4
Widening Horizons (c. 750–c. 900)
‘L—d!’ said my mother, ‘what is all this story about?’ – ‘A Cock and a Bull,’ said Yorick.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
In 987 an Iraqi scribe and bookseller, Ibn al-Nadim (also known as al-Nadim), brought out his Fihrist (or Index) in which he attempted to list and characterize ‘the books of all peoples, Arab and foreign, existing in the language of the Arabs, as well as of their scripts, dealing with various sciences, with accounts of those who composed them and the categories of their authors, together with their relationships and records of their times of birth, length of life, and times of death, and also of the localities of their cities, their virtues and faults, from the beginning of the formation of each science to this our own time’.
Not only were thousands of authors included in Ibn al-Nadim’s survey, but some of them were extremely prolix. The essayist Jahiz is known to have been the author of almost two hundred titles, a few of which will be discussed below. Kindi (d. 865), ‘the Philosopher of the Arabs’, was a noted polymath; in the words of Fritz Zimmerman, he not only ‘wrote on mathematics, logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics and ethics, but also on perfumes, drugs, foods, precious stones, musical instruments, swords, bees and pigeons’.
All this is evidence of an explosion of literacy from roughly the mid eighth century onwards. Part of this is attributable to increasing use of (relatively) cheap paper, which replaced parchment and papyrus. Chinese experts in the manufacture of paper had been captured by an Arab army at the Battle of Talas (751) and then employed to make paper in Samarkand, but the use of paper only became widespread during the caliphate of Harun-al-Rashid (786–809), when it was adopted for state business in the ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad. The foundation of libraries was another sign of the explosion of literacy. The Caliph al-Mamun (813–33), who was fanatically devoted to astrology and the study of old books and was a leading patron of translations into Arabic, is said to have founded Bayt al-Hikma, or the ‘House of Wisdom’, in 830 (although it may have existed under his predecessors). The Bayt al-Hikma was a library which became a teaching institution. Besides the large public libraries founded under the patronage of caliphs and viziers, and those attached to the great mosques, there were smaller circulating libraries run by scribes, from which books – often of a popular and entertaining nature – could be rented out. Authors provided bookseller-scribes with manuscripts of their works and licensed them to make copies for circulation. During the ‘Abbasid period a reading public came into being, of which such professional scribes were an important component. Ibn al-Nadim himself was the son of a scribal copyist who ran a bookstore. Writers congregated at the Suq al-Warraqin, the bookdealers’ market. Readers were replacing listeners as consumers of culture in the ‘Abbasid period. (Even so, it is important to bear in mind the quasi-oral culture of the time. It was, for example, normal to ‘publish’ a work by reading it aloud in a mosque. The Mosque of al-Mansur in Baghdad was particularly popular with poets. It was also common for an author to subject a disciple to an oral examination before giving him permission to reproduce the author’s manuscript.)
Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist can be read as a map of the literary world during the early ‘Abbasid period. His book was divided into nine chapters and it is evident from the way the chapters were divided that Ibn al-Nadim’s categories are not ours. The first chapter dealt with language, calligraphy and scripture; chapter two dealt with grammar; chapter three encompassed historians, genealogists, government officials who wrote books, cup companions, jesters and singers; chapter four was consecrated to poetry; chapter five was on the literature of Muslim sects; chapter six, on the writings of jurisconsults and experts on religious law; chapter seven dealt with philosophy and the sciences; chapter eight was a sort of ghetto reserved for ‘story-tellers and stories, exorcists, jugglers, magicians, miscellaneous subjects and fables’; in the last chapter Ibn al-Nadim discussed non-Islamic sects as well as literature on Asia. What emerges from the chapter headings and the contents of the Fihrist is the high status accorded to religious writings and to poetry and the low regard accorded to prose fiction. Fiction scarcely counted as literature. (An extract from Ibn al-Nadim on fiction will be given in the next chapter.)
Ibn al-Nadim was a courtier in Baghdad. What was and was not regarded as literature was largely determined by the court in Baghdad, and to a lesser extent by the Arab literary elite in the Iraqi towns of Basra, Kufa and Mosul. Soon after the overthrow of the last Umayyad caliph in 750, the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur had moved the capital of the Arab Islamic empire out of Syria, thereby distancing the centre of government from Arab tribal leaders who had been power-brokers under the Umayyads. Al-Mansur chose a new site in lower Iraq and in 762 work began on the foundations of the new ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad. The shift of the centre of the Islamic government eastwards to Baghdad brought the caliphs and the court elite in closer proximity to Persian culture. A growing number of Persian converts to Islam entered the bureaucracy and some, such as the Barmecide dynasty of viziers, occupied the very highest ranks in government and court life. Persians who had become fluent in Arabic began to play a crucial role in the development of Arabic literature, as did Persian patrons of that literature (including, among others, the Barmecides).
By the ninth century, if not earlier, there were many non-Arab converts to Islam who were fluent in Arabic. Some of these converts, though perhaps only a minority, resented the cultural arrogance of the Arabs and they wrote attacks on their privileged position; various Arab writers counter-attacked, giving rise to the Shuubiyyab controversy (shu'ub means ‘peoples’). The defenders of the Arabs (and they were by no means all Arabs themselves) boasted of their lineage, their conquests and their poetry. In the course of boasting of the eloquent possibilities of the Arabic language, they demonstrated that eloquence. More than anything else, they gloried in the fact that the Qur’an had been revealed in Arabic. Finally they accused their opponents of being open or covert supporters of heresy.
Their opponents, Persians, Greeks, Copts, Berbers and others, not only pointed to the past achievements of their own cultures but were often able to demonstrate that they wrote and spoke better Arabic than the Arabs themselves. Shu'ubi partisans uncovered discreditable episodes in Arab history and in doing so they were able to draw on materials generated by the inter-tribal feuding of the Arabs. The Shu'ubis mocked the crudeness of Arab rhetoric and metre, and they referred to the Arabs as ‘lizard-eaters’. They also sought to distinguish between Islam and the Arabs, and the poet Abu Nuwas went so far as to declare that ‘the Arabs in God’s sight are nothing’. Shu'ubis also impugned the suitability of Arabic as a literary language. There were, for example, too many synonyms in the language and also too many words with opposite meanings. (For instance, khalaa means ‘to invest’ and ‘to depose’; taraba means ‘to be moved with joy’ and ‘to be moved with sadness’.)
Most of the leading Shu’ubi partisans were Persians. However, the example of Shu'ubi polemic given here is somewhat unusual. It was allegedly written by Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn ‘Ali IBN WASHSHIYYA (though the name may be a pseudonym), and Ibn Washshiyya was a Nabataean. The Nabataeans were the remnants of the Aramaic-speaking population of Syria and Iraq and they presented themselves as heirs to the culture of ancient Babylon. According to Ibn al-Nadim, Ibn Washshiyya ‘claimed that he was a magician who made talismans and practised the Art [of alchemy]’. His longest and most famous (or should that be least obscure?) book, al-Filahah al-Nabatiya, or ‘Nabataean Agriculture’, pretended to be a translation made at the beginning of the tenth century of an agricultural treatise in Syriac. However, ‘Nabataean Agriculture’ is no ordinary agricultural handbook. It is filled with the most bizarre and sinister spells. It is also filled with boasts about the superiority of everything Nabataean, coupled with splenetic attacks on everything Arab.
Ibn Washshiyya also wrote various other occult treatises and the extract given below comes from one of these. The Kitab al-Sumum, or ‘Book of Poisons’, is allegedly based on medical work done by Christian scientists in the old Persian city of Gondeshapur. But large parts seem to be based on the author’s own exuberant fantasy. Ibn Washshiyya’s eclectic and imaginative notion of what a poison was found space for a stone like marcasite, found in China, which causes the man who sees it to laugh himself to death. The man could only be saved from the fatal consequences of this vision if, at the same time, he saw a certain local feathered bird. Then there was a bird which, if a man attempted to stone it, bit the stones, thereby magically causing the death of the thrower. The ‘Book of Poisons’ also includes directions for making killer castanets, as well as (rather revolting) instructions for producing a human-headed cow, the mere sight of which will infallibly kill its beholder. The preface to the ‘Book of Poisons’ contains one of Ibn Washshiyya’s wholly characteristic denunciations of the Arabs and defensive praise of the conquered peoples. ‘It splits your belly because of the envious ones, the ignorant who blame the Nabataeans and who are ashamed of their nationality, language and all the rest of it.’ Certainly the Arabs did not know how to poison people half as effectively as the Nabataeans. In the extract which follows, Ibn Washshiyya pretends to be translating a book on poisons. However, he was almost certainly its actual author.
Know, my son, that I felt it essential to translate this book and others also into Arabic from the [Syriac] language of this Nabatean people. I listened to the people calumniate them and perpetuate evil on them; these people were praising themselves, increasing their slanders, and saying, ‘We did not receive any science or philosophy from them [the Nabateans] nor moral virtue, nor any praiseworthy scientific work.’
They ridiculed other things and scoffed at them; they made much of [any] faults in their words and blamed them for their language, and made the Nabateans shameful as Nabateans. When they wished to calumniate and throw suspicion on a man, and to scoff at him, they would say to him, ‘O Nabatean!’ They set up sayings like, ‘He is stingier than a Nabatean,’ ‘He is viler and more ignoble than a Nabatean,’ ‘Such a one claims he is an Arab and in reality he is a Nabatean and so there is no good in him,’ and ‘This one claims that he is a Persian but he originally was a Nabatean, there is no good in him because of his origin.’
I have no patience, by Allah, my dear son, when I hear the words of the likes of those. I am not to be blamed for the zeal of my nation especially. I am sure that they discovered that knowledge of the applied sciences which is distributed among peoples or most of them. Who denies this cannot deny my words that nine-tenths of the sciences is theirs, and one tenth of it is that of other people. This is popularly accepted.
This calumniation of the Nabateans puts a burden on me to translate some of the sciences of the Nabateans, in order to make them known to other people, and to show men how wise the Nabateans are and how excellent their thought.
I found that most of those who calumniate the Nabateans and scoff at them are correct in applying their statements to themselves, since these have no science, no praiseworthy work, no experience, and no moral virtue. They may be pardoned since they are ignorant.
I intend to demonstrate the science of the Nabateans for them especially and for others so that they may know that their ancestors possessed much knowledge. Furthermore, some of the people make much of themselves and are haughty to all others, and consider themselves superior. The cause of this is simple ignorance, abominable weak-mindedness in succumbing to passion, and a desire to be victorious. They calumniate the Nabateans since they are in pure ignorance as to themselves, and are in a state of forget-fulness. If they would but know that they are their descendants, that they came from the Nabateans who are their ancestors, and have taken the place of the Nabateans, then they would not calumniate them, nor call them ‘Negroes’ and ‘villagers’.
I swear by my religion that when the prosperity of a people disappears, and its reverberations are felt, then one result is that they forget the sciences, neglect invention, and they become like beasts. When decadence settles on them, one step after another, and when distress, hard times, poverty, and straitened circumstances, one after another, and so on, occur, then they become brutes and miserable creatures.
I mention these words to my readers at the beginning of my book so that they may pardon me. This is since the treatise is on the subject of poisons, a topic in which concealment of its secret, and the less said and done about it, may be the better way of treating it. However, there are reasons for my pardon. This is that I am desirous of describing the science of this people in the field of poisons because their science and wisdom must be made known. To permit the people to profit by it, the poisons are described along with their remedies so that the ill-effects of the poisons will be countered. Who desires to keep away from this, let him do so. However, there are some criminals who, if they would know the properties of the poisons, would cause harm to the people. On the other hand, the drugs, remedies, and narcotics can be useful in many ways. There is more good than harm in the discussion of this subject.
The third reason for pardon of the one who speaks of poisons is that Allah the Creator created them to test men when they may be affected by them.
Martin Levey, ‘Medical Arabic Toxicology’, Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society 56, N.S. (1966), pp. 20–21
The translation movement was given its first impetus under the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur (754–75). According to the tenth-century historian Mas’udi, ‘Mansur was … the first caliph to have foreign works of literature translated into Arabic, for example Kalila and Dimna; the Sindhind; various of Aristotle’s treatises on logic and other subjects; Ptolemy’s Almagest; the Book of Euclid; the treatise on arithmetic and all other ancient works – Greek, Byzantine, Pahlavi, Persian and Syriac. Once in possession of these books, the public read them and studied them avidly.’
