Keywords: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Book of Job, modern Arabic poetry, free verse, poetic symbol, intertextuality, patience, thanksgiving, human suffering, comparative literature.
Introduction
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was able to transfer the historical Job from the past and embody him in the present by transferring the story of Job to his own personal story, not only through the use of the symbolism of the story but through transforming and renewing it, and by showing that the story of Job is not the story of a man who has passed away, but of a man who lives now and here. This study will be based on introducing Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, his poem which he wrote ‘The Book of Job,’ and the reason for writing it, and we shall extract from it the human meaning that links us to the ancient Job. And this study reveals that al-Sayyab found in the sacred tales a language capable of carrying the crises of modern man.
We shall see the story of the writing of the poem, an introduction to the collection, an introduction to Job, the symbol and suggestion in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, then the main themes and axes of the poem: affliction and patience, thanksgiving, the scriptural intertextuality between the sacred story and the story of al-Sayyab, then the conclusion.
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
He is one of the Iraqi poets, and the most poetic of the poets of the modern era, and he is considered one of the founders of free verse in Arabic literature. This style differs from prose poems, for it is metered poetry but freed from the number of feet that delineate the hemistich in Khalilian poetry.
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was born in the village of Jaykur in southern Iraq in 1926, and his mother died when he was six years old; his poems were affected by his mother’s death, which had a deep impact on his poetry. He studied Arabic and then transferred his specialization to the study of the English language. Politically, he was known for his leftist leanings; the leftist current is a term representing an intellectual and political current that seeks to change society into a state of greater equality among its members, and is distinguished by its focus on economic justice, social services, and individual rights.
Al-Sayyab struggled for the liberation of Iraq from the English, and he was known for his support of the Palestinian cause; and because of his political positions, prison was his fate. Al-Sayyab remained in Iraq for a period after his release from prison and then left it for Iran and from there to Kuwait, but he later returned to his country to work there in the field of journalism. And Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was among the supporters of the coup against the monarchy in Iraq, which was led by Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1958.
The story of the poem ‘The Book of Job’
The poem of Job is considered one of the most splendid of modern poetry, and the Iraqi artist Saadoun Jaber sang it. This poem reflects the scene of al-Sayyab with illness, and the bodily pains that accompanied it. Since the year 1961 al-Sayyab’s condition began to deteriorate, and the pains developed into a state of atrophy in his body and his feet, and the symptoms of paralysis became clear upon him, so that his movement became difficult. He began the journey of searching for a diagnosis of the illness and a treatment, moving between Beirut, London, and Paris, until it was finally revealed that he suffered from a disease in his nervous system, and all the attempts at treatment for his healing did not succeed.
The illness was accompanied by the deterioration of al-Sayyab’s material situation, especially in the last three years of his life. And during this pain, there issued from it the poem of Job, in which he praises God in every state, describing the calamities that befell him and considering them generosity and gifts from God, the Exalted, and speaking of Job’s patience with his illness and his pains, praising Him always despite all that he went through.
Introduction to the collection
The Book of Job is a collection of ten poems, in which al-Sayyab used the name of Job not as a name for his collection, but borrowed it as a symbol carrying all the meaning of the event that al-Sayyab is passing through. The story of Job in the poem became as though it were the story of al-Sayyab, and Job lived in al-Sayyab’s poem a new scene of the experience of pain. And in both cases, the scene corresponding to pain was the tried thanksgiving for what God had afflicted him with, and he remained thankful, glorifying with His praise.
Hanan al-Qarni says:
“Al-Sayyab uses in these poems many of the powers of poetry and the causes of its authority, for al-Sayyab appears as though he is drawing his bodily weakness upon the poems of ‘The Book of Job’ by simplifying them and making them easy in the manner of the ‘easy-impossible,’ so the collection comes out vertical, without meter and without rhyme, telling of pain with an astonishing simplicity, and telling of pain with a frightening depth. Each poem of this collection can be read by its simple, clear surface, and one can read the flood of meanings that the symbols of the poems and their hidden indications evoke. And nothing is more important than the symbol that al-Sayyab made the title of the poems of the collection ‘The Book of Job,’ for Job is not merely a proper noun, but a symbol laden with meaning and loaded with connotations; for the word Job scarcely appears on a tongue except linked with patience, nay, with the utmost patience, so that ‘the patience of Job’ becomes a term indicating the highest peak of patience”.
