Al-Khansa'

Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Khansa (disambiguation).
al-Khansāʾ
الخنساء
Bornc. 575
Safeena, Arabia
(present-day Mahd Al-Dhahab Madinah Region, Saudi Arabia)
Diedc. 646 (aged 70–71)
Najd, Arabia
(present-day Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
OccupationPoet

Tumāḍir bint ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Sharīd al-Sulamīyah (Arabic: تماضر بنت عمرو بن الحارث بن الشريد السُلمية), usually simply referred to as al-Khansāʾ (Arabic: الخنساء, meaning "snub-nosed", an Arabic epithet for a gazelle as metaphor for beauty) was a 7th-century tribeswoman, living in the Arabian Peninsula. She was one of the most influential poets of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods.[1]

In her time, the role of a female poet was to write elegies for the dead and perform them for the tribe in public oral competitions. Al-Khansāʾ won respect and fame in these competitions with her elegies, and is widely considered as the finest author of Arabic elegies and one of the greatest and best known female Arab poets of all time.[2][3] In 629, she went to Medina with a deputation from her clan and, after meeting the Islamic prophet Muhammad, embraced the new religion. Her poetry was later recorded by Muslim scholars, who were studying unaltered Arabic of her time in order to explicate the language of early Islamic texts.

  1. ^ "Al-Khansāʾ | Arab poet". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2020-08-30.
  2. ^ Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology. Translated by Geert Jan van Gelder. New York: New York University Press. 2013.
  3. ^ Ghada Hashem Talhami (2013). Historical Dictionary of Women in the Middle East and North Africa. Scarecrow Press. p. 202. ISBN 978-0-8108-6858-8.