Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period

This entire period is crowded with major political events; life was rarely free of external aggression and the consequences of such aggression. While the political history of the era is referred to in other segments of this volume, here we need to survey briefly what constituted the poet’s world as well as the background resulting from earlier history.1 The history of the Arab world in medieval times was one of great cultural effervescence; a truly brilliant civilization was forged and served as a link between the older Mediterranean cultures and the European Renaissance. Indeed, the Arabs, along with the other Muslim peoples – particularly the Persians, themselves the bearers of an ancient and luminous civilization – were the main force of enlightenment over those many centuries. It was the Arabs’ ill fortune that, at this very point in their civilization, the Turks and Mongols should have become sufficiently strong and numerous to undertake an expansion through conquest; and that, simultaneously, European Christians should invade the Arab/Islamic world, wreaking havoc over large areas in the region. Eventually, however, there were two major outcomes: the predictable final expulsion of those who remained alien and aggressively oriented vis-à-vis the large and established world they had so wilfully and inimically engaged, namely the Crusaders; and the Islamization and, in many instances, the Arabization of the others from Asia, who had devastated the world of Islam but later adopted its religion and often its language.

In order to place the poetry of the post-classical period in its rightful context, we need first to trace, albeit in brief, the course of its development from the classical zenith just noted to its eventual status in the post-classical period. For, while the independent internal development of the art² was indeed tempered to a certain extent by external life around the poet and thus partly conditioned the kind of poetry he wrote, the political and social factors that literary historians have proposed as the sole factors involved in this process of artistic change are utterly unconvincing.³

For the post-classical poet, echoes of great poetic works produced over centuries continued to reverberate in his consciousness. The Arab poetic language had largely originated in the desert and had built most of its poetic idiom in desert surroundings. Early Arab visual imagery had to compensate for the lack of means to draw objects in an ecology practically devoid of the tools for graphic art, by activating a visual imagery that made the art of description a major element in the classical Arab poem. By the pre-Islamic sixth century, Arabic poetry had achieved its first acme of perfection, with a syntax that was terse, well-knit and virile, and a rich and varied vocabulary which was to become the major basis for linguistic research in the Islamic period.

Half a century after the advent of Islam the poetic genre that had achieved ascendancy was eulogy (madḥ). For the first three to four hundred years of the Islamic caliphate, the most impassioned eulogies in Arabic were undoubtedly those written during the prime caliphal period, poems pulsating with life and pregnant with the vision of glory and infallibility. During the early period of Abbasid hegemony (750–945), and slightly into the earlier middle period (945–1258), language and poetic idiom could still display the influence of the vigorous poetic output of earlier centuries, but they also reflected a new urbanity, one that, with the rise of al-Mutanabbī in the first half of the fourth/tenth century, achieved a second acme that would serve as the basis for a poetic revival in the late nineteenth century and have a major impact on twentieth-century verse.

The development of Arabic poetry after the fifth/eleventh century presents a basic literary-historical problem: in both literary and aesthetic terms, why did poetry begin to lose its former zest and spirit?

The first point is the changing context of poetry. Formerly poets had addressed themselves to a world that was, even in circumstances of war or internal commotion, ultimately stable. However, with the passage of time Islam’s unique capacity to maintain an a-racial attitude brought about a transformation. Once converted, a new Muslim was accepted into the community of believers without undue regard for origin, race or colour. But while this may be regarded as a superior quality in Islam, it was not conducive to a continuation of the old stability. In the early centuries of Islam, poetry was still a major instrument for the caliph and his statesmen, both the vehicle for the best literary expression and the effective means of displaying the greatness of the caliphate and the significance of conquest and victory. Even during the times of al-Mutanabbī (d. 965), when various strong men had begun to rule over portions of the empire, the concept of poetry and its role in society still remained more or less stable. All this was to change rapidly after the fifth/eleventh century.

Theme and meaning are non-aesthetic elements in poetry, but they can, in certain circumstances, wield immense effect on the aesthetic ingenuity of poets. In classical Arab criticism a major controversy had arisen regarding content and form, meaning and language, and which of the two should be pre-eminent. With time, however, the stale, repetitive nature of themes and meanings impinged on the elements of emotion, vision, and attitude to life and living, thereby robbing poetry of its former verve and spirit, and what al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–9) so aptly called ‘the sap of poetry’.⁴ A kind of tacit consensus develops that poetry had certain preordained themes, and that these were subject to a hierarchy of preference. For any poet with pretensions to be a faḥl (major poet) the four crucial themes were: madḥ (eulogy, always given major prominence by classical critics because of its importance to the caliphal state, as noted above); hijā’ (satire, also often linked directly to the state, or to the faction to which the poet adhered (Shia, Kharijite, etc.) and used as a potent tool against enemies); fakhr (the praise of self or tribe), very strong in pre-Islamic poetry but of continuing importance in Islamic times; and, fourth, waṣf (description).⁵ Other themes such as ghazal, ‘itāb (chiding a friend or lover, usually, for shortcomings), rithā’ (elegy) as part of eulogy and khamriyya (a poem on wine), etc., were also discussed by critics. However, the selection of these four primary themes for the faḥl poet (overlooking ghazal, despite the fact that it has always been a major theme in Arabic) points to the importance of statehood for the Arabs. Love poetry could have no possible use as a publicity tool for the state. It was regarded rather as a pastime or a congenial prelude to more serious topics, to be used in overtures to poems.