From the eighth century onwards a significant and growing quantity of literature in Arabic was written by non-Arabs, especially by Persians. Among the authors of prose and poetry who will be discussed below, Ibn Muqaffa’, Abu Nuwas, Bashshar and Ibn al-Rumi were all Persians. Non-Arabs also played a leading role in translating works from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek and other languages. Much of this was done under the patronage of the ‘Abbasid caliphs. According to Ibn al-Nadim, the Caliph al-Mamun became a great patron of translations from the Greek after being visited at night by a vision of Aristotle: ‘He dreamed that he saw a man of reddish-white complexion with a high forehead, bushy eyebrows, bald head, dark blue eyes and handsome features sitting on his chair.’ After a brief philosophical dialogue at the end of which the dead philosopher exhorted the caliph to believe in the One God, Mamun awoke and set about organizing the purchase of Greek texts from the Byzantine lands and having them translated.
Aristotle and especially Aristotle’s Ethics had a considerable impact on Arab culture. The tenth-century essayist Jahiz was to accuse the scribes of preferring Aristotle to the Qur’an. The philosopher Farabi (870–950?) wrote a treatise on the canons of poetry which depended almost entirely on Aristotle, yet there were areas of Aristotle’s Poetics which al-Farabi had great trouble in understanding – especially the Greek notion of theatre. Drama in Farabi’s eyes was a special kind of poetry, ‘in which proverbs and well-known sayings are mentioned’. As for comedy, it ‘is a kind of poetry having a particular metre. In comedy evil things are mentioned, personal characteristics and reprehensible habits.’ Farabi’s difficulty in understanding Aristotle on drama must in part have been due to the fact that live theatre hardly existed in the medieval Arab world.
Greek literature was revered as a ‘treasure house of truth’. Greek works were translated, sometimes directly from the Greek, but often from intermediary texts in Syriac. The Arab translation project was selective and broadly utilitarian. Works on mathematics, medicine, engineering and military science were translated – and so were works on philosophy, for the Arabs regarded philosophy as a useful subject. However, a great deal of Greek literature was not translated. The “Abbasid court was not interested in Homer, Thucydides, or Greek drama. Only a few of the Greek romances were translated. The Islamic lands did not absorb Greek and Persian literary culture indiscriminately. Indeed, as they became more familiar with alien cultures the Arabs became increasingly aware of their own cultural identity.
The impact of Persian literature on Arabic prose, non-fiction and fiction, was if anything even more important than that of Greek. ‘Abd Allah IBN AL-MUQAFFA‘ was not only the leading translator of Persian prose, but an important author in his own right. Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘was born around the year 721, of Persian stock. (His name, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, ‘Son of the Shrivelled’, alludes to the fact that his father’s hand had shrivelled up as the result of a savage blow dealt by the brutal governor and keen grammarian, Hajjaj.) Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘was a convert from Zoroastrianism and his enemies sometimes impugned the sincerity of his conversion. He was accused of having written a heretical imitation of the Qur’an which began, ‘In the name of the Light, the merciful, the compassionate …’ He worked as a government secretary in Basra. He translated a number of works from Persian, aiming thereby to introduce the ‘Abbasid court to traditional Sassanian culture – the cultural lore and etiquette, and the expert pursuit of diversions which the dihqan, or country gentleman, might be expected to master.
Ibn al-Muqaffa’ is most famous, however, for a book of animal fables, Kalila wa-Dimna. An Indian collection of animal fables in the mirrors-for-princes genre provided the ultimate source for what was to become one of the earliest and greatest classics of Arabic prose literature. The ancient Sanskrit text used stories about talking animals to offer guidance to young princes about the conduct of life and government; it was divided into five sections, hence its title, the Panchatantra (‘Five-Fold Warp’). In the sixth century the Indian story-book was translated from Sanskrit into Pahlavi (old Persian). Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘took the Persian version and translated and expanded it, in such a manner that the original tidy division into five chapters became somewhat obscured and he became the real author of the work. The animal fables are framed by a story about a pre-Islamic Persian sage, Burzoe, who went to India in quest of a famous book of wisdom which had been written for the guidance of kings. With the help of an Indian sage Burzoe secretly copied the precious book, which was in an Indian king’s library.
In the first chapter, ‘The Lion and Bull’, the Indian King Dabshalim, having asked his minister for a story about two men whose friendship is broken up by a liar, is obligingly served up with just such a story. There are two jackal viziers at the court of the Lion King, one of whom, Kalila, is virtuous while the other, Dimna, is a wickedly plausible intriguer. Dimna, jealous of the favour the Lion King was showing Shanzabah, the bull, tricks the king into killing him. However, Dimna is subsequently accused of this crime and is brought to trial. (The trial chapter was an addition by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘.) In his defence, Dimna cites virtuous proverbs and narrates improving fables. Sounding rather like Polonius, he speaks in favour of caution, clemency, loyalty and similar virtues. He talks eloquently in the hope of saving his life, but despite all the improving stories, sage advice and exhortations to virtue, the ambitious and treacherous Dimna is a thoroughly untrustworthy narrator and at the end of the chapter he is sentenced to be executed.
Telling a story as a ransom for one’s life is a recurrent theme in Kalila wa-Dimna. In story after story, animals talk themselves out of traps and ministers argue themselves out of disgrace. Thus the book has a Chinese-box structure, in which story is nested within story. Characteristically an animal who is arguing against being killed will announce the onset of a plea-bargaining story with some such phrase as ‘If you do that, it will be with you as it was with …’. The story which follows, which may well contain yet more stories within it, serves as a vehicle for philosophizing and for proverbs and snatches of ancient wisdom. (Of course, the theme of story-telling to save one’s life is later found in The Thousand and One Nights, not just in the frame-story of Sheherezade’s telling of tales, but also in such story-cycles as ‘The Hunchback’; that work too has a Chinese-box structure.)
The second section of Kalila wa-Dimna, ‘The Ring Dove’, deals with the theme of steady friendship. The main story in the next section, ‘The Owls and the Crows’, is about vigilance regarding enemies. ‘The Monkey and the Tortoise’ is dedicated to the theme of the man who acquires wealth without the ability to manage it. ‘The Mouse and the Cat’ is about escaping the wiles of enemies and, finally, ‘The Jeweller and the Traveller’ is about how a ruler should choose those whom he is going to favour. The original Indian story collection may well have been designed for princes, but the Arabic version, which has some very critical things to say about kings, seems to have been especially popular among government officials and scribes (the class to which Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘himself belonged).
Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘wrote a prologue of his own and, as a religious sceptic, added a section on the uncertainty of religions, as well as other material. He intended the book to teach eloquence and grammar and he hoped that his readers would commit it to memory. Jahiz called Kalila wa-Dimna ‘the treasure chest of wisdom’. Even Ibn al-Nadim, who did not like prose fiction much, was prepared to praise the elegance of the book’s Arabic. Ibn al-Muqaffa‘’s style, which was limpid and simple, was good for foreigners and schoolchildren who were trying to master Arabic. In the Middle Ages, Kalila wa-Dimna was one of the two most famous works of medieval Arab prose (the other, Hariri’s Maqamat, will be discussed in the next chapter). It was later turned into verse and it was also translated from Arabic into other languages including Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and Latin. Authors such as Ibn Zafar and Ibn Arabshah followed Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘in using ‘boxed’ animal fables as a vehicle for teaching politics and ethics. Modern admirers have included Carlos Fuentes and Doris Lessing.
It is fitting that Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘should be famous for what is an adaptation from another language, for he held that originality was unattainable and undesirable. A wise man rearranges choice bits of wisdom; he does not invent them. Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘believed that all human knowledge had been covered in the works of previous generations. Oddly, given Kalila wa-Dimna’s classic status, there is no definitive text and some versions include more stories and other material than others.
Wyndham Knatchbull, Kalila and Dimna: or
The Fables of Bidpai (London, 1819)
Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘not only translated and adapted works from Persian; he was also an author in his own right. His Kitab Adab al-Kabir, ‘The Grand Book of Conduct’, dealt with similar themes to those in Kalila wa-Dimna: wise polity, friendship, warning against flattery, magnanimity and so forth. His Risala al-Sahaba, ‘A Letter on the Entourage’, was a political treatise on the caliph, his ministers, servants and army. The notion of publishing a work of any kind without a formal addressee took time to catch on. The conventional fiction was that the letter one was writing had been requested by a particular correspondent, although the destined readership was usually much wider. Works like the Risala al-Sahaba are difficult to translate, for Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘and his contemporaries were discussing a technical subject, political theory, for which a specialized vocabulary had not yet been developed.
The circumstances of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘’s death (c. 757–9) are somewhat obscure, but he was almost certainly murdered at the behest of a political enemy, possibly in a fire. Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘had played a key role in the development of adab. Adab can be translated into English as ‘belles-lettres’, ‘good manners’, ‘refinement’ or ‘culture’. In modern Arabic, adab can be translated simply as ‘literature’. However, in the early ‘Abbasid period it was at first used to refer to a code of conduct which was primarily social and ethical. Very likely it owed something to pre-Islamic Persian notions of the way a dihqan, or country gentleman, was expected to behave and the subjects of which he was expected to be a master. Then, thanks to the activities of Ibn al-Muqaffa and other bureaucrats and scribes, the notion of adab as a kind of etiquette acquired an increasingly literary connotation. Adab came to be used (in a fairly unsystematic way) to refer to the sort of cultural baggage an ambitious government official, court hanger-on, or scribe might be expected to carry – snatches of history, poetry, examples of eloquent rhetoric, jokes, improving anecdotes, and so forth. In time adab effectively came to refer to secular culture. To be an adib, a master of adab, one had to be the possessor of a broad culture.
Jahiz, who was a master of adab himself, presented a cynical portrait of the typical scribe who was steeped in adab and who had studied a select body of approved literary texts. This absurd and servile fellow with his inkstand gives himself airs as if he were a master. He ‘knows by heart the more spectacular clichés by way of rhetoric’ and he actually prefers Aristotle to the Qur’an. Abu Uthman ‘Amr ibn Bahr al-jAHIZ (c. 776–868/9) was the leading literary and intellectual figure of his age, who in the course of his long life covered most of contemporary human knowledge in his writings. He was born in Basra and spent most of his life there. Basra’s heyday was in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, when it was one of the leading centres both of commerce and intellectual life in the caliphate. Ibn al-Muqaffa ‘also came from Basra, and so did the leading poets Bashshar ibn Burd and Abu Nuwas. Jahiz was of humble origins and according to some sources his grandfather was a negro porter. However, if this is true then his purported defence of the blacks, in an essay entitled The Boast of the Blacks against the Whites’, has a curious flavour, as many of the arguments in favour of black superiority have a parodie feel. For example, in arguing for the naturalness of black as a colour, he remarks, This exists in all things. Thus we see that locusts and worms on plants are green, and we see that the louse is black on a young man’s head, white if his hair whitens, red if it is dyed.’
More generally, throughout Jahiz’s writings it is hard to know when he is being sarcastic. As we shall see, the essay in which he pretends to praise singing concubines is actually an attack on them. Much of his writing consists of tour de force demonstrations of the art of rhetoric rather than expressions of deeply felt conviction. He was always prepared to argue both sides of a case: for example, he wrote one treatise in praise of wine and another against it. Jahiz was the master of munazara, that is the literary genre of the struggle for precedence, in which competing people, animals or objects put forth their respective merits. Thus he wrote a treatise on the respective merits of the back and the belly, another on the superiority of speech to silence, yet another in which boys and girls competed in boasting of their superior qualities, a dispute between summer and winter, and a debate between sheep-farmers and goat-farmers. The debate concerning the respective merits of contraposed persons or things was a kind of literary game which had originated in pre-Islamic Persia and which was taken up in Arabic literature in the ninth century.
Like many Basran intellectuals, Jahiz was a Mu’tazilite. Mu’tazilism was a theological movement whose adherents believed that the caliph had theocratic powers, including the authority to interpret and add to the Qur’an and the practice of the Prophet. Mu’tazilites believed that the Qur’an was created by God, while their opponents held that it was co-eternal with God. The Mu’tazilites were rationalists who tended towards scepticism and they were strongly influenced in their rationalism by Greek philosophy. Mu’tazilism was briefly the orthodoxy of the court in the early ninth century, but in the long run a more fundamentalist view prevailed.
Jahiz was the master of witty, learned, limpid prose. A few critics thought that his prose was too limpid, criticizing it for its lack of ornamentation. His essays, though well organized within paragraph-length units, tended to digress from topic to topic as he indulged his penchant for afterthoughts. He was a prolific essayist and wrote on such diverse topics as rhetoric, Mu’tazilism, cripples, mispronunciation, lizards, the caliphate, robbers, the culture of bureaucrats, book-collecting, the attributes of God, schoolmasters, Christianity, mules, Turks, pedlars’ slang, types of singers, capital cities and jokes. He used the belles-lettres essay to entertain as well as instruct; as a later writer, Mas’udi, put it, ‘when the author fears that he is boring or is tiring his audience, he skilfully passes from the serious to the entertaining, and leaves the grave tomes of science for the lively ones of amusing stories.’
