The Manifestations of Heroic and Sublime Values in Al-Sa’alik Poetry: A Descriptive-Analytical Reading

Abstract

This study asks how the heroic and sublime are aesthetically constructed in the poetry of Al-Sa’alik, and how the experiences of poverty, exclusion and peril are transformed into moral and literary value. Its main objective is to re-read selected poems by Al-Shanfar, `Urwah ibn Al-Ward, and `Ta\’abat Sharran, in addition to documentary accounts of insurgency and marginalization. This study is significant in that it links the social history of the Saqqara to Arabic poetry and the theories of the sublime, and explains how the marginal experience becomes a source of dignity, moral agency, and aesthetic elevation. Using the descriptive-analytic method, the article examines the language, images, rhythm, symbolic structure, narrative movement, and ethical positioning of the representative passages. The results show that heroism combines physical courage with responsibility to comrades and the vulnerable, while nobility is found in perseverance, generosity, self-control, and resistance to degradation. Poems then turn hunger, exile, and death into forms of transcendence and communal value. The study concluded that the poetry of Al-Sa’alik is an important humanistic and aesthetic element in pre-Islamic literature. Future research should compare his marginality poetry with the heroic and outlaw traditions of other literatures.