ABDEL RAHMAN EL-ABNOUDY knows he’s a good poet. He is arguably the greatest living poet of the activist 1960s and one of the founders of the modern colloquial poem, yet it is not his poetry for which he wants to be remembered.

“I am a good poet, but I know that Egypt will bear even better poets in the future,” he says modestly. “But if people forget my poetry, they will always remember that I am the one who spent 30 years of my life dedicated to the brilliant epic work Al-Sira Al-Hilaliyya, or the story of Bani Hilal.”

El-Abnoudy has spent the past three decades gathering and compiling The Sira, an ancient oral-tradition biography of Arabic history. “With my few piastres and pounds, I have saved the Arab people’s Iliad.”

But a hair’s breadth away from seeing his dream of a Hilaliyya museum — scheduled to open in a few months in his hometown of Abnoud in Qena, Upper Egypt — the poet has suddenly been forced to put his project on ice.

“I am afraid for The Sira, which tells the story of the amazing raid through which the Arabs of the Hijaz [northwestern Saudi Arabia] came to North Africa in the middle of the fifth century after Hijra [eleventh century AD]. It is going to be stolen,” El-Abnoudy says worriedly, referring to a parallel UNESCO effort to gather the surviving epic. “The museum is ready, with air-conditioned rooms where researchers can listen to all my recordings and read the published work. It also contains material I procured from universities abroad, with the recordings of Libyan and Tunisian [versions]. But now I wish I had never released the tapes or the books.”

El-Abnoudy claims that the only materials available to UNESCO are the tapes and books on the market — all of which are the fruit of his work. But how can the great poet be so sure of himself? After refusing for months to draw media attention to what he terms the “theft,” El-Abnoudy tells Egypt Today his own saga of pain and loss. Excerpts:

Courtesy Abdel Rahman El -Abnoudy El-Abnoudi favors the oral tradition of The Sira.

Abdel Rahman El-Abnoudy: For decades, I worked with storytellers and have come across two true poets, Jaber Abu Hussein and Sayyed El-Dowwi. They are people who gave their lives to The Sira, carrying it as a religious and historical trust. They believe it to be their divine duty to tell it.

You see, the folk poet knows how to build his story. As he stands among his audience, he does not know what he is going to say. He has the events and places in his head, but the rest is purely improvisational. I would record a part and then, if something is wrong with the recording, I would ask the poet to repeat it and find he would say it in a completely different way without changing the meaning or twisting the events.

This work has called out to me ever since I was a child in the village of Abnoud. I am one of those who have been smitten by it, and those who have been so smitten by Al-Hilaliyya cannot get it out of their minds. We explain the whole world through our understanding of it. We can tell the difference between a true poet and someone who memorizes small parts of The Sira and retells it as he begs for money or bread. These are the gypsies who go from village to village with a rababa [an Egyptian fiddle], singing the praises of people or singing harvest songs for money.

Then there are these academics who have presented UNESCO with a proposal to gather the surviving epic and protect it from oblivion. They have received $250,000 as down payment to do so — where are they going to get The Sira? El-Dowwi has refused to work with them, so they accuse me of coercing him into working only with me. But he grew up in my village, knows my family and my grandmother and trusts me to present his work [in a proper manner].

Besides, the epic has already been recorded. I have 360 half-hour episodes that were aired on Al-Shaab station years ago. [There are also 50 tapes on the market and three volumes available through the First Lady Suzanne Mubarak’s Family Library]. The academics argue my work is not scientific. They want me to point out where the poet spit or scratched. That is not part of the work. Many European and American academics have taken my work and built great studies upon it. But here, in Egypt, they do not understand The Sira, and they also do not respect it.

Nowadays, all people care about is the money. Back in the 1960s, whenever I had LE 30 or 35, I would carry my heavy recorder given to me by [singer] Abdel Halim Hafez. I went everywhere: staying in places like the Red Sea for a month or two, scanning the area, visiting the mountains, looking for people who tell The Sira. If, on returning, I was informed I had missed someone in some faraway place, I went back when I had the money, forced to use the most miserable forms of transportation. But it was the most enjoyable thing I did. I felt I was conquering the very idea of collecting the heritage.

They are just like the antiquities’ thieves. All they want is the money to collect what has already been collected. All they have is my work, which they try to make some memorize. This is what they are recording now. An epic is learned by the poet as a child; he follows his father or uncle, carrying the rababa and learning until it becomes a part of him. This is true oral tradition.

