The Islam of Ka’b ibn Zouhayr and the ode "Bant Sou’ada"

Ka’b ibn Zouhayr ibn Abi Soulayma was the son of the poet Zouhayr, author of one of the seven suspended odes: a poet son of a poet. When the Messenger of Allah returned from his turning back from Ta’if, Boujayr ibn Zouhayr wrote to his brother Ka’b, by their father, informing him that the Messenger of Allah had killed in Mecca men who used to satirize and harm him, and that of the remaining poets of Quraysh, ibn az-Ziba’ra and Houhayra ibn Abi Wahb had fled in every direction. If you have need of your soul, then hasten to the Messenger of Allah: for he never kills anyone who comes to him repentant; and if you do not, then flee to your safety from the land. Ka’b had said of Boujayr: Shall I not convey from me to Boujayr a message? Woe to you for what you said, and woe to you, have you any? Make plain to us, if you are not the doer: upon what else have you fallen? Upon a character which for a day a father loved nothing of, nor you, and your father loved nothing of you. If you do not, I shall not be sorry, nor say:

if you stumble, may your curse follow you! The Bountiful gave you to drink a brimming cup: may the Bountiful destroy you by it, and saddle you! Ibn Hicham relates the poem under other forms. He sent it to Boujayr, and when it reached him Boujayr disliked concealing it from the Messenger of Allah, and recited it to him. When he heard: The Bountiful gave you to drink a brimming cup, the Messenger of Allah said: "He spoke truly: he is indeed a liar: I am the Bountiful!" And at: Upon a character which a father and mother loved nothing of: "Indeed, his father and mother loved nothing of it!" Then Boujayr wrote to Ka’b: Shall one convey to Ka’b: have you need of that whereof you blame wrongly, and it is more binding? In Allah, not in al-’Uzza nor al-Lat alone: that you be saved when salvation comes, and safe; upon a day when none is saved, and none delivers men but the pure of heart, submissive. So embrace the religion of Zouhayr, for his is nothing; and the religion of Abou Soulayma is forbidden to me!

When the letter reached Ka’b the earth straitened him; he feared for his life, and whoever was present of his enemies unsettled him, saying: he is a dead man! Finding no escape, he composed his ode in which he praises the Messenger of Allah, mentioning therein his fear and the unsettling of his enemies, then went out until he came to Medina and lodged with a man of Jouhayna whom he knew, as was related to me, who brought him at dawn to the Messenger of Allah at the dawn prayer. He prayed with the Messenger of Allah, then his host pointed him out to him, saying: this is the Messenger of Allah: rise to him and seek his safety. It is related that he rose to the Messenger of Allah and sat beside him, placing his hand in his hand, the Messenger of Allah not knowing him, and said: O Messenger of Allah, Ka’b ibn Zouhayr has come seeking your safe-conduct, repentant, a Muslim: will you accept him if I bring him to you?

The Messenger of Allah said: "Yes." He said: then I, O Messenger of Allah, am Ka’b ibn Zouhayr! A man of the Ansar leapt upon him and said: O Messenger of Allah, let me at this enemy of Allah, that I strike his neck! The Messenger of Allah said: "Leave him be: he has come repentant, breaking with his past."

Ka’b grew angry at that clan of the Ansar for what their man had done, for no one of the emigrants had spoken but good: wherefore he said in the ode he composed when he came to the Messenger of Allah: Sou’ada has departed:

my heart today is stricken, a sleepless man following her traces, unaverted; and Sou’ada, on the morning of parting, when she appeared, was but a sunbeam, the eye refined with kohl, lighting the border of the dark when she smiles, like the lamp of a hermitage in a meadow drenched with pure rain on a summer morning; the desert winds carry the drifting sand from her tresses, and the excess of a morning shower waters her; O friend, were she but true to her promise, or were counsel accepted! But she is a friend whose blood has known no constancy: sorrow, and biting, and betrayal, and change; she does not remain in one state, as the ghoul shifts colours in her robes; nor does she keep the pledge she claimed, but as water is held in the talons of ravens; let not her favours and promises deceive you:

hopes and dreams are but delusion; her trysts are like those of Ourqoub, and her trysts are but fables; I hope and expect that she will hasten, but never will they hasten, for time does not speed them; Sou’ada dwells in a land none reaches but the noble, slow, worn camels; none reaches her but a fat, heavy-paced she-camel, blackened beyond telling, anonymous, throwing her legs at the glance of an exhausted charger, when the banners of battle blaze; huge, her mail riveted, her stride shackled, preferred in beauty to the daughters of the stallion; the sister of al-Harf, their father, of the tribe of Mouhajjan, her uncle Qawda’ Chimlil; the mites walk upon her, then she lets them slip: butter and skins of milk; the mare launched in the race, stripped of her twins, her flanks parted from her legs; bearing the harness between her two flanks to the seeing eye:

