Death and Afterlife in Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry

Pre-Islamic poetry makes for a beautiful read – they are hauntingly beautiful verses full of life, death and everything in between. With early Arabic poetry, you will find works that are full of references to religious concepts which are often mysterious, necessitating an understanding of the poetry's social and religious background as well as substantial guesswork for reasonable explanations.

“To escape this vicious circle, other sources, especially Islamic writings, are useful but differences in time, place, and world view must be considered. Early Muslims concerned with codifying and propagating their faith showed little interest in the pagan Arab religions, and they may have perceived, consciously or not, that an examination of such matters could depreciate the wonder of Muhammad's call and dampen its dramatic effect-a situation similar to the question of the literacy of the Prophet. Nevertheless, a number of Muslim writers such as Ibn al-Kalbi, al- Mas'udi, and ash-Shahrastani gathered substantial information about the pagan Arabs which is invaluable to discovering and decoding poetic allusions to the owl and other archaic and pre-Islamic beliefs and customs”.

Owls are frequent visitors in early Arabic poetry, an important aspect of the society they were used in, especially in regards to poetry about life and death. The owl seems to have been important to early Arab religions but scholars are still uncertain as to what this relationship was. The owl was unquestionably an awe-inspiring creature amongst the Arabs, and it was thought to be one of the followers of the djinn, supernatural and as a rule malicious beings. If an owl landed on a person’s house, it signified that death was near, and poets from this time incorporated them into their poetry.

In early Arabic poetry, death was an important theme. “In sharp contrast to the living who "wandered," the deceased was a muqim (a "sedentary"), and this word in its transitive usage, "that which causes to stay," became an epithet of the grave."1 Descriptions of the tribe's departure from the grave, the home of the deceased, strengthened the idea of sedentary life and death's oppressiveness. This hasty abandonment of the grave by the companions or the clan in order to resume their wanderings became a motif of early Arabic poetry, and it is suggestive of ancient Arab attitudes towards the deceased. The dead were not believed to take part in the activities of the community; life was precarious and often short, and the dead were no longer of consequence, though perhaps remembered”.

In poetry, the owl was formed from the bones of the person who died or carried the deceased’s soul within their bodies. In this sense then, the owl signified the troubled and tormented existence for one who had been disgraced by his friends and relative.

The owl was an important aspect to the pre-Islamic people’s beliefs; when Islam became the dominant religion, the faith had little need of the pagan gods that had been worshipped for thousands of years beforehand. Instead, the owl, and many other symbols of death and the after-life, was remembered through poetry and other forms of art. In pre-Islamic art then, the owl was a classic motif which can lead us into the archaic world, the “unconscious life which surrounds consciousness” and forms the substrata for conceptualization.

Bibliography:

Homerin, T. Emil (1985) Echoes of a Thirsty Owl: Death and Afterlife in Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, The University of Chicago Press.