From Poem to Foundational Tradition: The Afterlife of Bānat Suʿād

Abstract:

This article examines the long reception history of Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr’s Bānat Suʿād as a process through which a historically situated poem became a foundational literary tradition. Drawing on a systematic survey of a large corpus of Arabic works, the study identifies and traces several overlapping modes of reception: the transmission of the narrative surrounding Kaʿb’s encounter with the Prophet, the circulation of the poem and its individual verses, scholarly citation across multiple disciplines, commentarial activity, poetic opposition and rewriting, and increasingly abbreviated forms of cultural reference. The study argues that the poem’s exceptional durability cannot be explained by its literary merit or its association with the Prophet alone. Rather, its longevity resulted from a process of functional accumulation: narrative memory preserved symbolic authority, textual extraction created portability, repeated quotation produced evidentiary authority, commentary established textual centrality, and literary reuse renewed the poem’s productive force. Over time, these processes enabled even the formula “Bānat Suʿād” to evoke a wider narrative and literary complex. The article thus proposes a cumulative model for understanding how a poem moves from event to tradition and from textual presence to cultural

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