I greeted your shy life from afar, so live me ... O Tigris of goodness, Umm Al-Basatin,
I greeted your shroud with a thirst for me ... the doves of water between mud and water
On the 23rd anniversary of his departure, the positions of writers and critics still differ about the late Iraqi poet Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahery, nicknamed "the greatest poet of the Arabs", as the cultural circles on this occasion regain his poetic achievement and his political and social transformations over the centuries of his life.
Al-Jawahiri is from the family of Najaf, one of the most important religious and cultural cities of Iraq. He was born on July 26, 1899, and his father was a religious scholar who wanted his son to be like him, so he made him wear a cloak and turban since the age of ten. He organized poetry at an early age, and showed a tendency from childhood to literature, so he reads in the book Al-Bayan and al-Tabyeen, the introduction of Ibn Khaldun and the collections of poetry.
From Najaf to Damascus, through Lebanon and the Maghreb to Prague, where Al-Jawahery has lived for nearly 30 years, he has had many stops in poetry, politics, and the press, as he issued several newspapers, the Euphrates, the Coup, and Public Opinion.
His first book, "The Circuit of Literature," was published in 1923, and it is a collection of poems opposed to famous poets of his time, such as Ahmed Shawky and Ilya Abu Madi. Al-Jawahiri does not seem to be influenced by European literary currents, while his subjects share political events and personal experiences, and in many of them appear to revolt against corrupt political and social traditions and situations.
Personal transitions
In an attempt to find out about Al-Jawaheri's personal transformations and their impact on his poetic achievement, critic Dr. Muj Youssef believes that "there is no need to stand at the stations of his personal life, as much as we need to read his poetic stances, which have expressed a certain stage of his life and society."
She adds that we can choose from his poetry two situations that express his ideology from which he was not freed. On the one hand, his religious upbringing in the city of Najaf, and the other his mixing with his Communist and Marxist friends, such as Hussein al-Rahal, Abd al-Fattah Ibrahim, and others.
"What concerns us is the effect of these ideologies on his poetry, as he wrote the poem" reactionaries "against the scholars of the city of Najaf, who opposed the opening of a school for girls, and he said:
This religion would not have been made for their claim ... for the privileges of its classes to be
paid millions of people to an individual and around him ... thousands of them have given alms
These verses - as the Iraqi critic sees - show class discrimination, reveal the socialist tendency of Al-Jawahiri, and Moj Yusef concludes her speech by saying, "The truth is, Al-Jawahiri only drew his attention to Marxism, the historical materialism that says that making history is the result of class struggle, but it was not Marxist, With his Islamic sense did not appear except when provoked. "
Al-Jawahiri’s poems were distinguished by the commitment to the traditional pillar of poetry and a weaving in the fabric, as well as the revolution on some social conditions. He was close to the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim during the first years of the Republic’s regime in Iraq, but he was separated from it after that, and he was subjected to harassment, which led him to He left Iraq in 1961, and did not return until 1968 at the invitation of the Iraqi government.
Century man
The head of the "Iraqi Palm Foundation" and the head of the former Iraqi Media Network Foundation, the poet Mujahid Abu Al-Hail described al-Jawahiri as the man of the last century, saying that he was a contemporary of political, social, cultural and poetic transformations, and he was so effective that the critic Abdullah Al-Ghazami was considered one of the most important reasons for the emergence of the free poetry movement. In Iraq there is a poetic stature that cannot be surpassed by its name, Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri. Therefore, the poets of Iraq invented a region of poetic creativity outside the walls of the poetic kingdom of Al-Jawahiri, which was built by words and rhymes.
As for the member of the Iraqi and Arab writers Union, poet and critic Mohammed Al-Kaabi, commenting on Al-Jawahiri’s poetry by saying, “We dwell on talking about Arab poetic heritage, but we are silent when we reach Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabi. We also elaborate on describing and removing poets in the twentieth century AD, and we are silent when it comes to jewelery.” Because both Al-Mutanabbi and Al-Jawahiri are poets who disobey the characterization and delve into their poetic shrewdness, and the depth, accuracy, and beauty they abound in their word and meaning.