Although most of Jahiz’s works are very short, this is not the case with his most famous work, the Kitab al-Hayawan, which is in seven volumes. The Kitab al-Hayawan, or ‘Book of Animals’, is a wonderful rambling discourse which, with its incessant plunges into apparent wild irrelevance, may remind some readers of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). A debate between a dog-fancier and a cock-fancier provides the framing text for the explosion of erudition and clowning which follows. However, the underlying serious purpose of the book was to demonstrate that Arab science was not inferior to Greek in its knowledge of zoology – or anything else. ‘We rarely hear of a statement of a philosopher on natural history, or come across a reference to the subject in books by doctors or dialecticians, without finding an identical passage in Arab or Bedouin poetry, or in the everyday wisdom of those who speak our language and belong to our religious community.’ Jahiz considered Islamic civilization to be the fulfilment of the earlier cultures of the Greeks, Persians and Indians: it had absorbed their discoveries and gone on to develop them further. At another level, Jahiz wished to demonstrate the coexistence of good and evil in the world which God had created and the potential usefulness of every created thing. But the length of the Kitab al-Hayawan allowed Jahiz to plunge into Shandyesque digressions on the literary tastes of Manicheans, how eunuchs are made, the influence of climate, eating dogs, embryology, the techniques of stranglers, the nature of the atom, and much else besides. Jahiz sought to vary tone and subject matter, so as to keep the reader reading.
Jahiz was a noted bibliomaniac. He used to pay the owners of bookshops to be locked up in their premises at night so that he could read the stock. It is reported that he was killed when an avalanche of books collapsed on top of him. The first extracts from his masterpiece, the Kitab al-Hayawan, are in praise of books.
Say to Zuhair, when he goes off by himself and sings: Whether thou sayst little or much, thou art a prattler.
Thy coldness makes thee so hot that to me thou seemest like fire;
Let no one be surprised to hear me say this: is not snow both hot and cold at once?
… Moreover, have you ever seen a garden that will go into a man’s sleeve, an orchard you can take on your lap, a speaker who can speak of the dead and yet be the interpreter of the living? Where else will you find a companion who sleeps only when you are asleep, and speaks only when you wish him to?… You denigrate books, whereas to my mind there is no pleasanter neighbour, no more fair-minded friend, no more amenable companion, no more dutiful teacher, no comrade more perfect and less prone to error, less annoying or importunate, of a sweeter disposition, less inclined to contradiction or accusation, less disposed to slander or backbiting, more marvellous, cleverer, less given to flattery or affectation, less demanding or quarrelsome, less prone to argument or more opposed to strife, than a book.
I know no companion more prompt to hand, more rewarding, more helpful or less burdensome, and no tree that lives longer, bears more abundantly or yields more delicious fruit that is handier, easier to pick or more perfectly ripened at all times of the year, than a book.
I know no animal product that despite its youth, the short time that has elapsed since its birth, its modest price and its ready availability brings together so much excellent advice, so much rare knowledge, so many works by great minds and keen brains, so many lofty thoughts and sound doctrines, so much wise experience or so much information about bygone ages, distant lands, everyday sayings and demolished empires, as a book.
… For all its smallness and lightness, a book is the medium through which men receive the Scriptures, and also government accounts. Silent when silence is called for, it is eloquent when asked to speak. It is a bedside companion that does not interrupt when you are busy but welcomes you when you have a mind to it, and does not demand forced politeness or compel you to avoid its company. It is a visitor whose visits may be rare, or frequent, or so continual that it follows you like your shadow and becomes a part of you …
A book is a companion that does not flatter you, a friend that does not irritate you, a crony that does not weary you, a petitioner that does not wax importunate, a protégé that does not find you slow, and a friend that does not seek to exploit you by flattery, artfully wheedle you, cheat you with hypocrisy or deceive you with lies.
A book, if you consider, is something that prolongs your pleasure, sharpens your mind, loosens your tongue, lends agility to your fingers and emphasis to your words, gladdens your mind, fills your heart and enables you to win the respect of the lowly and the friendship of the mighty. You will get more knowledge out of one in a month than you could acquire from men’s mouths in five years – and that at a saving in expense, in arduous research by qualified persons, in standing on the doorsteps of hack teachers, in resorting to individuals inferior to you in moral qualities and nobility of birth, and in associating with odious and stupid people.
A book obeys you by night and by day, abroad and at home; it has no need of sleep, and does not grow weary with sitting up. It is a master that does not fail you when you need him and does not stop teaching you when you stop paying him. If you fall from grace it continues to obey you, and if the wind sets fair for your enemies it does not turn against you. Form any kind of bond or attachment with it, and you will be able to do without everything else; you will not be driven into bad company by boredom or loneliness.
Even if its kindness to you and its benevolence towards you consisted merely in saving you from the tedium of sitting on your doorstep watching the passers-by – with all the aggravations that posture entails: civilities to be paid, other people’s indiscretions, the tendency to meddle in things that do not concern you, the proximity of the common people, the need to listen to their bad Arabic and their mistaken ideas and put up with their low behaviour and their shocking ignorance – even if a book conferred no other advantage but this, it would be both salutary and profitable for its owner.
Pellat (ed.), The Life and Works of Jahiz
(trans. D. M. Hawke), pp. 130–32
COMMENTARY
Sahban Wa’il was a pre-Islamic figure famed for his eloquence; Baqil was a pre-Islamic figure famed for his lack of eloquence.
The al-Hassan ibn Hani whose verses are quoted by Jahiz is the poet Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani’ al-Hakimi. He is more commonly referred to as Abu Nuwas and he is discussed elsewhere in this chapter.
As Charles Pellat explains in his excellent introduction to the works of Jahiz, the third volume of the Kitab al-Hayawan was supposed to be devoted to pigeons, but first Jahiz digresses to set out his views on jokes and to relate some examples, of which the following is one example:
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… I was sitting one day with Dawud b. al-Mu’tamir al-Subairi when a beautiful woman went by, dressed in white; she had a lovely face and figure, and wonderful eyes. Dawud got to his feet, and since I was sure he was going to follow her, I sent my slave to see what happened. When Dawud came back, I said to him: ‘I know that you got up to go and speak to her; it is useless to lie, and your denials will not hold water. I merely wish to know how you accosted her and what you said to her’ (though I fully expected him to embroider some fantastic exploit for me, as he was wont). ‘I accosted her,’ he replied, ‘with these words: “Had I not espied in you the stamp of virtue, I should not have followed you.” She burst out laughing, and laughed so much that she had to lean against the wall, then replied: “So it is the stamp of virtue that gives a man like you the impudence to follow and lust after a woman like me? To say that it is virtue manifest that makes men brazen really is the absolute limit!”‘ |
Pellat (ed.), The Life and Works of Jahiz
(trans. D. M. Hawke), pp. 148–9
Jahiz’s description of a qadi (judge) harassed by a fly is one of the most famous passages in the Kitab al-Hayawan:
He used to say the morning prayer at home, though he lived quite near the mosque, and then go to his court, where he would wrap his robes around him and sit down without supporting himself on anything as he did so. He sat bolt upright and stock still, neither turning round in his seat, opening his coat, crossing his legs or leaning on either arm of the chair; he was like a statue.
He would remain thus until the noon prayer compelled him to rise, then sit down again and take up the same posture until the time of the afternoon prayer; having accomplished that, he would remain motionless until sunset, when he would get up, say his prayers, and sometimes (what am I saying? often, rather) return to his seat and deal with a multitude of deeds, contracts and miscellaneous documents. Then he would say his evening prayer and go home. If the truth be told, he never once got up to go to the lavatory during the whole of his tenure of office: he did not need to, since he never felt like a drink of water or other beverage. Such was his routine all the year round, winter and summer, whether the days were long or short. He never so much as lifted his hand or inclined his head, but limited himself to moving his lips.
One day, when his assessors and the public had taken their places beside him, in front of him and in the galleries, a fly settled on his nose. It lingered there awhile, and then moved to the corner of his eye. He left it alone and endured its biting, just as he had armed himself with patience when it settled on his nose, never twitching his nostrils, shaking his head or waving it away with a finger. However, since the fly was becoming really persistent, causing him acute pain and moving towards a spot where it was beyond bearing, he blinked his eyelid. The fly did not go away. This persistence drove him to blink repeatedly, whereupon the fly moved away until the eyelid stopped moving, then returned to the corner of the eye even more fiercely than before and stuck its sting into an already sore spot. The qadi’s endurance was weakening and his irritation growing: he blinked harder and more rapidly. The fly went away for a moment, then settled again and became so persistent that our qadi, his patience completely at an end, was reduced to driving it away with his hand. Everyone in court was watching this and pretending not to see it. The fly went away until he dropped his hand, then returned to the charge and compelled him to protect his face with the hem of his sleeve, not once but several times.
The magistrate realized that no detail of this scene was escaping his assessors and the public. When he caught their eye, he exclaimed: ‘I swear the fly is more persistent than the cockroach and more presumptuous than the crow! God forgive me! How many men are infatuated with their own persons! But God acquaints them with their hidden weakness! Now I know I am but a weakling, seeing that God’s most feeble creature has vanquished and confounded me!’ Then he recited this verse: ‘And if the fly should rob them of aught, the gods of the idolaters would be unable to restore it to them. Worshipper and idol are both powerless.’
Pellat (ed.), The Life and Works of Jahiz
(trans. D. M. Hawke), pp. 154–5
The next passage comes from Jahiz’s ‘Letter on Singing-Girls’:
Beeston (trans, and ed.), ‘The Epistle on Singing-Girls’
COMMENTARY
Nayruz and Mihrjan are the Persian festivals of the spring and autumn equinoxes respectively. Both days were occasions for gift-giving.
Majnun (‘Madman’) is the name by which the semi-legendary seventh-century poet Qays ibn Mulawwah is commonly known. His ill-fated love for Layla sent him mad and he withdrew into the desert, where the wild beasts were his only companions. The story of Majnun and Layla was popular with Arab and Persian poets and painters.
Although Jahiz’s essay Risalat al-Qiyan (‘Letter on Singing-Girls’) is presented in the form of a letter, this was a formal fiction, as this epistle, like so many similar literary products of the ‘Abbasid age, was really addressed to the general reading public. Singing girls were already employed by the Umayyad caliphs to entertain them. Such entertainers were usually highly educated and were skilled not only in singing and music (usually on the lute), but were also expected to be expert and well-informed conversationalists. Some masters of singing-girls were prepared to hire them out for other men’s parties, sending them off with a raqib, or guardian. The function of the singing-girl was somewhere between that of a prostitute and a professional bluestocking. Poetry was commonly given a musical setting and then sung by these geisha-like creatures. Hence the musician and courtier Ishaq al-Mosuli declared that ‘Music is like a book that men conceive and women register’ (though in fact some singing-girls composed their own poetry). Jahiz makes only a perfunctory pretence of defending this institution and in fact the treatise is an attack on these seductive but immoral denizens of the court of the ‘Abbasid caliphs.
The Kitab al-Bukhala’, or ‘Book of Misers’, is one of Jahiz’s best-known works. It can be read as Jahiz’s lament for the decline in standards of hospitality in his own time (but in Arab literature each age perceives itself as a decline from the previous one). Partly the book was also written to demonstrate that the Arabs exceed all other races in generosity – in particular the Khurasanis (inhabitants of eastern Iran), who had a special reputation for meanness. Generosity was esteemed as one of the virtues in medieval Arab culture. It loomed particularly large in the minds of literary folk, who relied on their wits and their learning to secure them their next meal. Finally, like many of Jahiz’s products, the Kitab al-Bukbala can be read simply as entertainment. It is full of quirky portraits and anecdotes, such as the one concerning a governor of Basra who, after soaking himself in melted butter for medicinal reasons, had the butter sold on in the local markets. After word of this got about, Basrans stopped buying butter for a year.
Al-Jahiz, The Book of Misers, trans. Serjeant, p. 30
COMMENTARY
Zubaydah here is, unusually, a man’s name.
A barnakan is a woman’s black cotton dress.
‘All evil was assembled in one room and locked in and the key to it was drunkenness’ is a hadith or saying attributed to the Prophet.
Al-Jahiz, The Book of Misers, trans. Serjeant, pp. 68–71
COMMENTARY
According to R. B. Serjeant, zadw is a game which ‘seems to consist of hiding nuts or stones in pits and asking another player to guess “odds and evens”‘.
A tannur oven is a kind of baking oven, usually clay lined. It was quite common for the kitchen to be located on the roof.
The dinar is a gold coin, the dirham a silver coin and the qirat a fraction of a dirham.
