Days of the Arabs (Ayyam al-'Arab)

"Days of the Arabs" (Ayyam al-'Arab) is the name, in Arabian legend, for the combats that the Arab tribes fought amongst themselves in the pre-Islamic era, and sometimes in early Islam. Individual days take their names from places or events, such as the Day of Bu'ath or the Day of Dhu Qar. Their number is considerable, but many were not battles between whole tribes; they were skirmishes in which only a few families or individuals opposed one another, and the Arabs themselves sometimes noticed this. Al-Zubayr b. Bakkar, for example, observed that only the day of Bu'ath was a proper battle between the Aws and the Khazraj, and that on the other days the fighting was limited to throwing stones and beating with sticks. ¹

A day followed a fixed pattern, as Wellhausen showed for the fights between the Aws and the Khazraj. A few men came to blows, perhaps over a border dispute or an insult to a protégé of a man of influence. The quarrel of a few then grew into hostility between whole tribes, which met in battle. Bloodshed was generally followed by the intervention of some neutral family, peace was soon restored, and the tribe that had lost fewer men paid the blood-price. The Ayyam, written in good old prose together with the ancient poems, give excellent information about conditions before Islam and about the chivalrous spirit of the old warriors. Similar material recurs in later popular romances: Zir, a hero of the Siyar Bani Hilal, is none other than Muhalhil, brother of Kulayb Wa'il, who plays a leading part in the War of al-Basus between the Bakr and the Taghlib. ²

Tradition holds that the Prophet ﷺ's companions already discussed the events of the jahiliyya in their gatherings, so the Ayyam early became a favourite subject of the akhbariyyun, the transmitters of the old Arab tales. The Fihrist names several authors who wrote on particular days or on all of them, but none of these works survives in its original form. Most later extracts borrow from Abu 'Ubayda (d. 210/825), who wrote a shorter work on 75 days and a larger one on 1,200 days. Later writers preserve the material in scattered pieces, in al-Tibrizi's Hamasa commentary, the Kitab al-Aghani, collections of proverbs and the geographers, and in full chapters, in Ibn 'Abd Rabbih's 'Iqd al-Farid, al-Nuwayri's Nihayat al-arab and Ibn al-Athir's al-Kamil, which arranges the days in chronological order. Al-Maydani's Majma' al-amthal treats 132 pre-Islamic days and 88 Islamic days. ³