He added, "I believe that the diversity in Al-Jawaheri's poetry has not been studied yet, despite the many who wrote about it, as it is a rare poetic stature. He established the General Union of Writers and Writers in Iraq, headed his first session, and headed the delegation of the Federation's writers to Russia, his public poetic speech is still stuck in memory Generations. "
He pointed out that "the Union of Writers immortalized Al-Jawahiri by setting up a bust for him at the headquarters of the union, and establishing a poetry festival in his name, and a hall bearing his name, this is all that the greatest Arab poet obtained from honoring in Iraq, and it was better to allocate an international award in his name that is granted annually to creators in the fields of Literature is similar to the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His life stations
One of the most prominent stations in Al-Jawahiri’s life was the death of his brother Jaafar during the 1948 Al-Wathba uprising, which erupted against the Portsmouth Treaty with Britain and was able to overthrow it, which inspired him one of his most famous poems in the pathology, titled “My Brother Jaafar,” in which he says:
Do you know or do you not know .. that the wounds of the victims are mouth of a
mouth that is not like the plaintiff in saying .. and not like another who is rested.
Learn that the wounds of the martyr .. remain about revenge. They question
that. You know that the wounds of the martyr .. from hunger digest what inspires you
suck blood and then you want blood .. and you keep pressing and feeding
His relations were close with Arab kings and presidents, and with great writers, artists, thinkers and the people of politics, and he enjoyed intimate and estranged relations with various leaders of Iraq, and in 1983 the then Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad invited him to Damascus, so he was received with a warm welcome and a home and car were allocated to him.
In the early nineties, during the return of the poet Al-Jawahiri from Cairo to Damascus, he passed through Amman, and he was received with unparalleled welcome. On December 2, 1992, in the presence of the late King Hussein bin Talal, he read his poem:
Oh sir, I am happy with my mouth to say .. On your beautiful birthday .
His political stances
and his political stances, Dr. Khayal Al-Jawahry, the daughter of the late poet, told Al-Jazeera Net that her father "was arrested in the royal era many times, but the prison terms were not long, because there was always someone who interfered and mediated to get him out of prison, and participated in a revolution Twenty against the British occupation, his newspaper "Euphrates" was canceled and imprisoned several times.
Khayyal added that Al-Jawahery opposed the May Movement in Iraq in 1941 because of its sympathy for Germany. He was elected to the Parliament in 1947, but resigned in 1948 in protest against the Portsmouth Treaty with Britain.
He blessed with his poems the revolution of July 14, 1958, and he was close to the then Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim, but then he disagreed with his policy, so he left Iraq, stayed true to the approach of the revolution, and opposed the February 1963 coup that overthrew Qasim, and he did not return to Iraq Only after the July Revolution of 1968, in which the Ba’ath Party took power in Iraq. ”
She adds that his relationship was not good with the authorities at the time, despite the regime's affection for him, as he was visited at home by the late President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, but he left Iraq in 1980 after Saddam Hussein came to power, and chose Prague as his residence.
The reason for this - as Khayyal Al-Jawahiri says - is that the German embassy in Baghdad invited him to reside in Berlin because of a threat to his life, and when Al-Jawahiri responded, the German plane landed in Prague to welcome a delegation from the Czech Writers Union to Al-Jawahery, and they told him that they were behind his invitation to reside in Prague to camouflage power through The German embassy in Iraq, and his family joined him after that.
His daughter asserts that the Iraqi authorities made great efforts and made many promises and inducements, but her father refused to return.
The Secret of the Hat
About the hat that his jeweler was wearing, his daughter spoke to us, saying, "My father got a cold when he was participating in a literary conference in the former Soviet Union, and the doctors advised him to wear a headscarf because of sensitivity in his head. Then he remained with him until his death, and he did not take it off even while sleeping. " His daughter adds that she still has a number of these hats that were given to her father from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.
Al-Jawahiri died on July 27, 1997 in Damascus, and was not recommended to be buried in his country - according to his daughter Khayal - and was buried in the cemetery of strangers in the Syrian capital, and he wrote on his grave "lying here far from the Tigris of good."