Introduction to Job
The Book of Job is one of the books of the Old Testament. As for the character of Job, it is the character of the righteous, suffering man, and his story has appeared in several civilizations. We see his story in the civilizations of the ancient East, for the man of the ancient East saw that calamities and affliction come upon the sinful, erring man. Thus we see the story of the Sumerian Job, the Babylonian Job, whose known text is entitled “I will praise the God of wisdom,” and Job in the Torah, whose book is known as the Book of Job, and Job in the Quran. All these texts revolve around a similar story: a righteous man who suffers, upon whom many afflictions and calamities befall, and he remains patient and steadfast, praising God and thanking Him; then in the end, God commends him and blesses him.
The symbol and suggestion in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
The use of the symbol is the poet’s attempt to give his poetry that vast range, where he does not draw a ready-made image of some scene, but rather lays a brick and the foundations of the scene as a whole, and leaves the reader to sail in the world of the drawing. Thus the poem becomes like a vessel in which each person sails according to his own conceptions, but along the road that the poet himself drew. The poet gives the symbol a new dimension, not by changing it and uprooting it entirely from its basic existence, as though he were creating a new scene, but by giving it a new dimension.
For the personal symbol “is that symbol which the poet invents by pure invention, or which he uproots from its first wall, or its basic source, in order to empty it partially or wholly of its first charge, or its original inheritance of meaning, and then charges it with a personal charge, or a subjective signification”
For Chadwick says: “Symbolism is the art of expressing ideas and emotions not by describing them directly, nor by explaining them through explicit, concrete comparisons, but by alluding to what the image of the reality suitable for these ideas and emotions could be, and that by re-creating them in the reader’s mind through the use of unexplained symbols”.
The main themes and the axes of the poem
Affliction and patience
Al-Sayyab depicts patience not as a moral virtue only, but as an existential path in which pain turns into a source of deep inner change. Al-Sayyab restores the tale of Job, but reshapes it as a new event, and meditates upon patience, steadfastness, and the great wisdom that arises from suffering. Patience in al-Sayyab’s poem is not a quiet, silent acceptance; rather, it is presented as a conscious act toward pain, and as a challenge and a refusal to fall into despair, despite the collapse and the bodily and psychological exhaustion.
Al-Sayyab was able to understand the patience of Job. It is an existential stance in which man stands on the edge of the abyss of torment but clinging to hope. Through this existence patience turns into a living process based on the capacity for endurance and the continuous inner search for the divine meaning behind this experience.
Praise be to You, for calamities are dew
and the wounds are the gifts of the Beloved;
I press their bouquets to my breast;
Your gifts do not depart from my heart;
Your gifts are accepted — give them to me.
The poet uses the images of fever, withering, and bodily weakness to show the severity of the affliction, but these images also reveal an important paradox:
during pain the capacity for spiritual insight deepens. Patience here turns into a creative force that reshapes the soul, and man is not content with patience in order to be saved from the ordeal, but rather rebuilds his formation through it; for in the stillness of waiting the heart opens onto levels of understanding that cannot be reached at the peak of comfort and peace. Al-Sayyab shows this transformation through the pairing of how suffering paves ways for a serious birth within the self.
If the fire touches the heat of the brow,
I imagined it a kiss from You kneaded of flame.
Beautiful is the sleeplessness; I pasture Your sky
with my eyes until the stars depart,
and Your light touches the window of my house.
Job’s patience is also rooted in trust. For despite the collapse of his world, the isolation imposed by the illness, and the body’s betrayal of him, his heart remains full of a deep faith that suffering is not in vain. This trust does not erase the pain, but it repositions it within a wider horizon, where the divine wisdom works when God seems absent. Thus patience becomes an act of faith: continuing to cling to hope even when the horizon seems entirely empty of any hope. Al-Sayyab indicates that the divine answer to pain is not always in its cessation, but may be in the inner strength that patience itself generates and what the experience creates.
The poet extends the meaning of patience from the individual experience to the universe through the symbols of nature: rain, drought, the seasons of renewal. For just as the earth waits for the rain, the heart waits for healing. This interconnection shows that pain is not the end of the path, and that patience is the bridge between barrenness and fertility. Through this symbolic framework, al-Sayyab elevates patience to a cosmic principle that permeates the fabric of existence.
