Insights: Accepting Fate is Painful

Abu Dhu’ayb’s ayniyyah was an orally transmitted piece of literature, and it survived long enough for it to now be analyzed digitally. The subtlety of the poet’s depression, fatalism, and pain immediately render the reader an investigator: what does Abu Dhu’ayb want us to understand from his lines on hunting and chivalric duels? Surely, although it was orally transmitted and only later transcribed, Abu Dhu’ayb’s work does not lose any structural mastery: it was very deliberately organized the way it was. First, he expresses grief over losing his five sons–his beloved sources of pride–and how he was ashamed as a father for being unable to either seek a cure for their illness nor fight off a plague as if it was personified. He then describes allegories of a prey animal enjoying the simple pleasures of life until it is easily devoured by a predator, and then an oryx that nearly makes an escape from a hunt but then is shot down just before it breaks free, and finally two knights who duel each other to defend their honour but who both die due to mutually inflicted wounds. Together, this reflects Abu Dhu’ayb’s life as he perceived it in his probable emotional suffering. Just as the prey animal enjoyed the simple pleasures of life, unworried of any predators lurking around to harm them, Abu Dhu’ayb can be understood to have migrated to Egypt with his family to settle their roots – to provide his sons with ample opportunity to succeed and enjoy the simple pleasures of fertile land. Just as the oryx made an honest and nearly successful escape from its hunters, Abu Dhu’ayb tried every amulet, every cure, every way of trying to prevent death from overtaking his sons – yet, he fails at the end. His sons succumb to the plague. Just as the two Bedouin knights were formidably skilled, armed, and protected with armour and yet both of them lost and died, Abu Dhu’ayb expresses a reality of life: the outcome of deliberately planned actions can turn wholly undesirable – in colloquial terms, things rarely go as planned. This poem is certainly not an autobiography, but it tells the story of a man who had exhausted every manner of shaping his future, but acquired every reason to believe that he lived in a world in which divinely determined fate always reigned supreme.