In Dr. Abdullah Al-Ghadhami’s book (The Dressed and Dressed One... From the Papers of Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi), recently published in one hundred and eighty-four pages of medium size by the Arab Cultural Center, there are important insights and pauses that open the horizon towards the systematic Al-Mutanabbi, not the creative one that people agreed upon.

Al-Ghadhami described Al-Mutanabbi by saying: “He is the one who wears wisdom and is clothed in order. He lived with a brave mind but with a fearful conscience, or a wise mind and a conscience affected by awe!”.

Al-Ghadhami initially acknowledged that Al-Mutanabbi had a hold on his memory, so he appeared in his writings in a way that amazed him, and his occupation of a space in his writings was neither planned nor intentional!

Al-Mutanabbi, about whom Al-Ghadhami also said that he is “a philosopher if he is free from his subjectivity, and a systematic person if he is subjective.”.

Preoccupation with cultural criticism

Dr. Abdullah Al-Ghadhami’s preoccupation with cultural criticism and his complete disregard for literary criticism in Al-Mutanabbi’s poetry prompted me to search for the reasons that led him to this. One of the most important things I found was that his immersion in the study of cultural patterns and his preoccupation with cultural criticism was a result of his feeling that the traditional taste for poetry had declined and had declined greatly in him, so he no longer surrendered to the aesthetics of poetry as he used to!

Some of the points that Dr. Al-Ghadhami made in his book caught my attention, such as the state of writer's anxiety that comes from the pleasure of writing. The true pleasure in thought (as he said) is to read, while misery is to write, and more miserable than misery is not to write, meaning that the idea is in your head and you do not write it down!

In his book, Al-Ghadhami pointed out the dominance of poetic memorization over us, and the absence of a critical sense of the material consumed. This is why we keep repeating Al-Mutanabbi as if he is the epistemological, aesthetic, and philosophical model as well!

Al-Ghadhami saw Al-Mutanabbi as a model belonging to a culture that represented the taste and mentality of that era, and we cannot claim that he represents our era or that he offers our generations any cultural and intellectual model, and nothing will save us from this closed vortex except a critique of Al-Mutanabbi’s discourse!

Why Al-Mutanabbi?

Al-Ghadhami asks: Why do we admire Al-Mutanabbi?! He answers: Because he expresses our system and our superiority over others and our mental readiness to revolt against them whenever we are angry with them. Al-Mutanabbi represents the evil that is in us, and we keep trying to cover it up, and we let Al-Mutanabbi express us, as evidenced by our representations of his verses, our enjoyment of them, and our avoidance of criticizing them!

However, Al-Ghadhami believes that Al-Mutanabbi combined poetry and storytelling, and if we put the stories of the poems together with poetry in one discourse, we will present our cultural memory to modern generations in forms that break the monotony of traditional education, which is no longer charming or amazing and causes obstacles to appreciating poetry and absorbing the higher models in which memorization is no longer valid or remarkable, as he said. But he adds that Al-Mutanabbi has tricks in his verses that go on all tongues despite the fact that they contain patterns that resemble viruses in their ability to renew and transform!

Linguistic Salafism

In this book, Al-Ghadhami does not merely talk about Al-Mutanabbi, but also touches upon language, mentioning the group of “Say and Don’t Say” whom he described as guardians of the language of creativity and thought, so we do not speak except after their permission, and the group of “The Eloquent,” by which he meant the language of the ancestors in pronunciation and meaning, so we speak as they spoke, and we adhere to the meanings of their pronunciation, so we do not invent meanings that they did not invent!

He concluded that this is a mental and behavioral education aimed at creating generations that imitate their dead exactly!

Lamenting is a cultural instinct

In his book, "The Wearer of the Clothed," Al-Ghadhami departs from Al-Mutanabbi and his writings to the cultural pattern in general. In one of his articles, he emphasizes lamentation as a prevailing cultural instinct, citing lamentation as evidence of the prevalence of a culture of triviality and superficiality. It is as if we assume that everyone who engages with culture must be a skilled, outstanding, and serious creator. This assumption, according to Al-Ghadhami, is meaningless and did not happen in the past and will not happen now. He asks:

How many of those born in Kufa whom we know composed poetry during the time of Al-Mutanabbi’s birth, and conversely, how many of them remain in the memory of time?

Al-Ghadhami cited Al-Tha'alibi's poem "Yatimat Al-Dahr" and asked how many poets remained in its four volumes?!

