Resistance

The Martyr

الشهيد

Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud

Written by a schoolteacher in his twenties who was killed in battle eleven years later — the poem that earned Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud the name 'the martyr poet.'

I will carry my soul in my palm and throw it into the abyss of ruin…

(opening lines, in translation; Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud died in 1948 and the poem is in the public domain)

About this poem

“Al-Shahid” — “The Martyr” — is Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud’s best-known poem, composed when he was around twenty-four. Its opening couplet sets out a bargain in the plainest terms available in classical Arabic prosody: the poet carries his own soul in his open hand and throws it into destruction, and either he lives a life that gladdens his friends or he dies a death that enrages his enemies. There is no third possibility offered, and no consolation.

The poem belongs to the decade of the Palestinian general strike and the 1936 revolt, and Mahmoud’s own life is inseparable from it. He was teaching Arabic at the National Najah School in Nablus — where Ibrahim Tuqan had taught him — when he joined the fighters in 1937 under the command of Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad. Pursued by the British, he went to Damascus and then Baghdad, took a commission at the Iraqi Military Academy in 1939–40, and returned to teach again in Nablus. In January 1948 he trained at the Qatana camp in Syria and came back as a company commander in the Hittin brigade of the Arab Salvation Army.

On 13 July 1948 he was killed by a shell during an attack on the colony of al-Sajara, beside the Arab village of al-Shajara near Tiberias, and was buried in Nazareth. The novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra called him the first knight-poet of modern Arabic poetry — the one who followed his words with action. What makes “The Martyr” difficult rather than simply rousing is that it was not a pose: the poem describes an ending its author then went and met, and it has been read ever since through that fact.

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