AN ANCIENT ARABIAN WAR (HARB AL-BASUS) AS REFLECTED IN CLASSICAL ARABIC POETRY

The war of al-Basus is among the most renowned wars of pre-Islamic Arabia. It was said to have been fought between two sister-tribes, and to have lasted allegedly for forty years. Its story, especially since the eighteenth century CE, became rich material that nurtured epic and non-epic literary works. This article examines the influence of that war on early Arabic poetry, based on every reference in a corpus of some 27,000 poems, dating from the pre-Islamic era to the fifteenth century. The verses are identified using the Rhetorical Element Identifier database (REI), a web-based tool developed by Ali Ahmad Hussein et al. It considers how the theme of the war developed and compares the mark it made on the earlier poetry with its significant imprint on modern and pre-modern Arabic literature. The main conclusion is that the influence and/or importance of the war in the classical period differed from that of later times. It seems that in this early period it was no more than a local incident, its importance restricted to those involved, and its influence on the wider Arabian community minimal. This study emphasizes the hypothesis that a significant portion of this war is embedded in Arab folklore rather than Arab history.