Al-Ghadhami pointed to the memory that sifted through the masses and selected from them what deserved to be kept alive, first in the novel and then in the written record. He emphasized that the problem with our time is the ease of publishing through public means and the ease of remaining on the surface of reception and within the scope of sight. For this reason, the phenomenon of the individual has disappeared and has been replaced by the phenomenon of artistic masses that cover the spaces of reception with diversity and multiplicity at an extremely high speed, some of which erase each other!

This lamenting is about monopolizing the scene, as each person sees that his right to remain and be immortal is being challenged by others, some of whom may gain more attention for reasons related to the influence of the moment, which usually happens to be a favorable moment, so one name becomes popular and another name that was shining fades away!

As for the masses who were accused of “wanting such and such,” Al-Ghadhami had a different opinion on this matter, as he considered this an accusation used by the elites either to look down on the people or to attribute the problem to them. He cited as evidence the saying of the corruption of the times, the corruption of taste, and the decline of culture, and he sufficed to respond to it with the poet’s saying: They were corrupt, but the times were not corrupt!

The most interesting topic in Al-Ghadhami’s writings is his talk about recording in the Abbasid era, in which he said that our Arab culture is indebted to the Abbasid scribes who opened their hearts to receive narrators, memorizers of poetry, and promoters of tales to record everything that reached them with high professionalism, impartiality, no conditions, absolute freedom, and unconditional tolerance. However, he pointed out that this tolerance may reach the limits of leniency and failure to investigate and verify the accuracy of the narration.

Al-Ghadhami stressed that this is Mahmoud’s leniency because they are dealing with a little of what has passed and been buried in memory, so there was no option to delete and exclude, so the forged came to the proliferation of the novel market and what it brings in terms of money and prestige!

The heritage is ambiguous

Al-Ghadhami believes that the term "heritage" is ambiguous in that it suggests the old without the new, and thus the term "modernity" came as if it meant confrontation with the old. However, a realistic view reveals that everything old was new in its time and everything modern will be old to those who come after it, and the term "heritage" will include both sides together, including this talk of ours, which will enter the memory of the culture as soon as it is published. Al-Ghadhami mentioned that the conflict between modernity and heritage is a conflict in interpretation and in application, and this means that we humans keep reviving things through our reading of them, and every revival is a renewed application of what was done before! Therefore, we revive Al-Mutanabbi whenever we mention his name and read his texts, and it follows that we will interpret his text according to our skills; that is, the text is Al-Mutanabbi's attribution and affiliation, but it is ours in application, interpretation, and activation.

He pointed out that Al-Mutanabbi was highly interactive before the era of interactivity that we live in now, and if he were alive among us today, we would find him to be one of the most prominent tweeters in terms of presence and interaction. He tweeted before the culture of tweeting, not only in his poetry, but also in his system of thinking and in his expressive forms that combine wisdom and poetry with linguistic economy and the warmth of meaning!

Al-Mutanabbi is outside the norm

The only poem by Al-Mutanabbi that Al-Ghadhami acknowledged as beautiful without reservation, and without including it in the list of cultural style and criticism, is the poem (Al-Hamma). Although we love Al-Mutanabbi, and emulate his poems without asking why we love him, Al-Ghadhami explains this love by saying that we are driven by what is hidden within us, as if Al-Mutanabbi is saying what we wanted to say. He confirms that if we recognize what we like about Al-Mutanabbi, we will recognize the cultural cowardice that we inherit, just as Al-Mutanabbi inherited it and bequeathed it to us!

Therefore, we remained prisoners of Al-Mutanabbi’s wisdom, which we accept, seek, and repeat in our citations and memorizations, and we turn a blind eye to its systematicity, as if Al-Mutanabbi (as Al-Ghadhami said) combines an intellect that we accept through wisdom and a conscience that we live through wonder at the very thing that Al-Mutanabbi speaks for us about, while we are ashamed to declare it. Therefore, he occupied us, occupied us, and occupied us, and Al-Ghadhami does not think that anyone has done what Al-Mutanabbi has done in our Arab memory!

Overall, the book does not deny Al-Mutanabbi’s skill in writing poetry, and its author acknowledges that he is one of those whose memory was captivated by Al-Mutanabbi’s poetry, which he memorizes and emulates, but he takes a firm stance against Al-Mutanabbi’s systematic approach.

This book is the best evidence of Al-Ghadhami’s critique of Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi’s systematic approach, while fully acknowledging his authority!