BETWEEN THE SA’ALIK AND THE EARLY MUSLIMS: A JAMESONIAN READING ON LAMIYYAT AL-ARAB

This article aims to propose a possible answer to the curious case of the popularity of Lamiyyat al-Arab as a means of education among Muslim leaders during the Umayyad era. The curiosity lies in the fact that Lamiyyat al-Arab is attributed to alShanfara, who was reportedly a su’luk, an outcast in the society who was also known as a brigand poet. To answer the curiosity, I conducted a literature review on who the sa’alik are and how they share some vision with early Muslims. This exploration makes up the first part of the article and the second half is a textual interpretation on Lamiyyat al-Arab guided by the three horizons of interpretation as proposed by Fredric Jameson. Looking at three different horizons of meaning, textual, social, and historical, I strongly hope that the interpretation offer a glimpse into the desire for change that the poem shares with the early Muslims. This constitutes as a possible answer to the curious popularity of the pre-Islamic poem among early Muslims.


INTRODUCTION
Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the second successor of Prophet Muhammad, reportedly enjoined the teaching of Lamiyyat al-Arab by the brigand poet al-Shanfara to their children (al-Malouhi in Furani, 2012). The reason is because the poem is an example of the highest morals. In this poem, however, the reader will find, in addition to the morals, narrations about al-Shanfara's raids and killing. This unresolved question has led to a question on how a society built around regimented ethics as the early Muslim society valued such a strong yet problematic poem as Lamiyyat al-Arab. While it might sound simple at a first glance, the answer to this question will potentially lead to a hint on how the early Muslim society viewed poetry and, particularly, the complexity of poetry.
Before venturing further, however, it is important to acknowledge the fact that many literary critics and commentators both from the Arab world and the West have deemed Lamiyyat al-Arab a forgery. Some of these scholars support their arguments with proofs that could convincingly make a student of Arabic literature believe that the qasida is indeed a forgery, such as by presenting a report a literary master who claimed to have done the forgery or showing the formal discrepancy between Lamiyyat al-Arab and its contemporaries. However, many others, including those who see early Arabic poetry as oral poetry that was transmitted in the manner similar to what was theorized by Milman Parry and Albert B Lord (1954), see that the poem originates in the pre-Islamic era.
As I will present in this section, Lamiyyat al-Arab's distinctiveness owes to its origin among the sa'alik (throughout this article, I use "sa'alik" as the plural form of the term "su'luk"). Suzanne Stetkevych (1993), for example, argues that regardless of the authenticity of Lamiyyat al-Arab as a pre-Islamic poem, we can trace back its attribution to the legendary pre-Islamic figure called al-Shanfara due to its archetypal consistency with the legendary figure. In other words, this poem can as well be a pre-Islamic, although it might not be written by al-Shanfara.
For the purpose of this article, and due to the lack of material evidence on the inauthenticity of Lamiyyat al-Arab, let us suffice to say that Lamiyyat al-Arab is a poem by al-Shanfara from the pre-Islamic period of the Arab Peninsula. Therefore, we can then proceed to the purpose of this article, which is to demonstrate how Lamiyyat al-Arab might share a world view with the early Muslim community and thus indicates the political unconscious of the early Muslim community, a community that was eager to set themselves different from the seventh century Quraish tribe as well as the seventh century Bedouin communities of the Arabian deserts.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The Sa'alik and Their Tendencies
The term sa'alik denotes a social class in the pre-Islamic Arabia that consisted of the poor and the brigands. While the available sources on this term have several major definitions of the sa'alik, they tend not to vary too much. Edward William Lane's An Arabic-English Lexicon defines "su'luk" as both "the needy" and "robber" (1872). In addition to this definition, Lane also includes Urwah ibn al-Ward's attribute as "Urwah al-Sa'alik" as an example; Lane explains that the attribute is caused by Urwah's association with the poor, whom he accepts in his cattle enclosure and feeds them with "the plunder that he took" (1872, p. 1691). In line with Lane's definition that "the poor" and "robbers" seem to intermingle, Alamrani also states that the Sulu'k poet shares the same vision of mingling between life and death, pleasure and grief but Lane lacks the explanation for the correlation between these two seemingly different groups. We can find the correlation between them in A. Arazi's exposition in The Encyclopedia of Islam, where a much longer and more nuanced explanation for the term is available. Arazi carefully defines su'luk from the anthropological and literary perspectives. The sa'alik, according to Arazi, can mean the poor, the robber, or the so-called khali or people disowned by their tribes due to some social misconduct that, unless solved by disowning the tribe, will potentially endanger the tribe. It also makes a connection between all these three groups: the strongest among the poor join the rank of the robbers, which is mainly membered by the khalis who, because of their dissociation with their tribes, does not have any way to find sustenance other than to take plunder.
