Labīd bin Rabīˁa, nato c. 560 d.C.
"Do not be gone" lā tabˁadan is a formulaic phrase (westerners
would call it a "cliché" I guess) used to refer to the recently dead
(likewise lā yabˁadan "let
him not be gone.") Its ritual function may have been to indicate
psychological shock (i.e. "how can he have left us?") and/or to imply
that the person so commanded will survive as long as their memory and, by
definition, the verse-lament in their name. The verb is baˁida/yabˁadu meaning "to perish, to
depart." This verb and the related, more common baˁuda/yabˁudu "to be distant, far"
seem to have semantically bled into one another in Early Arabic.
E.g. Qur'an 11:95 a-lā buˁdan (=baˁuda) li-Madyana ka-mā baˁidat (=baˁida) Thāmūdu "Yea
let Midian perish even as Thamud perished." Among Orientalists, the
meaning is best brought out by S. Stetkevych:
...lā tabˁadan is equivocally
"do not depart" and "do not perish." It is precisely this
polysemous condensation into two words that evoke all the shared emotions of
loss and departure...that this phrase was selected as part of the elegiac
formulary. Further, it serves as a condensed expression of the purpose of
[lamentation]: for the Arab poet or poetess to "recall" the dead is
to "call back" the dead to life.
Al-Baghdādī
in Khizānatu l-Adab states:
...they [the ancient Arabs] meant in
invoking the deceased [via the formula la
yabˁadanna] to have his memory survive and not disappear: for after a man's
death, the survival of his remembrance takes the place of his life.
