinan Antoon has a character wander through the ruin of the Baghdad National Library, & remember.

In Antoon’s novel, we can no longer wander separate through the ruins - we become the ruins.

The ruins of Baghdad are human & bodily, “like a corpse”.

The bodies & souls of the people, conversely are like ruins: “the wreckage I’d been carrying inside me mount[ed] even higher”.

The trope’s migration to prose has been one of its most significant developments.

Hilary Kilpatrick describes how one Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani, turns the motif on its head in his 1969 novel 'Ai'd ila Haifa (Return to Haifa).

The atlal today is more than just a brief passage in the opening of a poem.

From the earliest days of the Bedouin poets to the battlefields of modern neo-imperialist wars, it has expanded to become a whole way of reacting to loss & memory.

So that’s the story of how a small digression in the openings of ancient Arabic poems became one of the most enduring poetic tropes in history.

If there are any ruins in your area, go stop by them today & see what memories they bring up! But don't lose yourself in grief...

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this & you're interested in learning more about some of my research into ruins, I've collected some bits & pieces in this thread-of-threads. Happy reading!

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