Nizar Qabbani was born in Damascus on March 21, 1923 and began writing poetry in 1944, just one year before he began his Syrian diplomatic career which he later abandoned for his greater love, poetry. 
     His literary works consisted of two dozen volumes of poetry and regular articles in the Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat.  Qabbani was revered by generations of Arabs for his sensual and romantic verse where it seemed that women were his main theme and inspiration.  His poetry uses everyday language. Gamal el-Ghitanti, the Egyptian novelist and editor of the weekly News of Literature, praised Qabbani as having been "by any measure a great Arab poet who made a big effort to make his poetry understandable to all people and not only to the elite."
     The Egyptian novelist Mona Helmi said, "His greatness came from his ability to put into beautiful words not only the ordinary actions between men and women, but also between the ruler and ruled and the oppressor and the oppressed."
     Qabbani published his first poem, "The Brunette had Told Me," in 1944, a year before he graduated with a law degree from the University of Damascus. The Syrian capital remained a powerful presence in his poems, most notably in "The Jasmine Scent of Damascus."  In his later years, Qabbani's poems included a strong strain of antiauthoritarianism.  One couplet in particular--"O Sultan, my master, if my clothes are ripped and torn it is because your dogs with claws are allowed to tear me" -- is often quoted by Arabs as a kind of shorthand for their frustration of life under dictatorship.  Still, Qabbani never explicitly criticized his native country or its long-reigning leader, President Hafez, al-Assad, and that allowed him to be hailed across Syria as a national hero. (National/Metro.)
     The criticism of the Arab leadership in poems written after the June defeat in 1967 (when the Arabs lost the war against Israel) was evident through Nizar Qabbani's poem Marginal Notes in the Book of the Setback.  The June setback circumscribes Qabbani's shift from love themes to political ones dealing mainly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Since the beginning of his career and up to the 1967 war, only few poems with sociopolitical themes were written by the poet.
     Qabbani believed the defeat was a shameful event and blames the Arab rulers through his poetry by saying that they have denied the Arab people any chance of expressing their opinions freely and acting as a spontaneous body in a free society.  It is considered one of the most important that Qabbani ever wrote.  This poem caused a great deal of controversy in Arab literary circles.
     Some critics said that Qabbani being "a poet on erotic themes who has devoted all his poetry to women and love is unqualified to write about national themes", also, Qabbani, more than any other writer or poet, "should be blamed because of his sensuous poetry which has affected the new generation badly and spoilt their morals",  Qabbani is no more than a "sadist who finds pleasure in whipping the Arab nation while she is bleeding because of the defeat", and by "dancing over the wounds of his people", the poet, by writing thus aims at "killing any remnant of determination or hope that amy still exist among the Arabs" - in this way he is "serving the enemy who wishes to see the Arabs in complete despair".
     The evident anger towards Qabbani reached its peak when Egyptian writers incited a campaign against him.  They attempted to have the authorities ban his works and the poet himself from entering Egypt.  In defense, Qabbani wrote to the President Nasser about the situation and was able to have all the restrictions lifted.
     The "Sultan" a poem by Qabbani, is an example of political verse that denotes Arab rulersand blames them for losing the wars because the people are unable to express their opinions:

If I were promised safety,
if I could meet the Sultan
I would say to him:  O my lord the Sultan!
my cloak has been torn by your ravenous dogs,
your spies are following me all the time.
Their eyes
their noses
their feet are chasing me
like destiny, like fate
They interrogate my wife
and write down all the names of my friends.
O Sultan!
Because I dare to approach your deaf walls,
because I tried to reveal my sadness and
tribulation,
I was beaten with my shoes.
O my lord the Sultan!
you have lost the war twice
because half our people
has no tongue.
 

     Thus, Qabbani makes clear the bitter fact that the Arabs were defeated by their own defects rather than by the strength of their enemy: The Jews did not come across our borders, but they crept in like ants through our defects.

     Although the reaction of hte two defeats (loss of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the June defeat in 1967)  caused the poet's works to initially reflect shock and a sense of loss it eventually seemed to regain composure and express faith, confidence and hope in the future.  Nizar Qabbani, for instance, in "Marginal Notes in the Book of the Setback", expressed his firm confidence that the new generation would be able to achieve what the present generation had failed to do.  After advising them not to "embrace their defeated fathers' thoughts or trace their deeds", the poet says:

O (our) children
rain of the spring, buds of hopes!
you are fertile seeds in our barren life;
you are the generation that will vanquish
the defeat.  (Palestine and Modern Arab Poetry.)

     Salma Khadra Jayyusi, a Palestinian writer and translator wrote:
Qabbani was not embracing fashionable causes when he began his concentrated attack on the way women were induced, through a narrow conservative education, to deny their own humanity.  He began his campaign long before feminism in the Arab world became a fashionable pursuit.  It was through his erotic verse that Qabbani first discovered, for himself and others, the full meaning of freedom, the fact that genuine freedom is not divisible, and cannot be sought except in its totality.  Political freedom has been championed by every poet who mattered in the Arab world.  In fact, it is virtually impossible for any poet to win esteem among the audience of poetry without first championing the cause of freedom and political liberty.  The Arab world is full of poets and other creative writers who are refugees from their own governments because of their audacity in facing up to injustice and repression.  This kind of struggle against internal coercion waged constantly by generation after generation of Arab creative writers, particularly the poets, has long been their privilege and choice, making itself felt before political thinkers begin to wage war through intellectual reasoning and didactic argument. Qabbani's superior achievement, however, is that he not only attacked political coercion, but aimed his well-honed pen at the most sacrosanct taboos in the Arab traditional culture: the sexual.  He called for the liberation of both body and soul from the repressive injunctions imposed upon them throughout the centuries, awakening women to a new awareness of their bodies and their sexuality, wrenching them away from the taboos of society, and making them aware of its discriminatory treatment of the sexes, of its inherent cruelty.  Aroused consciousness is irreversible, except through delusion.  Fanatical counterattacks, made in the name of religion, honor, or any of the great absolutes, can warp meaning already gained and re-encode its signals, but they cannot obliterate knowledge already acquired.  Something will abide: if not full conviction, at least a question, a lingering doubt. The Qabbani baptism is like a tattoo on the spirit.  It cannot be removed.

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