BBC Culture Unpacks 6th-Century Poetry's Tradition of 'stopping by the ruins'

At BBC's Culture section, Paul Cooper discusses poets' tendency in 6th-century literature to observe the remains of previous civilizations. "A bleak landscape stretches out in all directions, broken only by wind-hewed formations of sandstone," Cooper begins. "A lone traveller wanders this hostile, waterless place, looking for shelter. And then on the horizon, a line of ruined walls appears to him like an apparition." From there: 

In the heat haze, they seem to hover above the ground. As he gets closer, memories of this place come back to him. Broken tents and pegs, abandoned fire pits, the signs of a camp long-since abandoned: this is the place where he once met the love of his life, now lost forever. As he wanders the ruins, he sees deer and goats grazing where he once walked with his beloved. He sees the plants of the desert bursting up through the tent where they once lay together. As the memories of this place rush back to him, the horizon flashes with thunder and the rain finally comes to the land.

This scene is a famous one. For centuries, it appeared and reappeared throughout Arabic poetry, and became one of the primary poetic tropes of the Pre-Islamic period and the early days of Islam. It is known as wuquf 'ala al-atlal, or ‘stopping by the ruins’, and today, it has found new life in the work of a generation of artists reacting to the loss of war and state violence across the Middle East.

The motif of the atlal (‘ruins’) originates in the pre-Islamic period, among the so-called Jahili (‘agnostic’ or Pre-Islamic) poets. It’s thought that its originator was the 6th Century poet-king Imru’ al-Qais. Al-Qais was the last king of the kingdom of Kindah, and is often hailed as the father of Arabic poetry. He spent much of his life banished from his kingdom, ostensibly due to his excessive love of poetry, and during his exile he wandered the lands of Arabia and wrote poetry. Legend has it that one of his poems was later written in gold and included in the Mu'allaqat (the Hanging Poems), seven pieces of poetry supposedly suspended from the Kaaba at Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine.

Read on at BBC Culture.