In Chance or Creation?, Jahiz argues that the existence of God is deducible from the visible and tangible evidence of the created universe (rather like William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794) in which the existence of God was proved from the appearance of design in natural phenomena). Although this is in the main a serious and reasoned exercise, every now and again comedy breaks in, as here:
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Have you heard what is related about the dragon and the clouds? They say that clouds are given the task of snatching a dragon whenever they see one as a magnet attracts a piece of iron, so that it will not venture its head out of the ground for fear of clouds, and will emerge only rarely, when the sky is clear without a speck of cloud. Why were the clouds given the task of looking out for this animal and snatching it, if it were not to prevent it from harming people? If you object, ‘Why was this animal created at all?’ we answer, ‘To frighten people. It is like a whip to frighten suspicious characters, in order to discipline them and teach them a lesson.’ |
Jahiz, Chance or Creation?, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem
(Reading, Berks., 1995), p. 57
Jahiz’s Kitab al-Tarbi' wa al-Tadwir, ‘The Book of the Square and the Round’, is a playful polemic directed against a contemporary who had claimed that good and natural things tended to be rounded in shape. Jahiz mocked the assumed learning of his opponent through the ironic massing of unanswerable questions. What bird is the phoenix? What was the original language of the world? Which is the longest-lived animal? Who or what were the parents of the phoenix? Why is the peacock’s tail coloured in the way that it is? And so on. (Jahiz here anticipates the quizzing of the seventeenth-century doctor in Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Urne Burial’: ‘what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture’.) Jahiz suggested that his antagonist’s prejudice in favour of roundness stemmed from the fact that he was a tubby man himself.
Jahiz’s writing had its critics. In the following century Badi ‘al-Zaman al-Hamadhani had his fictional mouthpiece, Abu al-Fath, denigrate Jahiz’s prose in these terms: ‘It consists of far-fetched allusions, a paucity of metaphors and simple expressions. He is tied down to the simple language he uses, and avoids and shirks difficult words.’
But Hamadhani’s opinion of the great essayist was not widely shared. Jahiz was described by his younger contemporary, Ibn Qutayba, as ‘the best stirrer-up of argument, the most articulate in raising the small and depreciating the great, who succeeds in doing both the thing and its opposite’. Abu Muhammad ‘Abd Allah ibn Muslim IBN QUTAYBA al-Dinawari (828–89), though born in Iraq, was of Persian stock; nevertheless, he defended the Arabs in the Shu’ubi controversy. He was a judicial official in Iraq before retiring to devote himself to literature and scholarship. He was the author of the Kitab Adab al-Katib, which may be tentatively translated as The Book of the Culture of the Scribe’, a rather earnest work offering guidance, mostly on philological matters, to scribes. His best-known work, the Uyun al-Akhbar (‘Sources of Narratives’), has already been cited in the first chapter with reference to the stereotypical sequence of themes in the Jahili qasida. (Ibn Qutayba was adamant that the particular sequence of themes he had listed was inviolate: ‘The later poet is not permitted to leave the custom of the ancients with regard to those parts [of the ode], so as to halt at an inhabited place or weep at a walled building, since the ancients halted at a desolate spot and an effaced vestige.’) The ‘Uyun was divided into ten books dealing with such broad themes as warfare, moral qualities, food and women. Essentially the work was a collection of anecdotes and poems from pre-Islamic times onwards which, however tenuously, were supposed to illustrate such themes. By reading literary anthologies like that produced by Ibn Qutayba, people who were neither descended from the Arab tribal aristocracy, nor from Persian dihqans, learnt about the culture of the elite.
What follows are wise sayings selected from the chapters on mental and moral qualities in the ‘Uyun al-Akhbar.
The “Uyun al-Akhbar of Ibn Qutayba, trans. L. Kopf and ed.
F. S. Bodenheimer and L. Kopf (Paris and Leiden, 1949), pp. 84–6
COMMENTARY
The translators have omitted the chains of transmission, i.e. ‘I was told by so-and-so, who had it from what’s-his-name, who heard it recited by …’ etc., etc.
As can be seen from some of the above, one of the uses of poetry was to serve as a vehicle for ethical teaching.
Kuthayyir, who lived in the Umayyad period, was famous for his love poetry.
Dhu-l-Isba’ al-Adwani was a pre-Islamic poet who belonged to the warlike tribe of Adwan. (Dhu-1-Isba ‘literally means ‘possessor of the finger’ and refers ironically to the fact that the poet lost a finger as the result of a viper’s bite.)
Sufyan ibn Mu’awiya was a member of the princely Umayyad clan; hence the envy.
Mus’ab ibn al-Zubayr was a prominent anti-Ummayad politician of the late seventh century. Al-Ahnaf ibn al-Qays was a leading politician and general. ‘Ahnaf’ refers to his deformed feet. He was also a poet, and he was credited with many aphorisms and proverbs.
A’sha (‘the night-blind’) is a name that was shared by a number of pre-Islamic poets.
The Bedouin’s somewhat cryptic formulation means that a man’s bearing is so arrogant that his face could damage stone. The Ka’ba is the Black Stone at Mecca, the object of the annual Muslim pilgrimage. To steal the curtains which are hung over it would be an act of gross sacrilege.
Abu-l-Aswad is probably the politician and poet al-Du’ali, who lived and wrote in Basra in the Umayyad period. He was notorious for his miserliness and obstinacy. (Inevitably, therefore, he also featured in Jahiz’s book on misers.)
Abu Darda was a Companion of the Prophet. He is alleged to have abandoned a successful business in order to devote himself entirely to religion. Many pious and ascetic sayings were attributed to him.
The ‘Uyun was a typical work of adab, consisting of choice materials which would improve a person’s conduct and conversation. (Mastery of adab might also improve a person’s prospect of advancement in government service.) Adab anthologies were a characteristic product of the culture of the majlis. A majlis (pl. majalis) means session, or, in a literary context, soiree or seance. At such soirees the cultured elite delivered improvised lectures and capped each other’s anecdotes. Much of the material which went into later anthologies came from such assemblies. Adab lore was transmitted from generation to generation. It is a general characteristic of medieval Arabic prose literature that its writers tended to disclaim originality; instead they stressed the fact that they were transmitting rather than inventing their material. They usually took care to provide a chain of transmission which authenticated a story and explained how it had reached their ears. Wisdom was supposed to be transmitted by word of mouth, rather than gleaned by reading texts, and therefore oral sources rather than written sources tended to be stressed.
The Barmaid (or Barmecide) clan were, after the caliphs themselves, the grandest patrons of literary assemblies. The Barmakis were a Persian administrative dynasty who originated in Balkh, a city in what is today northern Afghanistan. From the beginnings of ‘Abbasid rule in the 750s onwards, several generations of the Barmaki clan served the caliphs as viziers, as well as in other administrative posts. Until the sudden, mysterious and bloody disgrace of him and his clan in 803, Yahya ibn Khalid al-Barmaki was the power behind the throne during the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid (786–809). Yahya and his kinsmen were also leading patrons of literature and thought. Despite or perhaps because of their Persian origins, they were at pains to favour traditional Arab forms of poetry. Their majalis, at which poets, littérateurs, theologians and philosophers gathered, were particularly famous. On one celebrated occasion Yahya ibn Khalid presided over a majlis which (evidently following the example of Plato’s Symposium) was devoted to the theme of love. The account which follows was written by al-Mas’udi (on whom see Chapter 5).
Lunde and Stone, The Meadows of Gold, pp. 109-13
Although Ibn Qutayba was a political and religious conservative and an anthologist of the earliest Arabic poetry, he was also a champion of contemporary experimentation with verse forms and genres. More generally in the urban literary circles of ‘Abbasid Iraq, the old desert values – the pre-eminence of tribal lineage, manliness, boldness and endurance – were being replaced by what was, superficially at least, a more sophisticated urban code, of which the mannered ways of the zarif were the most extreme example.
Medieval Arab lexicographers characterized the zarif as ‘excellent, or elegant, in mind, manners, address or speech; and in person, countenance, garb or guise, or external appearance; clever, ingenious, intelligent or acute in intellect; well-mannered; well-bred, accomplished or polite; beautiful in person or in countenance; elegant, graceful, etc.’. The zarif, then, was a dandy and an arbiter of taste. He was a connoisseur of dress, fine objects, poetry and wit. The somewhat precious code of conduct of the zarif was spelt out in the Kitab al-Muwashsha, which translates as ‘The Book of Coloured Cloth’, but the title was surely a pun on the author’s name. Abu al-Tayyib Muhammad ibn Ahmad AL-WASHSA (860–936) was a grammarian who also taught some of the Caliph Mu’tamid’s princesses and concubines. The Kitab al-Muwashsha presents an ideal of life which is above all an ideal of courtly love, in which being in love was a full-time occupation.
‘Kitab al-Muwashsha’, trans. Gustave E. von Grunebaum,
in Medieval Islam, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1953), pp. 311–12
The zarif sought to comport himself in such a way as to attract the favourable attention of the beloved. Al-Washsha offered guidance on how to dress, perfume oneself and speak and what modest gifts might be appropriate, as well as what sorts of simple verses might accompany those gifts. Ideally, the refined (and of necessity wealthy) man should pursue a courtesan or singing-girl, and the notion that the singing-girl might in fact be unworthy to be the recipient of his love only made the passion more exquisite and ennobling (compare here Swann’s love for the cocotte Odette in Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu). Longing was better for a zarif than sex:
or to send letters whose spells are stronger than witchcraft.
Love is nothing but this; when lovers sleep together, love perishes.
The unchaste are only interested in having children.
A. Hamori (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 209
The nadim, or cup companion, was equally important as an arbiter of taste. The word nadim derives from the verb nadama, which means ‘to repent’. The link between the cup companion, who was usually a wine-drinker and well versed in risqué stories and buffoonery, and the concept of repentance is certainly curious, but perhaps a reference is intended to a saying attributed to the Prophet: ‘He who drinks wine in this world and does not repent from drinking it will be denied it in the hereafter.’ The nadim ’s brief was to sit and eat and drink with the ruler, or other patron, in the evening and to entertain him with conversation, poetry, historical anecdotes, fantastic stories, jokes, gastronomic lore, games of chess – whatever was required. It was a recognized job and commonly the nadim was salaried; sometimes he wore a uniform. The institution of the cup or boon companion had its origins in the Sasanian court culture of pre-Islamic Persia and the Arab kingdom of Hira (which was under Sasanian patronage). Although there were nadims in pre-Islamic times and although some of the Umayyad caliphs and princes maintained nadims, the golden age of the institution was the ‘Abbasid period. An enormous number of anecdotes and poems collected by such writers as Jahiz, Mas’udi and Tanukhi either originated in the table-talk of the nadims, or at least were ascribed to them. Nadims were, in part at least, professional storytellers, but they were highly cultivated entertainers and the sorts of story they related constituted an important part of the adab of the age. Huge numbers of entertaining or edifying stories were ascribed to such figures as the courtier and poet Abu Nuwas, the musician and raconteur Ibrahim al-Mawsili (d. 804), and his son, Ishaq al-Mawsili. Ishaq, the singer, had a considerable private library and was treated by the caliph and his entourage as a scholar.
The following story related by Mas’udi, about Ibrahim and one of his sources of inspiration, can be paralleled by other tales told about singers and poets and the supernatural sources of their inspiration.
“Don’t stop!”
So I continued until he fell asleep. Then I stopped, set down my lute and went to my usual place.
Suddenly I saw a handsome, well-built young man appear. He was wearing a light robe of painted silk and he was very elegant. He came in, greeted me, and sat down. I was very surprised that an unknown person could simply walk in at such a time and at such a place, without having been announced. I said to myself that it was probably some son of Rashid’s whom I had so far neither met nor seen.
The stranger picked up the lute from where I had left it, placed it in his lap and began to try it out with all the skill in the world. He made harmonies I could never have believed and after a prelude, more beautiful than anything I had ever heard, the youth began this song:
Drink a few more cups with me, my friends,
Before you go! Cupbearer, bring us some more
Already the first light of morning has stripped
Away the darkness and torn the chemise from the night.
Then he set down his lute and said:
“Son of a whore, when you sing, that is how you should sing!”
And he walked out.
I ran after him and asked the chamberlain:
“Who was the young man who just left?”
“No one has come in or gone out,” he replied.
“No, no,” I insisted, “I have just seen him walk right by me, only a minute ago, a man with such-and-such an appearance!”
But the chamberlain stated again very positively that no one had entered or left. I was more astonished than ever. As I returned to my place the Caliph awoke and asked:
“What is going on?”
I told him the story and he was extremely surprised.
“Beyond any shadow of a doubt,” he said, “you have received a visit from Satan.”
Afterwards, at his request, I repeated the song I had just heard. He listened with great pleasure and then gave me a handsome present. After which I withdrew.’