manifest freedom, and upon the cheeks a smoothing; as if all that escaped her eyes and her slaughter, from her muzzle and her jaws, was scarified; she passes like a palm of Egypt well-formed, planted in soil the pitfalls have not corrupted; she broods over the giddy eggs whose fall shakes the earth; the black ewes leave the pebbles as a flock, without swelling of the head of the mountain; a day the great lizard lurks in it, as if its morning, with the sun, were stretched; and she says to the riders driving her, as the locusts run over the pebbles: come on! As the arms of a fair arm, sweating, wrapped in silver bracelets; or the two hands of a bereaved suppliant, when she rose and answered her, a stone-thrower measuring; a wailing one, soft as the two she-wolves, who, when she mourned her firstborn, had no comforter; she draws butter with her palms, her bodice split, showing her collarbones; the she-wolves run at her two sides, and they say: you, O son of Abou Soulayma, will be slain! And every friend I hoped in says: busy me not, for I am taken with you.

I said: let my road be, you have no father: all the Merciful decrees is done! Every son of a female, however long his safety, one day upon a humped plank is carried! I was told the Messenger of Allah threatens me: but forgiveness is hoped from the Messenger of Allah! Patience: may He guide you who gave you in surplus the Quran, wherein are exhortations and expounding!

Take me not by the words of the whisperers:

I have not sinned, though the slanders multiply! I shall make a stand were the elephant to see and hear: dread trembles with anguish did the Messenger of Allah not grant increase; until I place my right hand, unopposed, in the palm of a man of white teeth, whose word is spoken; and his diversion is more fearful to me when I address him, and it is said: you are accused and questioned! He is a fierce lion, his lair in the belly of Aththar, in whose girth the winds are outstripped; he goes forth and devours two lions, their life of men, flesh spared to the carrion-birds; when he besieges a horn he may not leave it but worn out; of him the wild asses stay in flight, and the targets walk not in his valleys; and in his valley ever remains a man of trust, in a striped cloak eaten through. The Messenger is a light whereby one is enlightened, an Indian sword of God, unsheathed; in a band of Quraysh, when they accepted Islam, their words were said in the belly of Mecca: turn away!

They turned, and no recantation nor unveiling at the meeting, nor leaning aside; they walk the walk of white camels, kept by a blow when the lances are planted; helmeted heroes, their garments of the weaving of Dawoud, in the fray, tunics; white, flawless, ring-perforated, like the rings of a chiselled boulder, interlaced; they are not archers when their spears reach a people, nor swordsmen when they strike; the thrust falls but on their napes, and from the pools of death they do not shrink.

Thus Mohamed ibn Ishaq relates this ode, without chain; the Bayhaqi relates it in the proofs of prophethood with a connected chain: al-Hajjaj ibn dhou ar-Ruqayba, from his father, from his grandfather, who said: Ka’b and Boujayr, sons of Zouhayr, went out until they came to Abraq al-’Azzaf. Boujayr said to Ka’b: stay in this place until I go to this man, meaning the Messenger of Allah, that I hear what he says. Ka’b stayed and Boujayr went out and came to the Messenger of Allah, who offered him Islam, and he accepted. That reached Ka’b, who said: Shall I not convey from me to Boujayr a message? Upon what else have you fallen? Upon a character which a father and mother loved nothing of! The Bountiful gave you to drink a brimming cup: may the Bountiful destroy you by it, and saddle you! When the verses reached the Messenger of Allah he declared his blood lawful, and said:

"Whoever meets Ka’b, let him kill him!" Boujayr wrote that to his brother, mentioning that the Messenger of Allah had declared his blood lawful, saying: salvation! I see not that you will escape. Then he wrote to him after that: know that never does anyone come to the Messenger of Allah bearing witness that there is no deity but Allah and that Mohamed is the Messenger of Allah, but that he accepts it of him and cancels what was before it. When my letter comes to you, accept Islam and come. Ka’b accepted Islam and composed his ode in which he praises the Messenger of Allah; then he came until he tethered his mount at the door of the mosque of the Messenger of Allah, entered the mosque while the Messenger of Allah was with his companions like a table among the people, ringed about with them circle upon circle, turning to these a while and speaking to them, and to those a while and speaking to them.

