Rather, he is a mad magician, whose poetry is not without magic and whose courage is not without madness.
He took travel as his homeland and poetry as his lineage. No one wrote good poetry without being called the Mutanabbi of his time, and his name was immortalized in history to become an icon of poetry and poets.
A 600-page novel that narrates the life of Al-Mutanabbi. In it, you read about history, politics, and literature, and experience the lives of kings and rulers. The scent of the desert is fragrant between its letters and events, and you struggle between its pages with the horrors of heat, hunger, thirst, captivity, and loneliness.
Each chapter is a visual painting, and every poem mentioned by the author gives the novel magic. Deep and clear.
The novel begins with Al-Mutanabbi’s birth without a mother, and follows the events of his childhood and upbringing with a narrative and plot that captivates the reader and leaves him in the prison of the pages, and even swears to him not to leave it before completing it.
It takes us on a complete journey, as we visit the desert, feel its heat and the blazing sun, and experience its dangers until we almost shake the sand from our eyes and wander with our eyes searching with Al-Mutanabbi for what will feed and water us, and we saddle our horses when Al-Mutanabbi sets off on his horse, and we feel our feet when he crosses the desert alone, walking barefoot.
We find ourselves between the lines, immersed in the details of his life, carrying the sword with him at times, and reciting and composing poetry at other times, cursing kings at times, and traveling with him on his travels at other times.
We live between its pages, between Iraq, the Levant, Antioch, and Egypt, and weep with its events, a tear for Al-Mutanabbi and the harshness of his life, and a tear for the state of the country.
A novel of eloquent expressions and eloquent phrases, overflowing with poetic verses and stories that were the reason for its production, transporting us to the atmosphere of the desert and the courts of kings, depicting the life of Al-Mutanabbi in all its stages, and conveying to the reader a vivid picture of his solitude and isolation, so that he wishes that he had kept him company in his solitude, fed him when he was hungry, defended him from the poets, and traveled with him wherever he traveled, roaming the desert, not caring about any danger he encountered.
As a reader, I felt that Al-Mutanabbi before Aleppo and Khawla was not like the one after them.
Love dressed him in the garment of tranquility, stripped him of his ferocity, and gave him longing for a submissiveness that he would never have accepted before. Love gradually made him lose interest in the world and its desires until he lived his last years in boredom with life and everything in it when life fell short of his goal and his desire.
The novel ends with the physical death of Al-Mutanabbi, as he is still alive in poetry collections and on the tongues of poets.
Although Al-Mutanabbi did not leave behind an heir, every poet, knight, and orator has a share of his literary legacy.
There is no novelist more deserving of immortalizing the career of this knight poet than Al-Atoum, who breathes eloquence and fluency.
If the events of the manuscript on which the novel was based are true, then by God it is worthy of all this adoration and reverence.
Written by Batoul Watfa
Written by Batoul Watfa
