Abu Talib’s Poetry
ـ A Literary Study ـ
Hanaa’ Abbas E’laywy Kashkool
Summary
One of the reasons of studying Abu Talib’s poetry is that the literary writers did no pay his poetry the attention and the literary study it deserved, that we did not find a specific literary book to give an honest image for the art of this poet, and the books did not give a real image for the Islamic poetry in the mission era that accompanied the public declaring of the Islamic call in Quraysh and notifying the tribe of the Prophet ( prayer and peace be upon him and his pure and honorable household ), the era that lasted for ten years through which Abu Talib accompanied his nephew as a supporter, protector, sponsor and defender against the harm of Quraysh’s polytheist where this was considered one of the most sacred era for the Moslems because it represents the time of revelation and diffusing the Islamic call, and it seems that literature did not pay attention to studying the literary phenomena in the mission era because it represents a transitional period from the Pre ـIslamic period’s claws to the lights of Islam, and it is known that the literary phenomena did not develop directly through the transitional period, and there are few poets had competed in a real poetic battle, they looked at call as it could be extinguished, so that this era did not witness any clear literary movement, but it had the roots of the new Islamic literary phenomena, especially in the poetry of Abu Talib whose poetry represent the foundation of the literary phenomena in the Islamic literature, and an important stage of that period, that the research limits reach close time of the Prophet’s Hegira to Al ـMadina. Studying the poetry of Abu Talib includes documentary and studying it on two levels : subject and art.
The most important results of the research can be summarized in :
The poet Abu Talib is one of the poets who lived through paganism and Islam, and his poems in the Pre-Islamic period were few and were not compared with poems in the Islamic period due to stabilized life he lived. People of Mecca are just and did not of wars, and he did not have poetic motives that motivate his emotions, but the lights of Islam enlightened Mecca with a spiritual coup opened the way for Abu Talib to emerge within the new condition of the Islamic call which Quraysh had faced, so it provided him with a poetic ability to diffuse the Islamic call as a defender of the new religion and the Prophet, so most of his poetry were invested to defend his nephew.
The large quality of Abu Talib, his multi-purposes, the good quality of his work and the rich imagery were of distinguished characteristics of his poetry that attract the admiration of Ibn Salam and the men who were interested in literature such as Ibn Katheer, Al-Qastalany and others.
The new Islamic phenomena of poetry had been rooted in the poetry of Abu Talib before the other poets of the great Prophet such as Hassan bin Thabet, Ka’eb bin Malik and Abdullah bin Rawaha, due to be a contemporary of him during the mission time before the poetic battles between the Islamic poets in Madina and the polytheists in Mecca.
The Islamic poems of Abu Talib represented the spirit and events of Islam due to his continuous interaction with the new Islamic status and the psychological, social, religious and political data that affected it, so his different emotion had formed his loyalty to the monotheism message and religious doctrine, and the poems he had wrote described the Qyrayshy opposition of Islam and how to face it, so it formed documents for the historical events and a call for the new religion.
Abu Talib’s poetry was exposed to changes and developments, it includes many Islamic meanings and structures which carried the Arabic poem to a new phase that it can be considered as a literary phenomena to originate a poetic art, whether on the level of subject or the level of art, in composing the complex introductions and subjects that are prepared to originate the Islamic poem structure.
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