The Semiotics of the Arab Hero

Even pre-Islamic Arabic poetry has been pressed into service in the war of ideas within the Arab and Islamic worlds. Specifically the ideas of what constitutes a hero feed into ideas of what kinds of Islamic rule are feasible and how heroes may go about bringing them about. The Coptic academic Amin Bonnah wrote his PhD thesis in this area in 1994.

The thesis concerns the forward-looking nature of the hero-seeking poetry, its complexity and its co-option in the poetry of Muhammad’s son-in-law, ‘Ali, but in the reverse direction. By 'Ali's time the 'ultimate' Arab hero had already been formally discovered (Muhammad). The question for the Arab world, then, was whether to adopt this Salafi backward-looking approach that asserts the perfect model is to be sought in the past or return to earlier, perhaps more imaginative models. Whether Usama Bin Laden may be a desired present or future hero or can be compared with Muhammad would therefore be for Bonnah a live issue in Arab semiotics.

Bonnah sees this area of the hero in Arabic poetry as unreasonably neglected or rejected by both Western and Arab/Islamic scholarship. He sees Arab heroes (although God-guided) as more humanistic semiotically than either Homeric heroes that are heroic by virtue of asking the Gods for assistance or Aristotelian-defined tragically flawed heroes.

Bonnah first considers the very philology of the Arab word for hero (as the tri-literal Semitic language system of Arabic is quite meaningful and can be useful for philology). The word’s three meaningful letters (ب, ط and ل – roughly b, t and l) are interestingly related in Arabic etymologically to deceit and demands. This possibly hints at an ancient ideal of the Arab hero: a strong (demanding) and tricky person (like a guerrilla fighter or Usama bin Laden).

Bonnah and others have considered whether the frankly religious epic poetry of the early Greeks such as the Iliad or Odyssey would have been useful in the more humanist Arabic context and decided no as religion was too secondary in at least the ancient Arabic context to the heroic ideal.

Bonnah uses a few examples from Arabic literature (in chronological order, I believe) to illustrate his thesis.

The first is ‘Antara Ibn Shadad who loved ‘Abla. The love was unjustly proscribed and hence the hero exhibited his heroism in the just fight for his right to love freely.

The next, ‘Amru, fought corruption and sought to know the will of some pre-Islamic god. From these two, then, we can see social, religious and political interests of heroes are all permissible and indeed commendable but fighting is their vital corollary.

The third hero considered is Zohayr, who had a preference for an abstemious form of living. This too gives a clue to the form of Spartan Puritanism favoured in the Arab hero (again, seemingly epitomised in Usama Bin Laden).

The final poet is Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin, ‘Ali, as mentioned above. Naturally, Muhammad, himself, had all of the qualities of the preceding heroes and was in fact the model of a modern Arab hero, as it were, and his heroism was, for the first time (so Bonnah asserts), a fait accompli.

Bonnah suggests that the qualities of a hero cannot therefore now be legitimately revised or updated, in the Arab mind. This restriction may, in fact, be limited to at least the Arab Muslim mind and Bonnah’s sample may be quite limited in a number of ways (only one poet from the Islamic era is even considered, for example). One other potential for development, too, may be in the model of the Arab heroine (not discussed seriously by Bonnah). Nor did Bonnah consider any of the works of the female storytellers in his thesis.