Samaw'al ibn Adiya

Origins and early life

Samaw'al ibn Adiya was a Jewish Arab poet and chieftain of the sixth century, lord of the fortress of al-Ablaq at Tayma in the north of the Arabian peninsula, and the Arabic literary tradition names him plainly as al-Yahudi, the Jew.

Work and career

He belonged to the Jewish tribes long established in the oases of the Hijaz, and his castle stood on the caravan road between Syria and Medina. The story attached to his name is that the poet-prince Imru al-Qais, travelling to Constantinople, left with him his daughter, his weapons and several coats of mail for safekeeping; after Imru al-Qais died, a Ghassanid commander besieged the fortress and seized Samaw'al's son, who had been caught outside, and offered to spare the boy in exchange for the arms.

Samaw'al refused to break the trust, and the son was killed before his eyes. From that act comes the Arabic expression awfa min al-Samaw'al, more faithful than Samaw'al, still current today as the standard idiom for perfect loyalty. A poem beginning If a man's honour is not stained by baseness, attributed to him and preserved in the Hamasa anthology of Abu Tammam, is a canonical text of pre-Islamic Arabic literature, and its authorship is debated by philologists.

He is one of the clearest traces of Jewish life in Arabia before Islam, remembered by Arabic culture itself rather than only by Jewish sources.