Antarah ibn Shaddad
28 Feb, 2019
890 Other literatures
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.
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)