SOAS Research Online

Abstract

al-Khansaʾ was a remarkable poet of seventh-century Arabia whose life and career spanned the Jahiliyya (or pre-Islamic era) and the coming of Islam, making her what is termed a mukhadrama. al-Khansaʾ’s collected poetry, or diwan, circulated widely in the medieval period and spawned numerous commentaries. Like many other female poets, she specialized in funereal elegy (rithaʾ) or lamentation of the dead. Most of her poetry mourns and memorializes her brother, Sakhr, and, to a lesser extent, her brother, Muʿawiya, both of whom were warriors who predeceased her. She hailed from the tribe of Sulaym, a prominent people of the Hijaz. Her real name was Tumadir Bint ʿAmr; her sobriquet “al-Khansaʾ” refers to an upturned nose and is an epithet for the gazelle, often seen as a symbol for a beautiful woman. Not much is known for certain about Tumadir Bint ʿAmr’s life, and indeed, as is the case with other Arabic poets of her day, whose texts and reported antics were transmitted orally for centuries before they were recorded in writing, her biography is inextricably bound up in folklore.