Ka’b said: I tethered my mount at the door of the mosque, entered it, knew the Messenger of Allah by description, stepped over until I sat beside him, accepted Islam and said: I bear witness that there is no deity but Allah, and that you are Mohamed, the Messenger of Allah: the safe-conduct, O Messenger of Allah! He said: "And who are you?" I said: Ka’b ibn Zouhayr. He said: "He who says: Sou’ada has departed?"

Then the Messenger of Allah turned to Abou Bakr and said: "How did he say it, O Abou Bakr?" Abou Bakr recited: The Bountiful gave you to drink a brimming cup: may the Bountiful destroy you by it, and saddle you! Ka’b said: O Messenger of Allah, I did not say so. He said: "How did you say it?"

He said: I said: The Bountiful has given you to drink a brimming cup: may the Bountiful destroy you by it, and saddle you! The Messenger of Allah said: "Bountiful, by Allah!" Then he recited the whole ode to him to its end, and it is the ode related before. We have noted already the divergence of the recitations of Ibn Ishaq and the Bayhaqi in the variants.

Abou Omar Ibn Abd al-Barr relates in al-Isti’ab that when Ka’b reached: The Messenger is a light whereby one is enlightened; I was told the Messenger of Allah threatens me: but forgiveness is hoped from the Messenger of Allah, the Messenger of Allah signalled to those with him to listen: Moussa ibn Oqba mentioned that before him in his campaigns.

It comes in some narrations that the Messenger of Allah gave him his cloak when he recited the ode to him: ach-Charsari versified that in some of his panegyrics; and the hafiz Abou l-Hasan Ibn al-Athir mentions it in al-Ghabe, saying: it is the cloak that was with the caliphs. We say: this is a thing very famous, but I have not seen it in any of these famous books with a chain I would approve: Allah is most knowing. It is also related that the Messenger of Allah said to him when he said: Sou’ada has departed: "And who is Sou’ada?" He said: my wife, O Messenger of Allah.

He said: "She has not departed." But that is not authentic, and one imagined thereby that with his Islam his wife would leave him; the apparent is that he meant the sensible departure, not the juridical. And Allah Most High is most knowing. Asim ibn Omar ibn Qatada says that when Ka’b said in his ode: when the lances are planted, meaning thereby us, the assembly of the Ansar, for what our master had done to him, and having singled out the emigrants of Quraysh for praise, the Ansar were angry with him: so after his conversion he praised the Ansar, mentioning their standing with the Messenger of Allah and their place of honour:

Whoso delights in the nobility of life, let him dwell ever in a branch of the good of the Ansar; They inherited greatness, descendant upon descendant: the best are the sons of the best; Those who force victory by arms like the filaments of India, not short; Those who watch with eyes bloodshot, like embers never veiled of sight; Those who sell their souls to their Prophet for death, on the day of grappling and return; Those who lead the people from their religions by the burnoose and the keen lances; They purify, seeing it a rite for them, with the blood of those they mixed with of the unbelievers; They charged as charged in the belly of Khafiyya the thick-necked of the ravening lions; And when you are given leave to forbid them, you wake at the dens of the caves. Ibn Hicham relates that it is said the Messenger of Allah said to him when he recited: Sou’ada has departed: "Would you had not mentioned the Ansar in good, for they are worthy of that!" So Ka’b said these verses, in an ode of his.

Ali ibn Zayd ibn Jou’dan relates that Ka’b ibn Zouhayr recited to the Messenger of Allah in the mosque: Sou’ada has departed: my heart today is stricken: the Bayhaqi relates it by his chain mentioned, and it is without chronological link.

Abou Omar Ibn Abd al-Barr says in al-Isti’ab, after relating part of the biography of Ka’b ibn Zouhayr: Ka’b ibn Zouhayr was an excellent poet, prolific, foremost in his class, he and his brother Boujayr, Ka’b the more poetic of the two, and their father Zouhayr above them both. Of what is admired of his poetry: Were I to wonder at aught, I would wonder at the striving of the youth whose destiny is hidden; The youth strives toward matters he does not attain: the soul is one, and the care dispersed; Man, so long as he lives, has hope prolonged: the eye ceases not until the trace ceases. Ibn Abd al-Barr relates many verses of his, too long to mention, without dating his death; nor did Abou l-Hasan Ibn al-Athir date it in al-Ghabe, but he relates that his father died a year before the mission. And Allah is most knowing.