The whole Arab world knows El-Abnoudy is the one who collected The Sira. The deceivers will always be deceivers. I have not filed complaints anywhere, nor do I plan to. All I want to do is expose this travesty. I consider this an important political act.

They think it is money I want. If it were, I would not have wasted the best years of my life gathering The Sira. I still have thousands of unreleased hours, and I was about to publish the first volume. But all this has stopped. If I publish, I will give them more material to steal. They can and will steal it when I die, but until then I am still alive. And The Sira is not going to perish. It will live on. It is in my books, in the recordings. I have the rest of the recordings.

Yet I sometimes consider burning them all, so the robbers will not get hold of them. It is my life’s work.”

The Epic of Bani Hilal

THE SIRA IS 30 times longer than Homer’s Iliad. It also conforms to the European definition of an epic, telling the story of long wars where the heroes fight against each other for years, and also against gods, and goes on for generations. In these parts of the world, we do not have gods for water, sky, evil, etc. So we find the heroes of The Sira fighting against jinn and also against monks and priests who refuse to grant them the right of passage. If we look at it as a work of poetry, it proves how great our peoples are.

Although history is full of wars and events, people’s collective memory chooses which events to keep and has chosen this event to turn it into the great saga that it is today, despite the fact that it portrays aggression by Arabs against Arabs.

There are two theories on why the raid took place.

Famine and drought had hit the Hijaz, and rains did not fall for seven years, so the tribes decided to migrate to a country where they could find greenery. The name Tunis El-Khadra [Green Tunisia] was a dream — it represented everything they did not have, so they decided to go there. Thousands of tribes abandoned the peninsula, passing through many Arab countries on their way. The epic elaborates on this, adding countries that were not even on the route of this journey.

The other reason for the raid, as told by the epic, is that the Arab Ashraf, the Shi’a Ismailis in Tunisia, were attacked by the public while they were praying, and thousands were killed. The ruler of Tunisia was unable to protect them, so he chose to stand with his public. The Sira cites this as the political reason for the r that Arab tribes were going to aid their people. But in truth, the migration was an economic one.

Most poets, including the Egyptian poets, were prejudiced against the North African side and in favor of the Arabs. They believe that Abu Zeid El-Hilali, the leader, was the son of Khadra El-Sharifa, a descendant of the Prophet (PBUH). North Africa had become Muslim but had retained its ethnic culture. This war is what truly Arabized this part of the world.

The Sira of Bani Hilal embodies the idea of the hero of the Arab nations. The Arabs wanted a leader to unite them, one who was willing to sacrifice all for this greater purpose, the greater good of Arabs and Islam. All the values that one may miss in modern life are found in The Sira: sacrifice, manliness, friendship, sex, romance, parenthood, jihad, Arab nationalism. This has made countries that did not fall on the route of the journey adopt The Sira as well, such as Sudan, Iraq, Turkey and the Levant. They wanted this epic to become the epic of all Arabs. Of course the saga had generations of heroes, because in history, the war went on for 100 years.

Although it is the same epic tale, it is told differently throughout the Arab world.

In other countries, The Sira is read from a book, something written in weak classical Arabic by some student in the riwaqs (corridors) of Al-Azhar. But the Saeedi poet has returned The Sira to its roots as a folk work of art. The Saeedi poet may use the book to remind him of events and locations, but he weaves it in his own unique way.

The Delta is different. They do what all other Arab countries do, read from a book, singing along with a rababa. In Upper Egypt, the poet uses the square method, in which the first line rhymes with the third, and the second rhymes with the fourth. The last word of rhyming lines may be the same word, and this is where the poet plays on double meanings:

Tabib el-jarayeh goum el-hagg (Doctor of the wounded, help),

W’hatly el-dawa elli yowafig (Get me the medicine that works).

Feih nas kateer bata’raf el-hagg (Many people know the truth),

W’lagl el-daroora towafig (But would go along out of necessity).

This is the square. It is a work of genius. This square as a unit is small enough to be flexible and can become slow, fast or angry, depending on the emotion demanded by the moment.”

The Upper Egyptians will have it no other way. No other method would be accepted by the Saeedi audiences. If you read to them from a book, they will leave. Some of the listeners in Upper Egypt know The Sira better than the storytellers do. No poet can mess with it. et

—As told by Abdel Rahman El-Abnoudy to Manal el-Jesri