In terms of their active years, the sa'alik were present in the Arabian desert from the pre-Islamic era to the early Islamic era (Arazi, 1997, p. 863;Borg, 1998, p. 670). The absence of a common law code made it difficult to punish a certain misconduct that involved more than one tribe. Therefore, to avoid accepting the consequence of what a member of a tribe did towards another group, the tribe in question disowned the particular member. The advance and rise to power of Islam also brought with it a common law that included injunctions of what to do towards offenders of certain norms. In addition to that, Karen Armstrong in Islam: A Brief History, which is written from mostly Muslim sources, mentions about former brigands who had the chance to be once again members of the community when the inter-ethnic community of Muslims began.
However, that the sa'alik were disowned by the society and lived outside, the tribal enclave is not to be interpreted that they no longer had any business with the mainstream pre-Islamic tribal society. On the other hand, there was a recurrent, albeit not good, relationship between the su'luk and the tribal society. As mentioned earlier, even the prominent pre-Islamic poets, Urwah ibn al-Ward, gained his name "Urwah al-sa'alik" because he reportedly provided sustenance to the poor (or the su'luk) of his time while he lived within his tribe (Jones 145). In addition to that, poems by sa'alik poets describe their repeated raids of certain tribes, which is nothing but an instance of their maintained, yet harmful relationship with the tribal community. Asaad al-Saleh argues in his term paper, al-Shanfara still maintains a relationship with his tribe in the sense that he keeps returning to the tribe to define himself. Lastly, one of the theories about the oral-transmission of the pre-Islamic poetry holds that there was a group of rawis or "oral transmitter" who memorized poems by poets from outside their tribes, including the poems of the sa'alik poets (Jones, 2011, p. 21). In other words, the sa'alik needed the society to sustain both themselves and, by extension, their art. This tug-of-war between living away from the tribal society and the need return to it will become be the background for my exploration of the relationship between the world view of the sa'alik and the tribesmen in the social horizon of interpretation which will come in the next section.
As for the poetry of the su'luk, Arazi proposes four "parameters" with which we can appreciate it. The first of these parameters is the apologetic parameter, which sees the poetry as the poet's narration of "his life with particular emphasis on his poverty … overcome by virtue of his endurance, his courage and determination" (Arazi, 1997, p. 865 One last thing that we need to keep in mind with regards to the distinct quality of the su'luk poetry will surface when we juxtapose them to the mainstream pre-Islamic qasida. By more mainstream qasida here I am referring to works attributed to other poets and those that talk about the tribal or desert life that moves from one source of water to anotherhere I will mostly count on the Muallaqat poem to represent the mainstram pre-Islamic poetry. Ibn Qutayba, in a frequently quoted passage mentions the traditional sections in the pre-Islamic qasida, namely the atlal (the lamentation over the beloved deserted encampment), nasib (or the erotic prelude), rihla (which contains the narrative about the persona's journeys), and madih (or the panegyric) (Irwin, 2002, p. 5). While to some Western readers are prone to consider the qasida lacking the formal unity due to this manner of division (Irwin, 2002, p. 4), today's critics see that there is an organic unity among these elements. In his extensive structuralist study of the structure and meanings of Muallaqa of Imru al-Qays in, Adnan Haydar states upfront that the qasida is the manifestation of the "vision" of the pre-Islamic Arabia (1977, p. 227); Haydar's structural analysis reveals an organic unity in the poem whose parts at the surface look unrelated to one another or have hitherto always been considered proper names that only function to refer to certain places without any inherent content. Somewhat on the same wavelength about the presence of the organic unity in the qasida is Suzanne Stetkevych's argument that the structure of the pre-Islamic qasida suggests its ritualistic importance due to its similarity with the idea of the rite of passage (1993, p. 6). The seemingly disjointed elements of the pre-Islamic qasida have its intricate way to achieve an organic unity. The su'luk qasida and su'luk poetry in general, nevertheless, do not share the same manner in achieving its organic unity.
