Among the works of medieval Arabic literature analogous with Dante’s Divine Comedy, which encapsulated for posterity the literary influence of certain individuals, is the Epistle of Familiar Spirits (Risalat al-Tawabi‘ wa-l-Zawabi‘) by the Cordoban poet Ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035). The interest of this work in general “lies in its imaginative premise. Following the tradition of the mi‘raj [the Prophet Muhammad’s visit to heaven and hell], the poet travels with his inspiring genius to the netherworld to meet the jinn of poets living and deceased, engaging – and besting – them in poetic competition. The narration becomes a literary commentary on the Parnassus of Arabic poets …” (EAL, art. “Ibn Shuhayd”). Among the encounters with the muses of seven poets, representing both the Ancients and the Moderns, there is one with “Husayn”, the demon muse of Abu Nuwas. The scene is set up briefly as follows. Ibn Shuhayd travels in the company of his own poetic muse, Zuhayr. They come across a large monastery, surrounded by outlying churches and taverns, and recognize it as Dayr Hanna, the monastery of a place known as Dhat al-Ukayrah; both names feature in the poetry of Abu Nuwas. They inquire after “Husayn” and are warned by monks that he is inebriated in a tavern; but the visitors insist on meeting him. Zuhayr now advises Ibn Shuhayd to recite one of his tavern poems in order to stir the drunken demon from his stupor. Five lines of bacchic poetry are at this point inserted into the narrative; the lines are competent within the norms of the genre and generally reminiscent of Abu Nuwas, though they are not particularly memorable. “Husayn” recognizes the verses, vaguely, as those of Ibn Shuhayd and subsequently an exchange of poetry, touching on a number of subjects, ensues between the two figures.
Husayn goes on to recite some of the poetry with which he has inspired Abu Nuwas (from the latter’s Diwan); he then asks Ibn Shuhayd to recite more verses of his own, but the latter replies, “Have you left anything subject to be versified?” (which was something of a recurring anxiety among poets). The demon’s reply is significant. “You must recite! But walk the even path with me and avoid the highlands.” The reference is ultimately to the terrains of Arabia: to rugged uplands and level plains, a metaphor for poetic expression that was either harsh and rugged or smooth, refined, even urbane. “Husayn” is asking for poetry like “his” own, and the statement is in fact Ibn Shuhayd’s understated but important recognition of Abu Nuwas’s extraordinary stylistic influence on the Arabic tradition. It is style as much as theme that is important in this respect, as evinced by the compositions of two of the most well-known Andalusian poets of the eleventh century, Ibn Zaydun and al-Mu‘tamid ibn ‘Abbad; in different ways they, and others, were deeply indebted to Abu Nuwas’s often mellifluous verse. A few decades later the stanzaic lyric poems (muwashshahas) of al-A‘ma al-Tutili (the Blind Toledan, d. 1130) are so redolent of Abu Nuwas that they read like conscious tributes – which is significant since Abu Nuwas’s habit of quoting other poets (and even himself) in the last line of his lyric poems may have influenced a similar, and historically very significant feature at the structural tail-end of the Andalusian muwashshaha.
The point of illustrating Abu Nuwas’s literary afterlife through Ibn Shuhayd is that whilst he is – typically – associated, according to a sort of standard reflex, with the theme of the tavern, the style is more subtly just as important as the tavern: Abu Nuwas, coarse and eccentric though he could be, steered a stylistically natural and “even path” at the very heart of the classical Arabic tradition of poetry.
Contemporary Arab authors are profoundly sensitive to Abu Nuwas, none more so than the eminent Sudanese novelist, Tayeb Salih. There are evocations of Abu Nuwas in several of his works, including the celebrated Season of Migration to the North. In the following excerpt the protagonist of the novel, Mustafa Sa‘eed, who is the troubled incarnation of a conflict between cultures (British and Sudanese, colonizer and colonized), describes how he came across one of his English girlfriends:
I had met her following a lecture I gave in Oxford on Abu Nuwas. I told them that Omar Khayyam was nothing in comparison with Abu Nuwas. I read them some of his poetry about wine in comic oratorical style which I claimed was how Arabic poetry used to be recited in the Abbasid era. In the lecture I said that Abu Nuwas was a Sufi mystic and that he had made of wine a symbol with which to express all his spiritual yearnings, that the longing for wine in his poetry was really a longing for self-obliteration in the Divine – all arrant nonsense with no basis in fact. However, I was inspired that evening and found the lies tripping off my tongue like sublime truths. Feeling that my elation was communicating itself to my audience, I lied more and more extravagantly. After the lecture they all crowded round me: retired civil servants who had worked in the East, old women whose husbands had died in Egypt, Iraq and the Sudan, men who had fought with Kitchener and Allenby, orientalists, and officials in the Colonial Office and the Middle Eastern section of the Foreign Office. Suddenly I saw a girl of eighteen or nineteen rushing towards me through the ranks of people. She put her arms round me and kissed me. “You are beautiful beyond description,” she said, speaking in Arabic, “and the love I have for you is beyond description.” With an emotion the violence of which frightened me, I said: “At last I have found you, Sausan. I searched everywhere for you and was afraid I would never find you. Do you remember?” “How can I forget our house in Karkh in Baghdad on the banks of the river Tigris in the days of El-Ma’moun,” she said with an emotion no less intense than mine.
(trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, 1980, 142–3)
Abu Nuwas lived in Karkh, though shortly before “the days of El-Ma’moun”. There seems little doubt, however, that Abu Nuwas holds together this passage in which he is both an object of academic fascination and, vicariously, through the imaginary presence of his persona, the facilitator of enchantment and infatuation. Mustafa Sa‘eed is one of the more complex characters in Arabic literature. Brilliant in his studies in England, he becomes something of a polymath and utterly versed in English – not Arabic – literature. His attraction to Abu Nuwas, therefore, is superficially that of a wandering spirit to a literary icon of rebellion and libertinism.
At the end of the events of the novel Sa‘eed returns home to Sudan but settles in a village that is foreign to him. It is hard to say that he is roundly tolerant at the end of his life (the novel avoids resolving matters in which there is inherent tension); but he does come to lie at the cusp of cultures yearning for some form of harmony. His mysterious library, hidden away in a recess of his house, proves the point strangely when it is unlocked after his disappearance. Having come to settle in the “South” he had secretly brought an extraordinary collection of books with him containing not a single Arabic volume (even the Qur’an was in English). Abu Nuwas, who has something of the “universal figure” about him, might well have been one (if not the) point of cultural harmony for Sa‘eed.
Iconoclasm and tolerant diversity exist side-by-side in Abu Nuwas, a poet who lies, chronologically and stylistically, at the very cusp of the most significant divisions in the classical tradition. He was immeasurably influential, for all that his unique legend of ribaldry tends to dominate the way he is remembered. And his importance in Arab literary history is perhaps commensurate with the fact that he is one of the most likeable of poets.