Lunde and Stone, The Meadows of Gold, pp. 89–90
Ibrahim ibn AL-MAHDI (779–839) was son of the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi and eventually became caliph himself for a brief and unfortunate period (817–19). After his overthrow, he went into hiding and on his capture he was imprisoned for a while. However, he survived political disgrace to become a distinguished courtier, poet and musician. Besides being the author of the first Arabic cookbook to have survived, the Kitab al-Tabikh, he also wrote poems on food. For example, in a poem on a certain turnip dish, he compared the turnip to the moon, the stars and to silver coins; the aubergine was another subject of poetic passion. This was, incidentally, the age of the celebrity male cookbook, for medieval Arab housewives do not seem to have written on cookery. The historian Miskawayh also wrote on cookery and the poet and astrologer Kushajim wrote poems on food (see Chapter 5).
The esteem in which Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Kalila wa-Dimna was held was exceptional. In general, prose fiction was anonymous and poorly regarded. There is an instructive anecdote in a tenth-century work of adab, al-Awraq (The Leaves’) by al-Suli (d. 946). The grandmother of a young’ Abbasid prince, who was later to rule as the Caliph al-Radi in the years 934-40, sent eunuchs to requisition his books so that she might censor his reading. When the eunuchs shamefacedly returned the thoroughly respectable collection of books to the prince, the latter berated them, saying, These are purely learned and useful books on theology, jurisprudence, poetry, philology, history, and they are not what you read – stories of the sea, the history of Sindbad and the “Fable of the Cat and the Mouse”.’
Since stories featuring adventures, sex and magic were not on the whole highly regarded by the literary elite, it is hard to trace the evolution of popular story-collections and this particularly applies to Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights, which is also known in the West as The Arabian Nights). However, it would appear that the Arab collection of entertaining stories was based on a now lost earlier Persian version of stories known as the Hazar Afsaneh, or Thousand Stories’. The earliest fragment of the Arabic version of The Thousand and One Nights dates from the early ninth century, but it survives only in the form of a single damaged page, in which Dunyazade prompts her sister Sheherazade to start her story-telling. The framing concept of the stories seems to have been that of munaz-ara, or comparison between different qualities, and as such it is not so very different from the debates about qualities or objects, devised by Jahiz and others.
Night
And when it was the following night said Dinazad, ‘O my Delectable One, if you are not asleep, relate to me the tale which you promised me and quote striking examples of the excellencies and shortcomings, the cunning and stupidity, the generosity and avarice, and the courage and cowardice that are in man, instinctive or acquired or pertaining to his distinctive characteristics or to courtly manners, Syrian or Bedouin.’ And Shirazad related to her a tale of elegant beauty …’
Nabia Abbott, ‘A Ninth-Century Fragment of the “Thousand
Nights”: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights’,
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8 (1939), p. 133
Since the earliest surviving selection of stories from The Thousand and One Nights dates from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, we shall return to discuss this collection of stories in Chapter 7.
Although, as we have seen, prose was increasingly tolerated as a vehicle for high literature, poetry was still held to be the only proper form in which to express certain kinds of sentiment. One used poetry, not prose, to celebrate the joys of alcohol, and one boasted of one’s martial courage or confessed one’s love for another in verse. Turning now to the poetry of the ‘Abbasid period, there is a school of thought which held that Arab poetry came to an end around the time the Umayyad dynasty ended. Such poetry had been produced by desert-dwelling, nomadic tribal Arabs who had direct experience of the deserted campsites, long camel journeys and inter-tribal raids which they commemorated. Poems which were produced in later centuries were either pastiches of the original model or regrettable aberrations, and in fact much of that poetry was produced by city-dwelling Arabs and non-Arabs. This was for example the opinion of the scholar and translator Sir Charles Lyall; however, it was and is a minority view.
A great deal of ‘Abbasid poetry did look back to the Jahili period for its archaic themes, imagery and vocabulary. Rawis and philologists followed the example of Hammad al-Rawiya in going out to the desert to hear and memorize the poetry that the nomadic Arabs transmitted. The cult of gharib (obscure) words continued under the ‘Abbasids. The Mufaddaliyyat (named after its compiler, the rawi Mufaddal al-Dabbi) is the best-known compilation of pre-Islamic qasidas. It was put together under the patronage of the Caliph al-Mansur for the instruction of one of his sons, the future Caliph al-Mahdi. In general, the ‘Abbasid court played a leading part both in preserving ancient poems and presiding over the development of new forms. Yahya ibn Khalid al-Barmaki, who served as Harun’s tutor and then later as his vizier, actually established a Department of Poetry (the Diwan al-Shi’r) which dished out money to poets in return for panegyrics.
Though much of ‘Abbasid poetry was backward-looking, there were poets who were prepared to ditch Jahili models in favour of themes and forms they judged to be more appropriate to the courtly and urban environment in which they worked. Abu Mu’adh Bashshar ibn Burd (714–84) was the first and foremost of these literary innovators. Born in Basra and hailed by Jahiz as one of the glories of that city, Bashshar was blind from birth (and therefore must have made considerable use of rawis in his subsequent career). His ancestry was Persian and it is said that though his father was actually a bricklayer, Bashshar used to lay claim to royal descent. Despite his eventual fame as a poet writing in Arabic, he was a Shu’ubi and a champion of the old Persian culture. He was also accused of continuing secretly to adhere to Zoroastrianism. The earliest patrons of his poetry were Umayyad governors, but after the revolution Bashshar found favour with the’ Abbasid caliphs. Bashshar was an unprepossessing performer of his own poetry. He was heavily built and very ugly, with a skin deeply pitted by smallpox, and he used to spit to the left and the right before starting to recite. Despite his ugliness, he enjoyed a reputation as a libertine and seducer of women.
Bashshar, and Abu Tammam after him, were leading pioneers in the badi style. Badi can be translated as ‘new’, ‘discovered’, or ‘invented’. In poetry, it refers to the ornate style using rhetorical figures that became fashionable from the beginning of the ‘Abbasid period onwards. At the same time a debate began between the qudama (the ‘Ancients’) and the muhadathun (the ‘Moderns’) over the merits of this newfangled fancy poetry as against the sort of poetry produced by the Jahili poets and their imitators in the early ‘Abbasid period. However, as we shall see, even those who defended the new style in poetry customarily defended it by claiming that it was not really new and by finding ancient precedents for the rhetorical figures favoured by badi poets. In a later work of fiction, the Maqamat of al-Hamadhani (see Chapter 5), the author has his disreputable but judicious rogue, Abu al-Fath, declare that ‘the language of the Ancients is nobler and their themes more delightful, whereas the conceits of the Moderns are more refined and their style more elegant’.
As an innovative urban poet, Bashshar attacked the stereotyped forms and imagery of desert poetry. Although, like all poets of the period, Bashshar composed panegyrics to his various patrons, he is best known for his love poetry. As a poet of a courtly and generally hopeless love, he was heir to the Hejazi school of love poetry. His verses, which seem to have been directed at a young and female audience, were often set to music. In the poem which follows, Bashshar seems prepared to abandon his former virtuous life and to damn himself for the sake of his passion for ‘Abdah.
ever, so long as starlight shows to your eye,
or a singing-girl chants an ode in a drinker’s hearing.
I sought to find solace apart from dear ‘Abdah, but love is too strong for me.
Were the love of that lady for sale, I would purchase it with all my wherewithal,
and were I but able at will to influence fate’s decrees,
I and mine should ransom her from death.
My darling made complaint – for the love-lorn is full of complaints –
of a rumour which a liar’s word reported to her:
then I tossed sleepless, with my hairs starting on end,
for amazement at her coldness – but passion begets amaze —
and with tears clothing my breast I said,
‘Were I to abandon hope of dear ‘Abdah, my knell would have rung.’
‘Abdah, for God’s sake release me from continuing torment,
a man who was, before meeting you, a monk or as good as one,
who lay sleepless all night long, looking for things to come,but was then turned away from his devotions by passion for a full-breasted maiden,
who with love of herself drove the Great Judge’s reckoning out of his mind;
he is a lover whose heart will not recant from loving her,
and who complains of a sting like scorpion’s in his breast,for suchlike is what the lover experiences at the mention of his beloved.
Fear grips me that my kinsfolk may bear my coffin
all too soon, before I beheld in you any relenting.
So if you hear one of my kinswomen weeping,and amid those clad in garments of woe lamenting a martyr to maidens,
then know that love for you has brought me to destruction.
A. F. L. Beeston (ed. and trans.), Selections from the Poetry of
Bassar (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 28–9
The next poem is less tragically soulful, as Bashshar attacks and satirizes another poet, Hammad ‘Ajrad. Although this is essentially an example of flyting, it begins with a nasib or amatory prelude.
if I hasten, will you stay?
My love is utter and complete;
reverses make my ardour grow:
O Salma! Passion’s laid me low
in weariness of piercing-glancing blows …
I have a comrade like a sword in hand –
vainly to gild it might his maker seek –
Who is death of every mortal care,
whose goodness is a charter for abuse,
Who does not worship lucre, but pursues
the foe unflaggingly, unswervingly,
Who’s been with me through wealth and pauperdom,
his love for me untinctured, unforsworn …
But ‘Ajrad the Flasher jumps on his mother –
a sow giving suck to a hog –
Though any appeal to his purse is met
with a leonine bearing of fangs.
What good to anyone is a man
Who won’t even pray, the scum?
You son of a rutting beast, you are
a pustulous, foul, filthy bum! …
Julia Ashtiany (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 279
As the satirical poem (hija’) above suggests, Bashshar was a combative character and a misanthropic satirist, who was fond of and skilled at coining epigrams – and skilled, too, at making enemies. There are various versions of Bashshar’s death – none of them good. He was probably beaten to death on the orders of the caliph before being sewn into a sack and thrown into the Tigris. After his death it was said that ‘only people remained who knew not what language was’. It was also said that ‘he travelled a road which no one else had travelled before’.
The Iraqi poet Abu al-Fadl al-‘ABBAS IBN AL-AHNAF (d. after 808?) worked under the patronage of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who particularly valued Abbas’s conversation and jokes. He was also good-looking – always a useful quality for a courtier. ‘Abbas was a leading poet of courtly love and he produced ghazals devoted to love in the melancholic, submissive and unsatisfied vein. (Imru’ al-Qays would have found ‘Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf hard to take. Also, favoured Jahili beauties had tended to be much fatter than the women who were sighed over by ‘Abbasid poets.) Love in ‘Abbas’s poetry was a mark of nobility of spirit: ‘only lovers count as people’. He was a specialist in the short poem, the qit’a.
Many of his poems were addressed to a certain Fauz, also referred to as Zalum (‘the Tyrant’), but nothing is known of her. A number were set to music and sung by singing-girls of the type who were the subject of poetry by him and other would-be submissive ‘Abbasid courtiers.
When she walks amongst her maids of honour
you would think that she is walking upon eggs and green bottles.
Somebody told me that she cried for help
on beholding a lion engraved upon a signet-ring.
J. C. Bürgel (trans.), in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot (ed.),
Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam
(Malibu, Calif., 1979), p. 94
A sun sink slowly in the west,
Its beauty in that bower to hide
Where lovely ladies lie at rest:A sun embodied in the guise
Of a sweet maiden of delight,
The ripple of her rounded thighs
A scroll of parchment, soft and white,No creature she of human kind,
Though human fair and beautiful,
And neither sprite, although designed
In faery grace ineffable.Her body was a jasmine rare,
Her perfume sweet as amber scent,
Her face a pearl beyond compare,
Her all, pure light’s embodiment.All shrouded in her pettigown
I watched her delicately pass,
Stepping as light as thistledown
That dances on a crystal glass.
Arberry, The Ring of the Dove, pp. 210 n
A craze developed during the ‘Abbasid period for girls dressed as pageboys (ghulumiyyat) and amorous poetry was addressed both to these girls and to pretty boys. As the drinker moved from contemplation of what his cup contained to contemplation of the boy who had brought it, poems came to be composed in praise of beautiful cup-bearers; so wine poetry shaded into love poetry. Notwithstanding conservative views of what the qasida should be, new genres evolved in the ‘Abbasid period from the qasida form and went on to acquire an independent existence outside it. Khamriyya, or verses devoted to the celebration of wine and drinking, constituted one of the most important of what were effectively newly independent genres. (It is, however, true that some wine poetry had been produced in the Jahili period, particularly at the court of the Lakhmid kings of Hira and, later, under the patronage of certain Umayyad princes, such as Walid II.) Khamriyya poems were by convention fairly short. Under the ‘Abbasids the stock forms of khamriyya poetry were elaborated: the description of the wine-cup, the colour of the wine, the evocation of the beloved’s saliva, the appearance of the beautiful cup-bearer, and so on. There was even a sub-genre of ‘Abbasid wine poetry devoted to visits to monasteries, since Christian monasteries in the Middle East were noted producers of wine; the Arab aristocracy tended to resort to these places in search of wine and other diversions. Up to the tenth century Iraqi monasteries were favourite resorts of libertines. Anthologists such as Abu’l-Faraj al-Ishfahani and al-Shahbusti (d. 1008) produced guides to monasteries which were simultaneously evocations of the pleasures of life, since drinking bouts, picnics and assignations with lovers took place in monastery gardens.