The Su'luk poetry has a different structure and contents that are easily distinguishable from the mainstream pre-Islamic qasida. While most pre-Islamic qasidas begin with a section traditionally known as the atlal (deserted encampment) which is then followed by the nasib, a su'luk poetry does not. In his introduction to al-Shanfara, Robert Irwin on the absence of nasib in su'luk poetry by stating that "The sa'alik poets had little time for sentiment and nostalgic yearnings" and that "Shanfara is a poet as thug" (19), a statement which I will prove to be too simplistic. Furthermore, Irwin also comments on the fact that Traditions, or hadith. Goldziher argues that "The hadith will serve not as a document for the history of the infancy of Islam, but rather as a reflection of the tendencies which appeared in the community during the maturer stages of its development" (in Stetkevych, 1993, p. 124 Muhammad and-as an additional information-was said to be an "expert in Arabian poetry" and had converted into Islam after hearing the beauty of the Qur'an recited by his sister (Armstrong, 2007, p. 5).
Whether or not Lamiyat al-Arab was really enjoined by the Prophet or Umar ibn al-Khattab, the oral story that the poem was taught to the Abassid princes also suggests its valuation by the early Muslims. What I consider really important in understanding the relationship between Lamiyyat al-Arab and the early Muslims is the relationship between the su'luk and his tribe or the tribal society in general which is marked with high contrast in terms of social class.
There are at least two types of relationships between the su'luk and the tribal community. Some sa'alik live in the tribal society and depended on the mercy of more fortunate members of the tribe, as Urwah ibn al-Ward describes (with contempt) in his poem Man Huwa al-Su'luk?This particular group of sa'alik lived at the bottom of the food chain and had nothing in the way of dignity. The second group, however, consisted of those who were determined to leave the tribe and to create a community of brigands. This is the group that have decided to live outside the enclave of the tribe and to be brigands such as the one narrated in Lamiyyat al-Arab, that is a person who decides to leave his society instead of living as a poor man who receives the mercy of its richer people. For al-Shanfara in the poem, it is better to live needy instead of receiving help that will eventually only degrade himself. This second group, for whom Lamiyyat al-Arab can be read as a manifesto of some sort, was the one that, I argue, shared with the early Muslim society the common unconscious impulse for freedom from their undesirable roots.
Among the early Muslims, there appeared to be a tendency to create a distance between them and the Bedouin society. In his research on the concurrence of the development of Islam and the rise of the Arab polity, Suliman Bashear begins by discussing what he sees as the demeaning tendency towards the Bedouin, which is known as the a'rab, in the Qur'an as well as in hadith (1997, p. 10). The term a'rab here shares a lot of similarity to the idea of the tribal pre-Islamic mainstream society. Bashear's analysis seems to be built upon Goldziher's view of the worthiness of hadith collection as collection of documents which, as I quoted earlier, "reflects the tendencies which appeared in the [Muslim] community during the maturer stages of its development." This attitude, as Bashear interprets it, highlights the superiority of the umma over the Bedouin's tribal community.
