page_title: Mustafa Wahbi Tal
section_title: 'Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis
hierarchical_section_title: Mustafa Wahbi Tal / Works / 'Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis
caption_attribution_description: English: Mustafa Wahbi Tal and Crown Prince Talal in the late 1940s
context_page_description: Mustafa Wahbi Tal, also known by his pen name Arar, was a Jordanian poet, writer, teacher and civil servant, widely regarded as Jordan's most prominent poet and among the best-known Jordanian poets among Arab readers.
  Born in Irbid in the Ottoman Empire on 25 May 1899, Tal completed his elementary education in his hometown, later leaving to complete his high school education in Damascus. His rebellious and stubborn temperament would appear as early as his high school years in Damascus, when he would be exiled several times by the Ottoman authorities for participating in school strikes against their policies in the region. In his adulthood, Tal would be imprisoned and exiled several times for democratic activism or for insulting high-ranking officials by the governments of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, and, after its downfall, by the government of the Emirate of Transjordan.
  His first job was in Karak, Transjordan, as an Arabic literature teacher. Later Tal would be appointed as Administrative Governor of Wadi Al-Seer and Shoubak in the 1920s.
context_section_description: Tal died in 1949 without publishing any collections of his poems, which he used to sign using the pseudonym Arar, a reference to the son of Amro bin Sha, a figure in Arab and Islamic history. Tal gathered his poems in 1933 and named his Diwan, poem collection, Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis (The Nights of Al-Yabis Valley). The title of his poem collection was reminiscent of the times he spent with the Dom community. But Tal's friends disagree with this interpretation and insist that Ashiyyat was the name of a gypsy woman he loved rather than referring to "nights".
  Tal's friend Mahmoud Motlaq published Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis in 1954, which included 66 poems that Tal's son Maryoud collected from newspapers and drafts. Moutlaq excluded 20 verses from publishing because he considered them to be "bad". When Tal's other friend Yacoub Al-Oudat published his biography titled Arar: Jordan's poet in 1958, it included more than 500 verses which were not present in Moutlaq's first edition of Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis. But Al-Oudat admitted that he left out a couple of verses that included profanity because he said that poets shouldn't be remembered for a couple of inappropriate verses that they wrote in a fist of fury. In 1973, professor Mahmoud Al-Samra published the second edition of Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis in which he included 33 verses that weren't published in the first edition. In 1982, academic Ziad Zou'bi found tens of verses in both editions of Ashiyyat Wadi Al-Yabis and Arar: Jordan's poet that were not written by Tal but by other poets. In his edition, he removed them from the main part, attributed them to the original writer and added them in an annex. Zou'bi published three more editions in 1988, 2007 and 2017.
  Many of Tal's poem venerate Jordan. He was the first Jordanian poet to include geographical references in his poetry. In this poem, he was talking with a preacher named Sheikh Aboud:
  Tal also wrote poems criticizing the British colonial officials in Jordan including Frederick Peake and Glubb Pasha, Transjordan's Arab Legion commanders, and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Cox, the British Representative. In addition to Tal, Emir Abdullah was also a poet and the two men were one of the leading poets of their day, responsible for formulating alternate visions of the country through their poetry.
  Many of Tal's poems were about women and alcohol:
caption: Tal with Crown Prince Talal in mid 1930s.
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