Antarah ibn Shaddad

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, works, context and legacy of Antarah (525-608AD), the great poet and warrior. According to legend, he was born a slave; his mother was an Ethiopian slave, his father an elite Arab cavalryman. Antarah won his freedom in battle and loved a woman called Abla who refused him, and they were later celebrated in the saga of Antar and Abla. One of Antarah’s poems was so esteemed in pre-Islamic Arabia that it is believed it was hung up on the wall of the Kaaba in Mecca.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• James Montgomery 4 episodes
  Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge
• Marle Hammond No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS, University of London
• Harry Munt No other episodes
  Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York

Reading list

• An Introduction to Arab Poetics
  Adonis (trans. Catherine Cobham) (Saqi Books, 2003) Google Books →
• Arabic Literary Culture: 500-925
  Michael Cooperson and Shawkat M. Toorawa (eds.) (Thomson Gale, 2005) Google Books →
• Arabs and Empires before Islam
  Greg Fisher (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Antar, A Bedoueen Romance
  Terrick Hamilton (Forgotten Books, 2018) Google Books →
• Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women's Poetry in Context
  Marle Hammond (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• The Thirsty Sword: Sirat 'Antar and the Arabic Popular Epic
  Peter Heath (University of Utah Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam
  Robert Hoyland (Routledge, 2001) Google Books →
• Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature
  Robert Irwin (Overlook Press, 2016) Google Books →
• The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature
  Remke Kruk (I.B.Tauris, 2013) Google Books →
• Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
  Malcolm Lyons (trans.) (Penguin Classics, 2016)
• The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Storytelling
  M. C. Lyons (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Google Books →
• The Adventures of Antar
  H. T. Norris (trans.) (Aris & Phillips, 1980) Google Books →
• The Arabs and Arabia
  F. E. Peters (ed.) (Ashgate, 1999) Google Books →
• War Songs
  Antarah ibn Shaddad (trans. James E. Montgomery with Richard Sieburth) (New York University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam
  Peter Webb (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0002r5v

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002r5v

Auto-category: 892.7 (Arabic poetry)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Almost 15 centuries ago, Antare Ibn Shaddad was fighting on the Arabian Peninsula and composing poems he hoped would long outlast him, and they have.