There are at least two ideas that are vital in relation to this concept of the umma, namely the migration and the disappearance of the ethnic sentiment. In many occasions, the term umma is commonly limited to refer to the society of the believers, especially those who migrated with the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca (Bashīr, 1997, p. 14 Muhammad. Bashear finds this in hadiths that state for example the superiority of the members of the Muslim ummah over the a'rab from Mecca even if the former was originally from Persia or Abyssinia. This attitude is apparent even in ritual contexts in which there is a tradition that "mentions bedouins among those who are not allowed to lead in prayer or even to be in the first row [respectable position] during prayer" (Bashīr, 1997, p. 12).
While it is easy to misconstrue these Traditions as the tendencies among the early Muslims to discriminate only the Bedouin, Bashear also presents his finding that the basis of this attitude is the fact that the Bedouins were not Muslims; some hadith also mentions that this attitude can be different as long as the persons in question were believers. In the perspective of the early Muslims, the desert people had "uncouth" characteristics such as unbelief, hypocrisy, and covert sensuality (Bashīr, 1997, p. 13). What we can take from this analysis is that the early Muslims needed to distinguish themselves from who they were not. Their new society was no longer defined along the ethnic lines but along somewhat ideological lines. To do that, a series of attempt to leave the old order and to embrace the newer order was necessary.
As a conclusion to this section, there was a similar pattern in the attitudes of the early Muslims and the sa'alik towards their group of origin. The sa'alik, at least those who were considerably determinant, left their tribes in order to live in the mountains as brigands.
They left their groups and all the things that they considered bad. As for the early Muslims, their migration to Mecca and their tendency to include people of other ethnicities as their member were the basic elements for the formation of the umma, which dismantled the previous tribal mode of living. where the poem has originated and the audience where the poem was held with respect.

The Desire for Change
In this section, I argue that the popularity of the poem among the early Muslims, and its subsequent inclusion into the hadith regardless of its lack of authenticity, is associated with the poem's political unconscious that coincided with the world vision of the early Muslims.

METHOD
Fredric Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious that a literary work, as a cultural artifact created by an individual whose consciousness is shaped by his historical and social context, has what he terms "the political unconscious." This political unconscious is what relates the literary work to its social context and to the desires of its members. Since the creation of a cultural artifact involves conscious process and conscious decision making, such as to create the fictional depiction, any positivistic attempts to interpret a one-on-one signification will fall short. At best, such approach can only be effective to read works that are explicitly allegories. The effective move, thus Jameson argues, is when a critique unearths the political unconscious through the three layers of interpretation which consider what we traditionally understand as the "intrinsic" as well as "extrinsic" factors of a literary work. Eventually, the combination of all these factors will render irrelevant the separation between the intrinsic as well as extrinsic aspects or the form and contents of a cultural artifact. These three horizons are the political, social and historical horizons.
In the political horizon, I read Lamiyyat al-Arab, mostly through an explication du text of some sort. However, as opposed to the common explication du text that interprets a literary expression to come to arrive at hidden meaning behind the expression, my reading, following the example set by Jameson, interprets the literary expression as a symbolic solution to or a wish fulfillment for the contradiction (resolved or unresolved) that is present in the author's world (Jameson 61). In the second or social horizon, I scrutinize Lamiyyat al-Arab for the elements of the poet's ideology, reading the work as an utterance by a member of a certain social category. In other words, I treat Lamiyyat al-Arab as a voice on behalf the social group known as the su'luk. Jameson calls these utterances that reflect a particular ideology "ideologemes." Lastly, in the historical horizon, I analyze Lamiyyat al-Arab as a literary work that carries in it the style or genres of literary works that came before it or that exists outside its social context; to complement that, I will also analyze what each of these elements carries and how these elements interact with each other. The first of these is related to al-Shanfara's decision to leave the tribe due to his grievances against his tribe. These grievances include the tribemen's tendency to make public something that a person considers a secret, the greediness among the member and the demeaning behavior of those who help others in the tribe. In the first section, after telling his tribesmen to leave him, he declares that he has three friends-the wolf, the panther and the hyena-who show the quality of a real folk: In addition to al-Shanfara's boasting that he is still superior to the birds eventhough he does not put much effort, these lines are also pregnant with the good spirit of competition in the company of the wildlife: al-Shanfara would race for the privilege to quench his thirst before others. Al-Shanfara races to get the water before the birds, and when he gets there he enjoys that water. So are the sand-grouse, they take just as much as they need it and "move off quickly with the dawn," as opposed to what he describes about his tribesmen:

DISCUSSION
If hands are stretched out to food, [mine are] not the swiftest of them, for the greediest of the tribe are the swiftest.

