Province
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Haitim al-Tai
| While there's no doubt that Hatim al-Tai is a real man, there is a lot of romance about who he was, and about his actual acts of generosity and hospitality - but one thing is certain - he was very, very generous |
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Hail boasts a number of famous heroes and prominent poets - amongst them Zeid Al-Khair (or Al-Khail) Al-Taiee, Hayyan bin Olaiq, Ruwaished bin Kuthair, Qais bin Jerwah, and Al-Trimmah bin Adie. The most famous of them all is legendary poet and story teller, the extremely generous Hatim al-Tai.
Every civilization has its real life folk heroes whose exploits have taken on legendary proportions. Like the Irish Calhoun, Greek Aristides, or American Davey Crockett, Hatim al-Tai is a larger than life character whose exploits have been passed down from generation to generation and are much loved throughout the Middle East, North Africa, India and Indonesia.
Hatim al-Tai's exploits all revolve around his legendary generosity. He features in 101 Arabian Nights by Richard Burton as the ghost of Hatim al-Tai, who is generous even in death. He is the very personification of Bedouin hospitality.
Hatim was the chief of Taiy tribe - one of the largest in Hail. He lived in an age when history was recited as poetry around the after-dinner campfire. Specifically, he lived around the end of the Days of Ignorance, about A.D. 590, which means he was living during the youth of the Prophet (pbuh).
According to the earliest sources, Hatim lost his father when he was young and was raised by his grandfather. Raising the infant wasn't easy for his grandfather. Hatim's habit of giving away whatever happened to be in his hands to friends and strangers was a source of pride and even boasting for the old man at first; but as the years passed and the habit remained, his grandfather's resources grew smaller and the boasting fell away.
The final straw, so to speak, came when Hatim was watching over his grandfather's herd of camels. A group of riders appeared. Among them, three famous poets off to trade their verse for gold. Hatim (always hospitable) invited them to make camp for the night, and then, before the bemused guests, prepared a lavish feast consisting of the choicest camels of his grandfather's herd.
Hatim began his wanderings soon after that - always preceded by the stories told by the amused poets - stories which grew more hospitable with every telling.
How far he traveled in real life no one knows, perhaps in fact no farther than the boundaries of Hail, but even while he lived his fame passed far and wide.
Arabic poetry inspired the age of chivalry in the West. One man in particular, the Italian writer and diplomat Boccacio, was noted for his role in translating Arabian poems into the romantic style which wooed Europe.
So it's no wonder that Hatim ended up as 'Natan' in one of the great classics of European literature, "The Decameron" by Boccacio. Here, he is a young commoner whose generosity offends a great king. On hearing that the king has ordered his death, Natan offers himself freely as a supreme gesture of generosity, whereupon the king backs down and concedes that Natan is, indeed, the more generous man.
200 years later, the Persian author Kashifi wrote "Tales of Hatim" as a textbook on ethics for the ruler of Persia. This textbook, a popular success at the time, was translated into Turkish a generation later, and dedicated to Sultan Suleiman - from there the stories spread throughout the Ottoman Empire.
By the 17th century Hatim's fame had spread to India and Indonesia where a full-length novel based on "The Man From Najd" were told, enshrining for once and for all a global legend of the very real spirit of hospitality and generosity that has always been a hallmark of Arab culture |
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