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al-Khansāʼ

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al-Khansāʼ

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Also known as Tumāḍir bint ʻAmr, Khansa

Tumāḍir bint ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Sharīd al-Sulamīyah (), usually simply referred to as al-Khansāʾ (, meaning "snub-nosed", an Arabic epithet for a gazelle as metaphor for beauty) was a 7th-century tribeswoman, living in the Arabian Peninsula. She was one of the most influential poets of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods.

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Type
Person
Gender
Male
Origin
United States
Active from
1946-04-13
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Key facts

Person.name
al-Khansāʾ
Person.image
Al-Khansa.jpg
Person.birth_place
Safeena, Arabia (present-day Mahd Al-Dhahab Madinah Region, Saudi Arabia)
Person.death_date
645/646.
Person.death_place
Najd, Arabia (present-day Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
Person.occupation
Poet

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Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Gender
female
Place of birth
Najd
Place of death
Najd
Occupation
writer
Languages spoken
Arabic
Religion
Islam
Image
Al-Khansa.jpg
Show 5 more facts
date of birth
0575-01-01
name in native language
الخنساء
writing language
Arabic
Commons category
Al-Khansa
date of death
0645-01-01
Sources (4)

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Encyclopedic overview

6 sections
Contents
  • Life
  • Poetry and importance in the history of Arabic literature
  • Editions and translations
  • See also
  • References
  • External links

Tumāḍir bint ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Sharīd al-Sulamīyah (), usually simply referred to as al-Khansāʾ (, meaning "snub-nosed", an Arabic epithet for a gazelle as metaphor for beauty) was a 7th-century tribeswoman, living in the Arabian Peninsula. She was one of the most influential poets of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods.

In her time, the role of a female poet was to write elegies for the dead and perform them for the tribe in public oral competitions. Al-Khansāʾ won respect and fame in these competitions with her elegies, and is widely considered as the finest author of Arabic elegies and one of the greatest and best known female Arab poets of all time. In 629, she went to Medina with a deputation from her clan and, after meeting the Islamic prophet Muhammad, embraced the new religion. Her poetry was later recorded by Muslim scholars, who were studying unaltered Arabic of her time in order to explicate the language of early Islamic texts.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “al-Khansāʼ” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.