That is simply a generous act [on my part], for I am superior to them: and the most superior of men [constantly] has to strive to keep a surplus available. (lines 8 and 9)
This comparison indicates how al-Shanfara views the tribal life where some people have to work hard without really enjoying the fruit of his hard work because there are greedy members of the tribe who will race to enjoy this good before even the most rightful bread winning members. It seems from this part that al-Shanfara has all the reason to leave his tribe.
As a consequence of this defective tribal life, al-Shanfara prefers to stay away and to find his own community, which as he says early on in the poem consists of the wolf, the panther and the hyena (line 5). Of course, these three animals are only a metonymy for the entire wildlife; and he definitely picks the fiercest of all the desert beasts, which actually also include the ibexes and sand-grouse that he also depicts further into the poem. The fact that he finds comfort in these wild animals, which are not at all his kind, is a statement in itself: for a person who is rejected by his own flesh and blood, a society that he can associate with does not have to be of his own kind as long as they could understand him.
Therefore, al-Shanfara finds it necessary to declare upfront: stance. This is once again a proof that the departure from the tribe, despite the difficulties that it carries, includes in it an answer-and a much needed one-to a problem that al-Shanfara is currently having with his tribe.
These three points, i.e. his grudges against his tribe, his desire to preserve dignity and his positive attitude in the face of tribulations, all lead to the view that there is a problem with his tribe and departure from it is the only viable solution to this problem. As for the common moral values that al-Shanfara shares with the Muslim in this poem, these are good explicit teachings that one can pick from the work. However, these morals are not at all uniquely Islamic as they are universal and we can expect to find them in most religions or belief systems that were common in the pre-Islamic era. Let me repeat again here that what I argue to be more related to the Muslim is the political unconscious behind this story, that is, the departure from a tribe to solve the disgraceful condition experienced by the poor or the wrong-doers in the tribal community. This will be even clearer in the succeeding horizons of interpretations.
If on the political horizon we see the poem as a symbolic representation for the poet's grievances about his society and the necessary solution to this problem, the interpretation on the social horizon will take these personal grievances to a higher level, that is, the social class to which the poet belongs. This means that we see Lamiyyat al-Arab as an expression of the entire class of the sa'alik. This is done by focusing on the elements of the poem that are the main building blocks in the consciousness of sa'alik. In practice, I will focus on setting and metaphors as categories instead of analyzing the meaning of individual metaphors and spatial setting. For that purpose, I will focus on the spatial setting and the beasts in this poem. At the end of the discussion in this interpretive horizon, I will conclude that there is an irreparable rupture between the su'luk and the tribal society.
In Lamiyyat al-Arab, the fact that there are two modes of settlement, i.e. tribal settlement and desert/mountain, tells a lot about the social condition that marks the boundaries of the poet's imagination. In short, these places are the only places that the poet could conjure up in his work if he is to be considered a reasonable poet-a pre-Islamic Arab man like al-Shanfara cannot reasonably write a poem set in the urban settlement with narrow alleys such as in Rome. In Lamiyyat al-Arab, the poet could have come up with any place that has its own symbolic relevance; these places, however, still fall within the realm that is not alien to the poet, which also tells about the range of the author's consciousness. The boundaries of the poet's imagination are the encampment and the desert/mountain-for lack of a better term, "desert/mountain" is used to indicate any geographical locations in Lamiyyat al-Arab other than the tribal encampment. Quite expectedly, these two geographical locations are juxtaposed in such a way that reflects their opposing and contradictory nature.