ABU NUWAS, called the ‘Father of the Locks’ because he had curly hair, is perhaps the most accomplished, and certainly the most famous, of those poets. He was born sometime between 747 and 762 in Ahwaz, in Persia, and his early years are a trifle obscure. Abu Nuwas was proud of his Persian culture and his wine poetry can be seen, in part at least, as a literary continuation of the old hard-drinking culture of the Sasanian Persian court. Having first found patrons among the Barmakis, he fled to Egypt after their downfall. Later, however, he became the nadim of the Caliph al-Amin. Abu Nuwas’s end is as obscure as his beginnings. He died sometime around the year 814, possibly in prison.
Although Abu Nuwas followed convention in going out to the desert to spend time with the Bedouin so as to improve his Arabic, he later proved himself to be a literary innovator and rejected the stale bluster of the qasida. He expressed his contempt for the conventional nasib: ‘I do not weep because the dwelling-place has become an inhospitable desert.’ He followed Bashshar in rejecting Bedouin values and in one famous poem he parodied the abandoned campsite theme of the traditional qasida by composing a lament for the disappearance of old drinking taverns. More generally, he sought out new and sometimes rather disreputable subjects for poetry. According to Adonis, a leading twentieth-century Arab poet, ‘Abu Nuwas adopts the mask of a clown and turns drunkenness, which frees the body from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation.’ As well as wine poetry, Abu Nuwas wrote erotic poems addressed to both men and women. By contrast with the poetry of Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf, Abu Nuwas’s erotic poetry has a more sensual feel to it. While it is clear that Abu Nuwas was homosexual, it is doubtful whether his poems addressed to women were anything more than fictional exercises.
One of the disreputable things which Abu Nuwas did was to steal lines from other people’s poems. Lots of poets did this and a sophisticated technical vocabulary evolved to describe the different types of literary thieving that went on – of metaphor, of theme, precise wording, etc. However, Abu Nuwas went further than most in recycling other men’s words and he was blamed for it.
Abu Nuwas, the professional nadim, declared that the ideal majlis should consist of three guests and a musician. Also, the nadim should bear in mind that what was said in the evening should be forgotten by the morning (although to judge by the surviving literature, it rarely was forgotten). According to a thirteenth-century Persian joke-book, Abu Nuwas claimed never to have seen anyone drunk. This was because he was always the first to get drunk, and soon he was so drunk that he did not know what was happening to anyone else.
In the poem which follows, the themes of wine-drinking and homo-erotic love are combined in typical fashion, as Abu Nuwas addresses the cup-bearer:
a sword of passion and a spear in hand;
I cannot flee it and am sore afraid
of it, for every lover is a coward.
My hearth affords no amnesty, and I
have no safe-conduct if I stir outside.His face, a goblet next his lip,
looks like a moon lit with a lamp;
Armed with love’s weaponry, he rides
on beauty’s steed, squares up eye’s steel
Which in his smile, the bow his brow,
the shafts his eyes, his lashes lances.
Julia Ashtiany (trans.), in Ashtiany et al., The Cambridge History
of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 298
From my inner thoughts
Denying my eyes.
I begin to compose something
In a single phrase
With many meanings,
Standing in illusion,
So that when I go towards it
I go blindly,
As if I am pursuing the beauty of something
Before me but unclear.
Catherine Cobham (trans.), in Adonis,
An Introduction to Arab Poetics, p. 53
I quarreled with my boy –
my letters
came back marked ‘Unknown
At This Address – So Bugger Off’
In solitude & tears
I damply prayed – to Satan:
‘Weeping & insomnia have got me
down to 90 pounds –
don’t you care
that I’m suffering?
That I’m so depressed
I’ve almost run out of lust?
This obsession’s getting in the way
of my duty to thee:
my sinning’s half-hearted – I feel a fit
of repentance coming on!
Yes! Thou hadst better stoke up some love for me
in that lad’s heart (you know how!)
or I’ll retire from Sin: from Poetry, from Song,
from pickling my veins in wine!
I’ll read the Koran! I’ll start
a Koranic Night School for Adults!
I’ll make the Pilgrimage to Mecca every year
& accumulate so much virtue that I’ll … I’ll …’Well, three days hadn’t passed when suddenly
my sweetheart came crawling back
begging for reunion. Was it good?
It was twice as good as before!
Ah, joy after sorrow!
almost the heart splits with it!
Ah, overdose of joy! … And of course, since then
I’ve been on the best of terms
with the Father of Lies.
Peter Lamborn Wilson (trans.), Sacred Drift: Essays on the
Margins of Islam (San Francisco, 1993), pp. 95–6
Abu Nuwas also wrote hunting poetry (tardiyyat) and his Diwan, or ‘Collected Poems’, was the first to have a special section devoted to poems on the subject. In general the poems produced by Abu Nuwas and others in praise of wine, women, song, boys, hunting and flowers can be seen as a reaction against the fierce and gloomy subject matter of the traditional qasida. Abu Nuwas addressed his verses to attainable objects of desire rather than to some irredeemably lost love. Although he was a libertine poet, like the rakehell Umayyad prince Walid II, in Abu Nuwas’s poems there is often a strong element of self-deprecation. Moreover, while much of his verse celebrated the pleasures of life, this celebration was often mingled with regret for the brevity of such pleasures and even with expressions of repentance. A sensual regret for the passing of beautiful things may shade very easily into an essentially religious sense of contrition – and here perhaps there may be a semantic link between the nadim and nadama, the verb meaning ‘to repent’. Abu Nuwas seems to have died in disgrace, yet he lived on in Arab folklore, and even today in Swahili myth as a disreputable figure to whom all sorts of entertaining escapades were attributed.
Even such a disreputable figure as Abu Nuwas wrote poems on the themes of asceticism and repentance. It was really only in the ‘Abbasid period that religion and mysticism came to be recognized as proper subjects for poetry. Abu al-Ishaq Isma’il ibn al-Qasim, better known by his nickname ABU AL-‘ATAHIYYA, ‘the Father of Craziness’ (748826), was humbly born and throughout his life remained acutely conscious of his lowly origins. He was also known as Jarrar, ‘the Jar-Seller’, for he ran a pottery shop where poets used to meet and write down scraps of poetry on pot shards. Like other poor but clever contemporaries, he used poetry as a means of self-advancement and secured the patronage of the Caliph al-Mahdi by devoting a panegyric to him. Early on in his career he wrote ghazals on the subject of his love for ‘Utba, a slave girl of a caliphal princess, Khaizuran. However, she allegedly despised him for writing poetry for money, and spurned his approaches. In the years of Abu al-’Atahiyya’s success at court, the famous musician Ibrahim ibn al-Mawsili set his poems to music. Abu al-’Atahiyya fell in and out of favour and was in and out of prison during the caliphates of al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid; finally, during Harun’s caliphate, he totally renounced love poetry in favour of poetry devoted to asceticism (zuhdiyyat). He wrote qifas in very simple language on such themes as fear of death, the transience of all things, and contempt for wealth and ostentation (but unkind critics thought Abu’l-’Atahiyya made a very good living for himself, precisely by producing this sort of stuff).
His palaces empty on the morning of his death?
By him whom death has cut down and who lies
Abandoned by kinsfolk and friends?
By him whose thrones stand vacant,
By him whose daises are empty?
Where now are kings and where
are the men who passed this way before you?
O you who have chosen the world and its delights,
You who have always listened to sycophants,
Take what you can of the pleasures of the world
For death comes as the end.Lunde and Stone, The Meadows of Gold, p. 99
When Abu al-‘Atahiyya became an ascetic, he ‘donned the robe of austerity’. Sufis commonly wore robes of coarse wool (suf) and it is possibly because of this that the Sufis, or Muslim mystics, are so called. The word Sufi embraces a wide range of belief and practice in different parts of the Islamic world over the centuries. Some Sufis were simple pietists and ascetics. Other Sufis sought ecstasy and a lover’s union with God; some of these made use of a wide range of techniques to do so, including perpetual prayer, fasting, self-mutilation, dancing and listening to music. Some even advocated the use of wine, drugs or the contemplation of beautiful boys in order to bring them closer to God. One category of Sufis, the Malamatis, went so far as to lead sinful lives so that they could worship God without any expectation of reward in the afterlife. Again, the writings of Sufis show variously the influence of Christian mysticism, gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Buddhism and Hinduism. However, while it is clear that some Sufis were scoundrels or heretics, large numbers led virtuous lives. The profession of Sufism can be perfectly compatible with Islamic orthodoxy.
The historical origins of Sufism are unclear. Sufi teachers traced their chain of transmission right back to the Prophet Muhammad and his cousin ‘Ali. In the eighth century one comes across individuals, such as Hasan of Basra (d. 728), who were revered for their simple, ascetic piety. From at least the ninth century onwards Sufism began to acquire more of a distinctive doctrinal identity (or identities). Sufi masters who made provocative statements and who taught contentious, possibly heretical doctrines, such as Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 874?) and al-Hallaj, started to appear. In the early centuries the pursuit of the Sufi way was an individual matter. Only from the thirteenth century onwards did the great Sufi orders begin to form (including, among many others, the Shadhilis, the Qadiris, the Rifa’i, the Mevlana, and the Naqshabandi). There were (and are) Sufi orders in both Sunnism and Shi’ism. In the organized Sufism of the later Middle Ages, Sufis followed a specific way or tariqa, they received initiation from the hand of a master, and they often lived together in a special lodge or zawiya. Sufis made an enormous contribution to Islamic culture. Many leading artists and musicians were Sufis and, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, some of the greatest writers in later centuries, among them al-Ghazzali, Ibn al-’Arabi and Ibn al-Farid, were Sufis.
The career of the Sufi Hallaj, his preaching mission, his arrest and trial for heresy in Baghdad and his crucifixion, was one of the causes célèbres of the period, Husayn ibn Mansur al-HALLAj (c. 858–922) studied with Sufi teachers before travelling extensively in Persia, Turkestan, Arabia and India. He was famous for his miracles (or what his enemies preferred to describe as cheats and conjuring tricks). According to one witness, ‘I was summoned … by the slave in charge of Hallaj, and when I went out to him he told me that he had been taking to Hallaj the tray which it was his daily custom to bring to him, when he found that Hallaj was filling the room with his person, stretching from roof to floor and from side to side, so that there was no space left; this spectacle frightened him so much that he dropped the tray and fled.’ He added that ‘the slave was in a fever, shaking and trembling …’
Hallaj put poetry to the service of mystical doctrine, as can be seen from the following seven poems from his Diwan:
I continued to float on the sea of love,
One surging wave lifting me up, another pulling me down;
And so I went on, now rising, now falling,
Till I found myself in the middle of the deep sea,
Brought by love to a point where there was no shore.
In alarm I called out to Him whose name I would not reveal,
One to whose love I have never been untrue:‘Your rule is indeed just,’ I said, ‘Your fair dealings I am ready to defend with my very life;
But this is not the terms of our covenant.’
2
Painful enough it is that I am ever calling out to You,
As if I were far away from You or You were absent from me,
And that I constantly ask for Your grace, yet unaware of the need.
Never before have I seen such an ascetic so full of desire.3
Your place in my heart is the whole of my heart,
For your place cannot be taken by anyone else.
My soul has lodged You between my skin and my bones,
So what would I do were I ever to lose You?4
My host, who can never be accused of even the slightest wrong,
Made me share his drink, as a perfect host should do.
But when signs of my drunkenness became clear,He suddenly called to His headsman to bring the sword and the mat.
This is the end of keeping company with the Dragon and drinking with Him in the summer season.
5
I am He whom I love and He whom I love is I;
We are two souls dwelling in one body.
When you look at me you can see Him,
And you can see us both when you look at Him.6
You who blame me for my love for Him,If only you knew Him of whom I sing, you would cease your blame.
Other men go away for their pilgrimage, but my own pilgrimage is towards the place where I am.
Other men offer sacrifices, but my sacrifice is my own heart and blood.
They physically circumambulate the temple,
But were they to proceed reverently around God Himself,
They would not need to go round a sacred building.7
I swear to God, the sun has never risen or set without Your love being the twin of my breath;
Neither have I confided in anyone except to talk about You.
