Praying Mantis in the Desert. The Najdi Poet Ibn Subayyil Consumed with Love for the Bedouin

ʿAbdallah b. Subayyil (d. 1933) is the last great ghazal poet of the pre-oil era in Central Arabia. He was the headman of the small old town of Nifī. He is famous for his lively descriptions of the Bedouin tribes who would spend the summer at the wells of Nifī, and of the Bedouin beauties with whom he fell in love. He is considered an eminent representative of the Nabaṭī tradition: a mixture of vernacular and Bedouin classical Arabic. The author of the article provides here four poems he recorded in 1989 from a Bedouin rāwī. Two of these were part of Ibn Subayyil’s “poetic correspondence” with Ibn Zirībān, a warlike chief of the Muṭayr tribe. The other two feature the delicate subject of his love for the young women of the ʿUtayba tribe — the same tribe that would eventually settle in Nifī and eclipse Ibn Subayyil’s clan, as alluded to in the title of the article.