Oral Poetry and Narratives from Central Arabia, vol. 1, The Poetry of ad-Dindan, A Bedouin Bard in Southern Najd.

• Author: Holes, Clive

This, the first volume to appear of what will be a three-volume work on the oral poetry and narratives of Arabia, is devoted to a study of the poetry of an illiterate Bedouin of the southern Najd, nicknamed al-Dindan, a word meaning "tune" or "song." In recent years, there has been a considerable upsurge of interest in the oral arts of Arabia. One notes, in particular, Saad Sowayan's many recent studies, especially his masterly expose, Nabati Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985); the same author's ethnographic and linguistic study of the central Arabian epic narrative (Wiesbaden, 1992); and several article- and book-length studies by Bruce Ingham on the same genres as practiced by the Al-Dhafir tribe of northern Arabia.

Undoubtedly, the main reason for this renewed interest is the imminent demise of traditional Arabian oral culture of all kinds under the relentless onslaught of modernization. And although many governments in the peninsula have, rather late in the day, woken up to this fact and begun to sponsor efforts to preserve what remains, there is still a certain ambivalence - even suspicion - toward it. This uneasiness has to do with the fact that Arabian oral poetry and narrative hark back to a time before the foundation of the modern state, and are full of sentiments which, to the timorous officialdom of today, smack of social and even political subversion. This is very clearly brought out on pp. 71-80 of the present work, in which the author compares the version of al-Dindan's poems which he recorded directly from the poet's lips with the purportedly "canonical' versions which have been edited and printed locally. In the published versions, potentially sensitive allusions to historical tribal conflicts have been excised, religious language which might offend the official orthodoxy of modern Saudi Arabia has been sanitized to conform to prevailing "politically correct" models of religious rhetoric, and for the few ever-so oblique references to love and sex there has been substituted a twee and conventionalized doggerel, apparently of the editor's own composition. In other cases, a more "literate" phraseology has been substituted for the "Bedouin" vocabulary of the original, which on occasion - whether wittingly or not - has subverted the meaning. As a whole, the published versions of al-Dindan's poems offered to the Arab reader are smooth, emasculated travesties of the vigorous, larger-than-life, sometimes rough-hewn originals...