The opposition between the desert/mountain and the encampment in Lamiyyat al-Arab is apparent from the fact that twice as much emphasis is put on the desert/mountain. The poem indeed starts in the encampment, and for the first twenty-five lines it talks about the ills of the tribal life. For the remaining two thirds of the poem, the reader can only see the persona's presentation of the life in the desert/mountain. The only moment al-Shanfara returns to the tribe is when he goes to a tribe and kills the men or does the robbery. A solitary life in the desert/mountain is not the kind that anyone would enjoy living, but for the persona this hardship is worthwhile. In fact, we can see the desert/mountain part of the poem as a justification-through its hardships and freedom-of how big of a struggle al-Shanfara has to make and how freedom he could gain as the consequences of leaving his tribe. In short, the last two thirds of the poem is the answer to the first third.
For the su'luk, both the needy and the robbers, life in the tribal encampment is marked with difficulties with regards to their relationship with the other members of the tribe. In this case, Lamiyyat al-Arab is just an instance of this su'luk experience in the tribal encampment. Another example of this tendency is found in the works of other sa'alik poets such as Ta'abbata Sharra and Urwah ibn al-Ward. For Urwah ibn al-Ward, even though his major poems including Man huwa l-suluk? center around his life as a su'luk in a tribal community, they show the idealization of raids and travels in the mountains. In Man huwa l-suluk? he even justifies the raids that he does as a means that enables him to help the needy in his tribe. He says to Umm Hussan, who has rebuked him for raiding and lying in ambush as if he is not satisfied with the wealth that he already has: The people who resort to you [Umm Hussan]-I mean those related by blood, and all those women, black of wrist, who come to you, prevent my staying at rest. And those who ask for help, whose father is Zayd-I see no way of turning them away. So hold fast to your respect and endure the situation. (lines 11 and 12) Urwah ibn al-Ward in this poem is a person who empathizes with the su'luk, unlike other members of the society. The manifestation of this empathy, however, includes the raid of other tribes. Even though the words "mountain" and "desert" is not present in these two lines, the statement can only refer to the travel across the deserts and mountains to do the robberies and raids. He does all this for the sake of putting his heart at rest. From here, we can say that Urwah ibn al-Ward, unlike Al-Shanfara who has physically left the tribal settlement, is still physically present within the tribe while by ideology is a su'luk who celebrates the life in its primal state. Also, for Urwah ibn al-Ward, these ventures are for the sake of helping the needy who otherwise will not get sustenance.
However lives. What is undeniable is the fact that to sustain his life the su'luk needs to return over and over to tribal settlements to raid them. This is analogous to how al-Shanfara has to resort to idioms from the tribal life if he is to make his depictions of the mountain life achieve their effects. This dynamics hint at the problematic relationship between the poet and its audience, which is central to the discussion on the historical horizon of Lamiyyat al-Arab.
Finally, the political and social interpretations of the poem bring us to the historical reading of Lamiyyat al-Arab. After 1) seeing the departure of the su'luk from his tribe of origin as a symbolization of how one solves a problem with his/her tribe in the pre-Islamic society and 2) exploring how the dynamics of the desert/mountain and tribal settlement in the poem is an instance of the way the su'luk idealizes the desert with the freedom that it offers, we are now ready to see the further implication of Lamiyyat al-Arab as a poem that has in it important aspects of history through its use of two different genres. Since each genre has its own background, which is tightly related to the mode of production in the social context of the work in question, the use of a particular genre brings with it the social context and history of that genre. Therefore, the genre of qasidah and the modification that the poet does to it helps us understand another layer of the political unconscious in Lamiyyat al-Arab. It is through the dynamics of these two styles that we can see the readiness of the community to change to a new mode of living. is a qasida that also has aspects that are common in pre-Islamic qasida; however, the fact that it systematically eschews the fundamental elements that are common in other qasidas renders it a different type of qasidah.