Never have I mentioned Your name in gladness or in sorrow,
Unless You were in my heart, wedged in my obsessive thoughts.Nor have I touched water to quench my thirst without seeing Your image in the glass.
Were it possible for me to reach You I would come to you at once, crawling on my face or walking on my head.
I say to our minstrel that if he is to sing he should choose for his theme my grief at the hardness of Your heart.
What cause have foolish people to blame me? They have their own faith and I have mine.
Mustafa Badawi (trans.), ‘Seven Poems by Al-Hallaj (c. 858-922)’,
Journal of Arabic Literature 14 (1983), pp. 46–7
Hallaj was also notorious for his provocative mystical statements, such as ‘Ana al-Haqq,’ ‘I am the Truth’. Opponents also noted that he appeared to venerate Iblis, the Devil, for he held that Iblis was to be praised for the unflinching monotheism which led him to refuse to bow down with all the other angels before man, since God alone was worthy of veneration. Eventually Hallaj was seized, and after being exposed in a pillory he spent nine years under house arrest in the caliphal palace. He only emerged from this incarceration on the day of his execution, which is described by the eleventh-century historian Miskawayh:
Hallaj’s adherents asserted that the victim of the blows was an enemy of his on whom his likeness had been cast, some of them pretending to have seen Hallaj and heard from him something of the sort, with follies not worth transcribing. The booksellers were summoned and made to swear that they would neither sell nor buy any of Hallaj’s works.
H. F. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth (trans.), The Eclipse of the
“Abbasid Caliphate, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1901), pp. 90-91
Although ABU TAMMAM (c. 805–45) was the son of Thaddeus, a Christian tavern-keeper in Damascus, he converted to Islam. Abu Tammam spent his early years as a weaver in Damascus, before moving on to become a water-seller in Cairo. Despite these lowly origins, he invented a distinguished but wholly bogus Bedouin genealogy for himself and adopted the dress of a Bedouin Arab (a form of affectation that makes one think of T. E. Lawrence). Poetry served Abu Tammam as it had served so many other clever and ambitious men, as a means of advancement and as a way of securing the entree into the ‘Abbasid court. Abu Tammam found favour with the Caliph al-Mu’tasim (833–42) and he celebrated the latter’s prosecution of the jihad, or holy war, against the Byzantine empire. However, since his voice was singularly unattractive the caliph preferred that his poetry was recited by a rawi. Abu Tammam became an expert panegyrist, working in the badi” style – that is to say, he produced some brilliant images while making use of weird words, ornately tortuous constructions and word-play. His fondness for antithesis is evident in his most famous poem, a qasida which celebrated the caliph’s capture of the Byzantine town of Amorium in central Anatolia in 838. The first forty of the poem’s seventy-one lines are given here:
In gleaming blades, not lines of dusky tomes, are texts to dispel uncertainty and doubt.
Knowledge is found in the sparkle of lances, glittering between opposing ranks, not in the seven sparkling lights of heaven.
What use is such lore, what use the stars themselves, and men’s specious inventions about them? All lies,
Mere falsity and patched-up fables, neither tough oak (if reckoned right) nor pliant sapling.
Strange things they declared time would reveal in direful summer months,
To scare men with dread disasters, on the appearance of the star in the west with its comet-tail;
They claim to see in the lofty zodiac an ordered precedence, of signs ‘reversed’ and signs not so,
Judging events thereby – but the stars are heedless, whether moving the full circle of the firmament or close to the pole.
Were it true that they had ever plainly forecast a coming event, they would not have concealed this, stamped as it is in stocks and stones.
Victory of victories! too lofty to be compassed by poet’s verse or orator’s speech,
A victory at which heaven’s gates are thrown open and earth struts in her freshest garments.
Day of Amorium fight! our hopes have come away from you with udders full of honeysweet milk;
You have left the fortunes of Islam’s children at the height, heathens and heathendom at lowest ebb.
She [Amorium] was a mother to them: had they had any hope of ransoming her, they would have paid as ransom every kindly mother among them and father too.
She’s now a maiden unveiled and humbled, though Chosroes had been impotent to master her, and Abukarib she had spurned
– virgin unravished by the hand of disaster, greedy Fate’s blows could never hope to reach her –
From the age of Alexander, or before then, time’s locks have grown gray while she remained untouched by age;
God’s purpose, working in her year after year (a thrifty housewife’s churning) made her at last cream of ages.
But black grief, blindly striking, came upon her, her who had before been called the dispeller of griefs.
It was an ill omen for her, that day when Ankara fell and was left deserted, with empty squares and streets:
When she saw her sister of yesterday laid waste, it was a worse contagion for her than the mange.
Within her walls lie numberless heroic cavaliers, locks reddened with hot flowing gore,
By practice of the sword (henna of their own blood), not in accord with practice of faith and Islam.
Commander of the Faithful! you have given over to the fire a day of hers, whereon stone and wood alike were brought low;
When you departed, night’s gloom there was as noonday, dispelled in her midst by dayspring of flame,
As if the robes of darkness had renounced their colour, or sun never set:
Radiance of fire while darkness still lasted, murk of smoke in a noontide smirched,
Sun seeming to rise here though it had sunk, sun seeming to depart there although it had not.
Fate, like clouds rolling away, had revealed for her a day both fair and foul
(Sun did not rise that day on any bridegroom, nor set on any man unwed):
Dwelling of Mayyah, not yet deserted, haunted by her lover Ghaylan, was a scene not more sweet to look on than Amorium’s deserted dwelling,
Nor were Mayyah’s cheeks, blood-red with modest shame, more charming to beholder than Amorium’s cheek all grimed
By disfigurement with which our eyes are better pleased than with any beauty that has ever appeared, or any wondrous sight.
A fine event! its effects seen plainly, joyfulness the outcome of evil event.
Would that heathendom could have known for how many ages past Fate had been holding in store for her the spears and lances!
This is the wise design of al-Mu’tasim, God’s avenger, expectant and yearning for God.
Full-fed with victory, his spearheads have never been blunted nor parried in defence of a life inviolate;
Never did he make war on a folk, or assault a town, without an army of terrors going before him;
Had he not led a mighty host on the day of battle, he would yet have had a clamorous host in himself alone …
A. F. L. Beeston (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, pp. 159–61
COMMENTARY
The opening lines allude to the fact that Byzantine astrologers, consulting their books, had concluded that Amorium could not be taken and warned the Muslims that their enterprise was doomed, but the Muslim warriors had gone on to prove them wrong. They advanced through Anatolia to capture first Ankara and then Amorium. It is obvious from the beginning that the poem operates through antitheses: the sword against the pen, light against dark, conquest against defeat, and so on. Puns also play a large part in the effects that Abu Tammam achieved, but inevitably these are absent in the translation. You will have to read the original Arabic to enjoy them.
A Muslim woman is said to have appealed to the caliph for help against the Byzantines; hence the repetitive female imagery, in which, among other things, the captured city is compared to a violated woman. This qasida can also be read as a poem of vengeance. It reapplied the Jahili vocabulary of tribal feuding to the vengeance taken by the caliph for Byzantine attacks on Muslim towns. Despite the relative novelty of Abu Tammam’s badi ornamentation, he was more generally producing a pastiche of old Bedouin forms and adapting those forms in order to appeal to the salons of Baghdad.
Chosroes, or Khusraw, was the name of the Sasanian emperor of Persia in the days of the Prophet. Abukarib, also known as As’ad Kamil, was a legendary king of South Arabia in pre-Islamic times. Like Chosroes, he was famous for his conquests.
Dhu’l-Rummah, ‘He of the Tent Peg’, was the nickname of Abu Harith Ghaylan ibn ‘Uqba, an eighth-century poet, famous for his love of Mayyah.
In the rest of the poem (not translated by Beeston), the Byzantine flight is described. The Emperor’s cowardice is likened to that of an ostrich and the Byzantines are conventionally referred to as al-Asfar, ‘the Yellow Ones’. Then the poet returns to the siege and the women captured as a result. (They have waists like quivering branches and bottoms like sandhills.) Finally the caliph and his victory are praised once again.
Abu Tammam’s metaphors and similes may strike the modern Western reader as far-fetched or strained. Many medieval Arab critics found fault with Abu Tammam on the same grounds.
In the ‘Spring’ qasida which follows, Abu Tammam evokes a landscape and the changing of the seasons in a meandering sort of way, before ending up with a panegyric to the caliph.
moist morning earth is fragile in its gems;The grateful van of summertime has come:
yet do not think winter’s late hold thankless,For, but for what winter’s own hand planted,
dry fruitless scrubland is all summer would find.The winter has consoled the land for winter
for countless nights, and days, its downpour streaming:Rain, from which clear skies deliquesce, and then
clear [spring] skies, all but dripping with their plenty,A double rainfall: one spring showers, plainly
showing their face, and clear skies, hidden rain;And when dew makes the earth’s locks gleam with oil,
one fancies rain-clouds have passed remissly by.Our spring, our own, of nineteen years’ estate,
no spring but thou, outblooming spring in glory!There’s no delight that time could be despoiled of
if meadows could be beautiful forever –And yet we know that change makes every thing
ugly, but is the earth’s sale source of beauty.My two companions, look about you fully
and see how the earth’s face has been painted:And see broad sunny daylight which is blanched
by flowers of the uplands, as if moonlit;A world for human sustenance, which sudden
unveiling of the spring makes pure prospect.Its core now fashions for its outer side
blossoms enough to bring the bloom to our hearts,Flowering sprays all glittering with dewfall
like so many eyes welling over it,Glimpsed only to be screened again by fronds, like
young virgins, now glimpsed, now shrinking back again,Till all the earth and all its combes and hills form
rival bands, strutting in spring’s favours,One yellow and one red, for all the world like
clashing Y…emenis and Mudaris,Brilliant yellow, succulent, as it were
pearls that have first been split, then dipped in saffron,Or sunrise-glowing in red, as if every
approaching breeze were tinted with safflower:His handiwork, without Whose marvellous grace
no ripening yellow would succeed to green.In spring we may discern a temper like
that of the imam, with his bounteous ways:On earth, the imam’s justice and his largesse,
and the luxuriant herbs, are shining lights;Men will forget the meadows; but his [laurels]
will be remembered for eternity.The caliph is, in every dark dilemma,
God-sent guidance’ eye, caliphship his orbit,Never, thanks to him, idle, though at times
seeming to pause, as if in meditation;Its bond belonging, as always I have known,
in his hand only, since being free to choose.Peace reigns; the hand of fate is powerless
to hurt us now; his flock may graze undisturbed.He has so ordered his realm that it seems
a well-strung necklace, justice its centrepiece;No dismal nest of bedouin but has grown
plump, almost civilized, at his very name.He is a king whose reign has baffled fame,
whose gifts make prodigality seem scant:After all he has been, how hard for fate
to find a way to make men suffer hardship!
Julia Ashtiany (trans.), Journal of Arabic Literature 25
COMMENTARY
Mudar and Yemen were coalitions of north- and south-Arabian clans who had feuded with one another from time immemorial. Their partisans adopted distinctive banners and headbands.
In the context of this poem the imam is to be identified with the caliph, the leader of the Muslim community. Often, however, the same word is used to refer to a prayer-leader in a mosque.
Abu Tammam, a famous poet in his own right, was nevertheless equally well known as an anthologist. According to literary legend, having been trapped in a snowstorm while travelling in the region of Hamadan in western Iran, he took refuge in one of its great libraries and there researched his great anthology of pre-Islamic poetry, the Hamasa. The Hamasa, which means ‘Boldness’, was so-called after the longest of ten thematic sections comprising the anthology. The ten sections are as follows: 1. Boldness (almost half of the whole book); 2. Dirges; 3. Manners; 4. Love; 5. Satire; 6. Hospitality and Panegyric; 7. Descriptions; 8. Drowsiness; 9. Pleasantries; 10. Blame of women. Abu Tammam chose mostly extracts rather than qasidas to anthologize. What is more, he made most of his selections from minor poets who did not have diwans, or poetry collections, in their own names. One of Abu Tammam’s covert purposes in compiling this anthology was to demonstrate that the badi” devices which were being criticized as newfangled by some of his contemporaries were already employed by Jahili poets.
Abu ‘Ubada al-Walid ibn ‘Ubayd al-BUHTURI (821–97) was born at Manbij in northern Syria. His early poetry included qasidas in which he boasted of his tribe, as well as love poetry addressed to Hind (a woman who was a perfectly fictitious and conventional object of literary yearning). Buhturi was taken up by Abu Tammam, whose pupil he became. After the latter’s death, Buhturi enjoyed a career as a poet at the caliphal court. He was not a likeable character. His many enemies characterized him as a greedy sycophant. According to Yaqut, the compiler of a biographical dictionary in the thirteenth century, when Buhturi recited his poetry, ‘he used to walk up and down the room, backwards and forwards, and he shook his head and shoulders, stretched his arm out and shouted: “Beautiful, by God!” and he attacked his audience, calling out to them, “Why do you not applaud?” At court, he produced panegyric verse in praise of his patrons – as well as panegyric’s other face, satire. It was a widespread practice to direct satires at patrons who had failed to respond to panegyrics or who had disappointed poets in other ways.