In the conclusion of the poem, patience turns into a deep spiritual practice: a challenge that confronts pain without losing meaning, a courage that remains open to transformation, and a faith that pain, when endured steadfastly, yields wisdom and light. Thus al-Sayyab presents, through the voice of Job, a vision of patience as a quiet strength that enables the spirit to cross the darkness toward a new healing and a new light.
So lighten and thunder and send down the rain,
and tear the tresses of the trees,
and drown the plains,
and burn the fruit;
after you the ears heavy with grain shall sway,
and the roses and the chamomile shall be plucked
by a maiden in whose cheeks the south glows;
and you are a speck of blood and wounds;
and you, O poet of your valley, will you not return
from a journey that is long in the plains,
dancing with the river
and kissing the rain.
- Thanksgiving:
Thanksgiving is manifested in the poem “Job” as the deepest spiritual response by which a person can challenge the trial while at the peak of pain, in clear parallel with the life of Job, who declared several times: the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Al-Sayyab does not treat thanksgiving as a fruit of comfort or well-being, for he does not give thanks at winning and victory; rather, he sees it as a stance of faith born from the heart of suffering itself. Therefore he opens the poem with that earth-shaking declaration: “Praise be to You, however long the affliction lasts and however severe the pain grows,” for thanksgiving here is not conditioned on the removal of harm; rather, it is a constant acknowledgment of God and His mercy, even when pain veils this mercy. Al-Sayyab affirms this understanding when he describes calamities as a gift and hardships as part of generosity: “Praise be to You, for calamities are a gift and misfortunes are part of generosity.” With this, the poet places himself at the heart of the Job-like thought, where thanksgiving becomes a choice in the face of blasphemy, and he sees affliction as a test of spiritual purity, not a cause of sin.
Al-Sayyab reaches the peak of his conception when he asks in reverent astonishment: “Did You not give me this darkness, and did You not give me this magic?” And in this question — the question of the believer who realizes that everything that comes from God is in its essence mercy, whether it appears as darkness or as light — the poet consolidates this meaning through the likeness of the earth that thanks the rain and is not angered by the withholding of the clouds: “Does the earth thank the drops of rain, and is it angered if the clouds do not find it?” For thanksgiving here is not a mere feeling, but a value-stance and an inner disposition of the heart that does not change or alter with the change of circumstances and the like.
Then the poet deepens the line of parallelism with Job’s bodily experience, presenting harsh images of illness and pain: “Long months, and these wounds tear my sides like a blade,” “and the disease does not abate at morning, nor does the night wipe away its pains with death,” and yet the severity of pain does not prevent thanksgiving but makes it more sincere. For al-Sayyab is not content with patience; rather, he rejoices in the wounds themselves, counting them as bouquets that he presses to his breast: “I press their bouquets to my breast… Your gifts do not depart from my heart… give them to me, Your gifts are accepted.” This transformation from pain to embrace is the heart of the mystical experience that the poet shapes, for he sees in affliction a sign of election and love, to the point that he calls on others to look and envy him: “Come, look and envy me, for these are the gifts of my Beloved.” And what people see as an exhausting fire, he sees as a divine kiss: “If the fire touches the heat of the brow, I imagined it a kiss from You kneaded of flame.”
Then al-Sayyab completes the Job-like journey toward the light of hope: “Praise be to You, O You who cast the decree and O You who, after that, wrote the healing.” For thanksgiving remains present in the beginning, the peak, and the conclusion — thanksgiving for the affliction and thanksgiving for the awaited healing. This thanksgiving that precedes healing is the pure Jesus-like thanksgiving, which reminds us of Jesus’ thanksgiving before the tomb of Lazarus, who thanked God the Father before He answered and raised Lazarus. Thus al-Sayyab shapes through “The Book of Job” a spiritual vision that sees in every ordeal a road to divine closeness, and in every pain an opportunity to attain the station of the thankful. - The scriptural intertextuality between the sacred story and the story of al-Sayyab
The definition of intertextuality is the intersection and interweaving of texts, in which the poet evokes an ancient text and places it in his current text, in order to give the story a modern dimension and to give his story a sacred dimension. In al-Sayyab’s poem, intertextuality represents an important axis, where the poet re-reads the story of Job from the Islamic and Christian heritages within a poetic context, recounting his personal story and linking it to the sacred story. Thus the story of Job turns into a realistic story, and the story of al-Sayyab into a sacred story — and this is the truth: every personal story is sacred. Al-Sayyab does not evoke the character of Job as a historical or religious reference only, but as a symbol of trial, patience, and thanksgiving, which helps him and grants him the flexibility to transform individual pain into a common human discourse. He relies deeply on the symbols and tests in the experience. Al-Tawali says: “Al-Sayyab draws inspiration from the Quranic stories, and through the Quranic story he links the distant reality that the heritage embodies and the immediate reality that the experience of his own life represents”.