Related to Lamiyyat al-Arab's being a qasida of a different type, the relationship between the poet and his audience is also different. The frequently quoted passage from Ibn Qutayba shows the relationship between the conventional thematic units serves to cater the oral recitation of poem. Ibn Qutayba argues that the poet makes its claim in a qasidah only on the third thematic unit, after he is convinced that he has won his audience's attention by presenting enchanting atlal and nasib (Arberry, 2018, p. 15). If this is correct, then al-Shanfara has discarded two important elements that have been used by his contemporaries or predecessors. He presents, instead, the opposite of the typical atlal scene: al-Shanfara tells his tribesmen to hurry and leave him in the desert/mountain to be with the new folk. Instead of presenting erotic encounter(s) after the opening lines, al-Shanfara tells of how his tribesmen have shown greediness, and given him not the first share of the plunder, although in fact he has been the most industrious member of the tribe. In contrast to J.T. Monroe's theory on the tendency of oral poets to use "a fixed traditional repertory of themes" that he "may alter, lengthen, shorten, transpose, or omit theme in response to the audience's interest" (2017, p. 43), al-Shanfara is unhesitating in presenting his agenda and making his case. He is not concerned about retaining his audience by using literary elements that can "entertain" them. This brings us to the question audienceship of Lamiyyat al-Arab.
Lamiyyat al-Arab is a poem that communicates to its audience in a way different than other qasidas in its era. In fact, Lamiyyat al-Arab addresses not an audience that is gathered together to enjoy a poetry recitation as, according to the traditional accounts, was common in the pre-Islamic era. Neither is it a poem by the spokesperson of a tribe whose duty it is, as an eleventh century Arabic literary critique puts it, to defend the tribe's honor and to protect their reputation (Arberry, 2018, p. 14). Lamiyyat al-Arab is unlike the Muallaqa by Imr al-Qays in which the poet/persona addresses an enchanted audience and presents a poem that evokes his nostalgia with past lovers, erotic ventures and encounter with the ideal woman that has captivated his heart, his rise from the nadir of his life and the return to order of his life and his world. Lamiyyat al-Arab is also different from the qasida of Amr ibn Kulthum which is a defense for his people against the king who has disgraced the honor of his mother and his people-which in turn is an attempt to rouse his morale and that of his people. Lamiyyat al-Arab is a statement made by a poet/persona to his audience.
It is explicitly addressed to the audience who has wronged him collectively. It presents, as I discussed earlier in the interpretation of the social horizon, a manifesto that enumerates his reasons for leaving them and his exposition of the fact that his departure from them has led to freedom and dignity-although it is accompanied by sufferings, which he does not mind to endure.
Lamiyyat al-Arab is more like a statement than a description. According to Adnan Haydar, the paradigmatic distinctions between the pre-Islamic era and the era after the advance of Islam include the way each paradigm sees the connection between the text and the world (Lecture note). The pre-Islamic poet works under the assumption that the truth precedes the text, which translates into the common practice of composing a poem that describes a past happening. The ramification of this paradigm is the relativistic nature of the poetry. As for the Islamic era, there is a basic assumption of that the world comes after the text. In practice, the Islamic poetry or text in general carries a particular message or meaning that in turn will have to be carried out. It works under the positivistic assumption instead of the relativistic assumption. Lamiyyat al-Arab, if we see it as a statement to al-Shanfara's tribe, carries a strong message about or an argument for his tribe that he has decided to leave the tribe for the said reasons and his audience cannot do anything other than understanding the reason and acknowledging that his decision is justifiable.
Therefore, Lamiyyat al-Arab anticipates the coming of the next mode of creative production.

CONCLUSION
Lamiyyat al-Arab shows a major difference from other pre-Islamic qasidas. Not only does it have different building blocks than the ones found in its contemporaries, it is even built upon a totally different assumption. Instead of being a work composed by a person who had no time for sentimentality, which was desired by the audience, Lamiyyat al-Arab is a poem composed by a poet who desired to make a statement because he had been wronged by this audience. On top of that, this poet was at the highest of his emotion to part ways with the society that he could no longer tolerate. This is in line with the spirit of the early Muslims who tended to set the distinction between themselves and the Bedouin society. From this exposition, we can say that al-Shanfara finally found the "other folk" than his own tribe, and this folk came a century or so after him: the early Muslims.