However, Buhturi was to become famous as the leading specialist in wasf or descriptive poetry. Wasf became fashionable in this period. Descriptions couched in verse were coming to be appreciated in their own right, rather than as details which served to decorate a lament for a lost Bedouin girl or a boast of success in tribal warfare. (Farabi’s Canons of Poetry (Risala fx Qawanin Sina’a al-Shi V), written under the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics, was to argue that poetry was like painting, for ‘in practice both produce likenesses and both aim at impressing men’s imagination’. Buhturi’s descriptive verse was couched in the popular badi” style. In general, poets working in the badi manner were interested, in a way their predecessors had not been, in describing buildings, towns, gardens and animals. This sort of descriptive verse may possibly have owed something to the older tradition of ekphrasis, or rhetorical exercise in description, as employed in classical Greek poetry.
for the day to break where evening falls:
Troubled, I turned to the road, towards white
Madain directing my mount, with a last
farewell to illusion, sorrow to greet
in the age-long silence of the house of Sasan,
recalled to mind by the knocks and blows
that summon echoes from forgotten doors.
They had ruled recumbent in a towering shade
baffling the eye with its starry hub,
its gateway closed on the distant line
from grand Caucasia to deep Lake Van;
worlds removed from gazelle’s abode
that the driving sands obliterate,
achievement beyond the ambition of tribes –
were it not for the bias that runs in my blood.
The years cried havoc, the centuries wore
till they left the palace a lifeless shell,
vast halls of naked solitude,
the vaulted dismay that warns of a tomb.
Could you see it now, the walls would tell
of a wedding that turned at a funeral dirge,
yet manifest still is the glory of men
whose record dispels all shadow of doubt.At the sight of Antioch’s fall you would start
at Greek and Persian turned to stone,
with the fates at large as Anushirvan
under banner imperial drives his troops
in sea of armour closing in
on Byzantium’s emperor saffron-robed;
and under his eyes the men fight locked
in the surge and din of battle unheard,
as one irrevocably thrusts his lance
and another flashes his shield at the blade,
and alive to the eye indeed they come,
regiments signalling signs of the mute,
that enrapt in contemplation I find
my fingers tracing out their forms.
For my son had brought me ample supply
in stealth to drink on the battle field,
wine like a star that in moonless night
illumines the dark, or a beam of the sun,
that sends a glow through pulsing veins
at every draught, a bringer of peace,
and with a ray from every heart distilled
in the glass unites all men in love,
that I fancied Khosro Parvez himself
and his laureate keeping me company then:
a vision closing my eye to doubt,
or a daydream, sense to tantalize?The hall of presence in immensity stands
like a cave high-arched in the face of a cliff.
In commanding sorrow I seem to sense
someone coming – Is it early or late?-
grey at the parting of friends much loved,
at a wife’s disloyalty coming home.
Time’s revolution reversed its luck
when in baleful aspect Jupiter turned,
yet in majesty still it stands unbowed
by the heavy oppressive breast of fate,
unmoved by hands uncouth that stripped
the silk, the velvet, the brocade and damask,
soaring, sovereign, that battlements crown
in final culmination raised,
reaching white against the sky
as if to fly like scuds of fleece.
None might know: Was it built by men
for demon to dwell, by demon for man?
save that unanswerable witness it bears:
that its builder was king, unquestioned, of kings.
In the final glass in a vision I see
the state’s high officers, the multitudes;
embassies, weary from sun and dust,
awaiting their call from vast colonnades;
singers in marble enchantment remote,
dark their lips, and darker the eyes –
as if life had been but a week ago,
and departure had rung but a few days past,
that the rider bent on haste might find
the procession on the fifth night fading away.To them, whose domains in felicity shone
and in sorrow still consolation bestow;
to them I owe the tribute of tears,
slow to emerge, from the deeper heart.
Such were my thoughts, though the place by right
not mine I call, nor mine their race,
but for a debt that my country owes
for a deed of old – a tall tree now –
when to South Arabia’s shores they came,
valiant men in illustrious arms,
and with bow and sword against wild odds
freed us of the Abyssinian foe.
Bound, then, to the noble in spirit I feel,
to the gallant, whatever their nation and name.
Tuetey, Classical Arabic Poetry, pp. 241–3
COMMENTARY
The poet, troubled by personal problems, rides out to contemplate the pre-Islamic ruins of the Arch of Kisra. In this somewhat unconventional qasida the deserted campsite has been replaced by a ruined palace. The vanished glories of Persian culture were quite frequently evoked in Arabic literature and it was, for example, common for wine poets to describe the Sasanian imperial decoration of the silver or glass cups from which they were drinking. The Sasanian emperors cast a long shadow in the history of Islamic culture. The Persian palace at Ctesiphon, also known as the Arch of Kisra, also known as Madain, was located in southern Iraq (and in this poem Buhturi is implicitly expressing a preference for Syria over Iraq). Buhturi contemplates surviving frescoes in the ruined palace and re-creates the vanished splendour of the Persian imperial court. His contemplation widens to encompass the vicissitudes of fate and time (anticipating in his own way the fifteenth-century French poet Villon’s, ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’).
Khosro Parvez is yet another way of spelling Chosroes or Khusraw, the Persian emperor who also featured in Abu Tammam’s ‘Spring’ qasida.
Antioch in north-west Syria was one of the most important cities fought over by the Persians and the Byzantines. Today it is within the frontiers of Turkey, but in the Middle Ages it was treated as being part of Sham or Syria.
The Christian Abyssinians occupied Yemen in the sixth century, but around the year 572 the Persians, responding to an Arab appeal, drove the Abyssinians out and made Yemen a Persian satrapy for a while.
Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, another early experimenter with wasf praised Buhturi’s qasida on the Arch of Kisra as the greatest poem of all time. Abdallah IBN AL-MU‘TAZZ (861–908), a member of the ruling ‘Abbasid dynasty, was born in the palace city of Samarra in a period when being a caliph was a hazardous occupation. His grandfather, al-Mutawakkil, and his father, al-Mu’tazz, were both murdered by the Turkish slave soldiers who were supposed to protect them. Ibn al-Mu’tazz, who was devoid of ambition, eventually sought a retiring life in Baghdad as a pensioned writer and party-goer. Unfortunately, however, after the deposition of one of his cousins in 908, he was persuaded to become caliph. He lasted less than a day.
During Ibn al-Mu’tazz’s more successful career as a poet, he produced not only a great deal of excellent verse in the badi” style, but also a pioneering treatise on poetics. This book, the Kitab al-Badi” (877–8), dealt with the aesthetics of contemporary poetry. Paradoxically, Ibn al-Mu‘>tazz justified the badi” style, as practised by Abu Tammam and Buhturi, by citing precedents for its metaphors and mannerisms which he had discovered in earlier poems and in the Qur’an. In the course of his apologia for modern ways of composition, the poet-prince discussed metaphor, alliteration and antithesis, as well as the order of treatment of subjects and the technique of rounding off a poem by returning to the subject referred to in the opening lines. Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, like earlier and later literary critics, tended to focus on individual lines or turns of phrase rather than on a poem as a whole.
Together with Buhturi, Ibn al-Mu‘tazz was one of the earliest and most distinguished practitioners of wasf. His poem in praise of the caliphal Pleiades Palace in Baghdad is particularly famous. More generally his poems, which are usually direct and make use of brilliant, concrete imagery, are peculiarly likely to appeal to the contemporary reader. His longer poems, including one on the future decadence of the caliphate, may have owed something to an awareness of Persian literary traditions.
Seven short poems, mostly exercises in wasf, are given below.
If you can sleep, the night is short. The sickness
Seems trivial to the visitor.
But let me not deny upon the blood,
The little dear blood you have left me –
You gave your gift:
I embraced a fragment stem
That breathed in its own cool night;
If any saw us in the shirt of darkness
They must have thought us wrapped in a single body.2
Star in utter night: a lovesick glance
Stolen past watchers.
Dawn clambers out
From under dark:
White hints in a skein of black hair.3
Hand, until you must drop,
The sparrow hawk you perch at dawn
Achieves your pleasure.
The fugitive will not be saved by flight,
The claws home in when you release them.
Quick at your word, all skill, grace,
He is, but for death his passion, flawless.4
As she peels off her blouse to bathe
Her cheeks become a rose.
She offers the breeze
Harmonies finer than air
And moves a hand like water
To the water in the jug.
Then, done, about to hide
In her clothes once more,
She catches a glimpse of the spy:
The lights go dead
As she shakes midnight hair
About her body’s shimmer
And steady drops of water
Spring over the water.
May all praise God who fashioned
Such loveliness in woman!5
Looking, the narcissus, looking.
To blink – what unattained pleasure!
It bows beneath the dewdrop
And, dazed, watches
What the sky is doing to the earth.6
A treeful of bitter oranges: carnelian
Boxes of pearls
Glimmer among the branches, like faces
Of girls in green shawls –
You recognize the fragrance of one you desire
And a less obvious sadness.7
Another glass!
A cock crow buries the night.
Naked horizons rise of a plundered morning.
Above night roads: Canopus,
Harem warder of stars.
Andras Hamori (trans.), Literature East and West 15 (1971), pp. 495–7
Abu’l-Hasan IBN AL-RUMI, ‘the son of the Greek’ (836–96), was the son of a Greek freeman and claimed descent from Byzantine royalty. He began his career as a poet in Baghdad at a time when the caliphs were in Samarra and Baghdad was controlled by the Tahirids, a clan of Persian dihqan origin, who had become the city’s military governors. At first Ibn al-Rumi experienced disappointment in failing to obtain patronage from the clan and he wrote to Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Tahir, citing the ancient proverb ‘He who kisses the bum receives wind as his reward’. Later he became the fulsome partisan of another Tahirid, ‘Ubaydallah. Eventually Ibn al-Rumi moved to Samarra, where he continued the struggle to support himself with panegyric and blackmailing satire. He earned handouts but no fixed salary as he went in and out of favour with various patrons. Ibn al-Rumi cannot have been an endearing client. He was ugly, quick-tempered, gluttonous, blasphemous and superstitious. He wore dirty clothes, drank heavily and spent money lavishly when he had it. His disreputable personality notwithstanding, he claimed to admire ascetic holy men.
Ibn al-Rumi was a prolific poet who produced an extensive diwan. Like Abu Tammam, he was a partisan for the badi style. He was noted for descriptive poetry and for love poems addressed to both sexes. He composed a number of poems in praise or blame of particular singing-girls. However, above all he was a specialist in hija\ that is satirical poetry, much of it crudely abusive. Besides pillorying stingy patrons, he waged a satirical war against rival poets throughout his career. He was particularly envious of more successful poets like Buhturi.
How Ibn al-Rumi died is not clear, but it is alleged that in or around the year 896 he was poisoned by the Caliph al-Mu‘>tadid’s vizier, Qasim. Qasim was afraid lest the poet’s sharp tongue might be turned against the vizier’s clan. According to the account given in Ibn Khallikan’s thirteenth-century biographical dictionary, Ibn al-Rumi, after having been fed a poisoned biscuit, rose to leave. Qasim asked him where he was going. The poet replied that he was going where the vizier had sent him. The vizier then said to the poet, ‘In that case, convey my greetings to my father.’ ‘I am not going to the fires of Hell,’ retorted Ibn al-Rumi.
Ibn al-Rumi was a versatile poet. The poem which follows is unusual in that it is a poem about poetry and the inevitability of imperfection in literature.
Can you not see what a tree is made of?It is made of bark, dry wood
and thorns and in between is the fruit.But it should, after all, be so, that what
the Lord of Lords, not Man, creates is finely made.But it was not so but otherwise,
for a reason Divine Wisdom ordained,And God knows better than we what he brings about
and in everything he resolves there is always good.Therefore let people forgive whoever does badly or
falls short of his aim in poetry; he is [after all only] a human
being.Let them remember that his mind
is heavily taxed and his thoughts are exhausted in writing his verse.His task is like pearl-fishing at the bottom
of the sea: before the pearls lies danger.In pearl-fishing, there is the expensive, the precious
that the choice accepts, but also what it leaves behind,And it is inevitable that the diver bring with him
what is selected and what is scorned.
Gregor Schoeler (trans.), in ‘On Ibn ar-Rumi’s Reflective Poetry. His
Poem about Poetry’, Journal of Arabic Literature 27 (1966), pp. 22–3