The poem begins with a phrase that intersects entirely with Job’s answer in confronting the trial, as we said in the previous paragraph, where praise and thanksgiving turn into the title of the Book of Job, and also into an opening for the story of al-Sayyab. Thus, just as Job refuses to direct blame toward God despite losing everything of possessions and children, so al-Sayyab repeats the ancient sacred voice, making the reader hear it in the poem — but not as a mere repetition, but by presenting a new reading of it from within his bodily and spiritual experience.
The intertextuality extends to include religious vocabulary with sacred scriptural roots, such as affliction, healing, and fire — words that carry the meaning of events and not merely abstract symbols. The poet says: “For calamities are a gift and misfortunes are part of generosity,” for he reformulates the pivotal idea in the story of Job: that affliction is a test, and that the divine gifts may come in the form of ordeals and hardships. This style transfers intertextuality from quotation to interpretation, where the poet turns the apparent curse into an inner grace, thereby approaching the mystical interpretation that sees in pain a means of knowledge and closeness.
The intertextuality also emerges through the depiction of the wounds as divine gifts:
I press their bouquets to my breast;
gifts in my heart that do not depart — give them to me;
Your gifts are accepted.
And at the end of this section the intertextuality appears clearly in the joining of the decree and the healing:
Praise be to You, O You who cast the decree,
and O You who, after that, wrote the healing.
The final question: what does Badr Shakir al-Sayyab say with his poetry today?
Religious thought has fallen into the problem of the past-oriented sanctification of the story, as though the past event were an event that happened and was completed and will not be repeated, while in truth Badr Shakir al-Sayyab reveals to us that the ancient religious event is nothing but an image of our suffering through our experiences. One person passes through the experience of Job, another through the experience of Noah, and so on. Job is not a story that has passed, but an event that is lived and that every one of us lives in different ways. Al-Sayyab shows how he drew inspiration from Job’s answers, so that al-Sayyab’s answers themselves became the answers in the face of trials, and thus al-Sayyab in the end reaps what Job reaped. The poet clarifies in the clearest statement that the sacred event does not die but lives in each of us, and this is what makes us in our world today draw inspiration and think not of the past as past, but of the past as an experience that gives us life if we cross through it.
The conclusion
The study of the character of Job in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab shows that al-Sayyab did not merely retrieve a familiar religious symbol, but reshaped it to become a model of patience in suffering, and his answers become the answer of humanity in its struggles, and also the answers of man in his inner and outer struggle and his spiritual rising. Job is transformed to reflect his personal pains and agonies, and his faith that salvation is possible however time is delayed or pain intensifies. Through intertextuality with the religious text, he deepens the significance of torment and gives it a sacred dimension, so that pain does not remain a negative matter, but a path toward the discovery of spiritual meaning. And the poetic images help to transform pain into a fertile ground for inner change. And just as Job moves from despair to the discovery of God, so al-Sayyab elevates patience from being a moral virtue to a creative force capable of shaping the self and the community.
References
- “Praise be to You, however long the affliction lasts”… the story of the poem that al-Sayyab wrote after he was stricken with an illness that paralyzed his ability to move, Arabi Post, published: 16/06/2022, date accessed 9/11/2025.
- Hanan, al-Qarni. The meanings of patience… a reading of al-Sayyab’s poem ‘The Book of Job,’ aljazeera.com, published Friday/Saturday 16 April 2021, 2025, accessed: https://2u.pw/nmav0H
- Al-Ta, Butrus Antonius, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (Tripoli, Al-Mu’assasa al-Haditha lil-Kitab, 2008), p. 11.
- Al-Boughbish, Abdel Karim. The personal symbols in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, a free platform for culture, thought, and literature, published: Monday 19 July 2010, date accessed 9/11/2025, accessed at HTTPS://2U.PW/WRPDLO
- Al-Tawali, Abdel Aziz. On the manifestations of Quranic intertextuality in al-Sayyab’s poetry, Oubour magazine, date accessed: 17/11/2025.