Book Reviews

The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to 
the Prophet Muhammad

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010. pbk. 306 pages

Non-Muslims, perhaps blinded by the claims of their own faiths, have long 
underestimated Muslim reverence for the Prophet Muhammad. By the 
same token, they have paid relatively little attention to Muslim traditions 
of praising the Prophet, whether it be the naths sung by Sufi qawwali musi-
cians in South Asia, the maulid lectures on the first twelve days of Rabi al-
Awwal ‒ or the biographies of the Prophet, which have become so numer-
ous over the past century. This is unfortunate because, intermingled with 
praise for the Prophet, there are often other messages, which non-Muslims 
need to note if they are better to understand their Muslim neighbors.

The Mantle Odes contains translations, and interpretations in their con-
text, of three of the most highly prized poems in the Arab-Islamic tradition 
in praise of the Prophet. One poem dates from the time of the Prophet, the 
second from the thirteenth century aC under the Mamluks, and the third 
from Egypt under colonial rule in the early twentieth century. The author’s 
aim is “to bring these Islamic devotional masterpieces into the purview of 
contemporary literary interpretation in a way that makes them culturally 
relevant and poetically effective for the modern reader, whether Muslim or 
non-Muslim” (xi).

The first poem is the “Qasidat al-Burdah” of Ka‘b ibn Zuhayr. Ka‘b 
was a celebrated pre-Islamic poet who faced death for refusing to convert 
to Islam. Eventually, however, he submitted to the Prophet, presented a 
poem of praise, and the Prophet as a sign of his protection and acceptance 



Book Reviews 139

of Ka‘b submission bestowed his mantle upon him. Stetkeyvich explains 
that Ka‘b’s panegyric was part of an exchange ritual in which bonds of 
mutual obligation and allegiance were created between the poet and pa-
tron. The panegyric also had a specific shape on which its performative 
functions were based. In time, she suggests, that not only the art of the 
panegyric “transforms an actual event or circumstance (the conversion of 
the pagan Arab tribes to Islam) into ritual or myth thus changing it from an 
ephemeral or transient occurrence to a permanent and transcendent mes-
sage” (31), but also it provided “a spiritual model for Muslims seeking 
redemption” (xii). 

Found in thousands of manuscripts, translated into all the languages of 
the Muslim world, credited with talismanic powers, and used for liturgical 
purposes ‒ the second poem, al-BūÎīrī’s “Qasidat al-Burdah,” is one of 
the most influential pieces of Arabic literature. This panegyric follows the 
same form as that of Ka‘b. The ritual exchange for this poem, however, 
becomes the expectation of the Prophet’s intercession on the Day of Judg-
ment. Statkeyvich then argues that the praise section of the poem promotes 
an ideology of what she terms “Islamic Manifest Destiny,” a ‘worldly do-
minion that serves as an earthly counterpart or complement to the other-
worldly concern with Judgment Day” (xiii). 

The third poem, the “Nahj al-Burdah” (The Way of the Mantle), of 
Ahmad Shawqi (d. 1932), the Egyptian poet of the Arab Renaissance, is 
an imitation of al-BūÎīrī’s “Burdah.” Stetkeyvich places the poem in the 
context of an Egypt caught between a moribund Ottoman empire and an 
oppressive British occupation. Although ostensibly it was written to cel-
ebrate the Hajj of Shawqi’s patron, the Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi, it was also 
a passionate protest against the West. He writes against the destructiveness 
and hypocrisy of the Christian West. Like the Reformist Muslims of his 
day, he asserts the Islamic tradition as the true source of the humanism and 
science of the West’s Enlightenment. The rule of the Shar‘iah and the glory 
of Baghdad are presented as a preferable form of empire to those of the Ot-
toman empire and the West. The ritual exchange he seeks for his panegyric 
is the return of Islamic this worldly domination. How deeply he is hurt by 
the shame of the present is echoed in these lines:

So, for the sake of the Messenger of the worlds, be gracious unto us;     
Do not deepen the humiliation of his people and their disgrace. (225)
Down to the present, Shawqi’s “Burdah” continues to have a powerful 

impact on Arabs ‒ in part, because it became a prominent song in the rep-
ertoire of the greatest Arab singer of the twentieth century, Umm Kulthum 



The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 28:3140

‒ but in part, too, because its anti-colonial spirit speaks as strongly to Arabs 
in the early twenty-first century as it did in the early twentieth. State depart-
ments and intelligence services could benefit by spending more time study-
ing and considering the significance of poems in praise of the Prophet.

This is an exciting and outstanding piece of scholarship. Its readership 
should not be confined to those interested in Arabic literature and religious 
studies. It should be read by all those historians, political scientists, and 
others who wish more fully to understand Arab and Muslim responses to 
the modern world.

Francis Robinson
Professor of the History of South Asia, Department of History, 

Royal Holloway, University of London
 Sultan of Oman Fellow, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies

F.Robinson@rhul.ac.uk

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