Almost every poet – and there were very many in the period under discussion here – regarded theme, with the exception of the love theme, in terms of this categorization; and constriction of theme became a basic problem for poetry, as constant repetition and an adherence to the same topics led to utter tedium. As early as the beginning of the fourth/tenth century, Ibn Ṭabāṭabā (d. 322/934) was speaking of the ‘ordeal’ of the poets of his day (al-muḥdathūn – ‘modernists’), who could produce nothing new. Former poets, he asserted, had already accomplished all there was to accomplish; the meanings being produced by their successors were inferior, merely tedious and deserving simply to be discarded.⁶ In the fifth/eleventh century the poetic taste of the moderns was regarded as boring, and there was a general call for a return to the old methods of writing verse. Critics felt that their present century was suffering from a paucity of original and inventive works. ‘How is it,’ asked the North African critic Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī (d. 456/1064), addressing the new poets, ‘that with time you are growing poorer in poetic themes? Themes have not become fewer, only the tools [of poetry].’⁷

In the seventh/thirteenth century, another Andalūsī/North African critic, ḥāzim al-Qarṭājannī (d. 684/1285), also wrote bewailing the state of eastern poetry. For two centuries, he said, poets there had lacked all sense of the essence of poetry, and had not, in that time, produced a single faḥl.⁸ One senses that poetry was beginning to evolve in ways that would reflect a falling away from what Arabs felt were the best poetic standards. One might perhaps have expected that al-Mutanabbī’s unmatchable verse, built on qualities that form part of the Arab poetic heritage and taste – his lofty eloquence, musical and virile rhythms, aphorisms on life and experience, brilliant imagery, occasionally nostalgic tone and deep insight into the human condition – would serve as a buttress for Arabic poetry after his death (as was the case with Andalūsī poetry after Ibn Zaydūn⁹). However, a state of inertia had set in, and poetry was seen to be veering towards decline.

The poet during these centuries seemed cut off from the warmth of human experience. There was not just a distinction between the objective and the subjective, between internal and external experience; there was outright rupture between them, with the internal world of the poet often buried or, as in the case of Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī (686–768/1287–1367), negotiated only on a superficial plane. There existed a wide breach between the self and the other, and invariably it was the other that triumphed. From this situation emerged the lack of particularity. The poet seems incapable of capturing the particular, of exploring inner experience and so arriving at the essence of life. He does not see beyond the expected, the recurrent, beyond the conventional routine and formality of externalized living.

In this period, it was only good religious poetry, Sufi and other, which captured the underlying dynamics of human essence and removed the discrepancy between experience and belief. A major trait of Arabic poetry is a dichotomy between what is secular and what is religious. The poet writing secular poetry is not really oblivious of God and religious principles, particularly religious taboos with regard to wine and sex, and he might allude to them in his verse. There are also occasional allusions to the divine in non-religious poems, especially in eulogies. However, rarely do we encounter a genuine spiritual conflict in poems where the poet describes wine drinking and frolicking. On the contrary, the treatment of the subject is often lighthearted, and the notion of sin and punishment is not usually a disturbing, heart-wrenching experience. Allusions to the divine in eulogies and other poetry are usually merely tagged on to glorify the other, to emphasize the greatness of the human through the glorification of God. Very rarely, outside directly religious verse, do we find the poet’s apprehension of the world and human experience merging with any awed consciousness of the presence of the divine in all things. In fact, outside religious verse, a ‘pious’ introduction to a poetic theme hardly seems suitable to a poetry conventionally attuned to ghazal overtures. Poetic sensibility among lay poets did not usually envisage the world and the poet’s experience in it as part of a divine strategy. Secular and religious poetry ran parallel to one another, without actually meeting save on rare occasions.

Nor do we find in this verse a proper coherence between objective vision, usually of the eulogized person, and apprehension of the self, which tends to remain buried behind conventions and repetitive notions, deeply rooted in memory. This cannot be attributed simply to the tyrannical hold of the subject on the poet, for al-Mutanabbī had managed to achieve a perfect fusion between his unrelenting consciousness of self and the objective entity of the mamdūḥ (object of the panegyric). In fact, al-Mutanabbī introduced into the eulogies a rare intimate voice pulsating with authentic feeling. In his famous mīmiyya, the last poem he declaimed at Sayf al-Dawla’s court, he expressed a truly wounded affection.

The repetition, the lack of thematic variety, the incapacity of meaning to apprehend the particular through the general and merge the subjective with the objective, all this led finally to a conformity that reinforced the various adverse influences, leading poetry inexorably towards aesthetic fatigue.

The steady urbanization of diction, a natural process for a poetry now transferred, in the works of major poets, to the ambience of city life (the major poets usually lived in the city, often moving from one city to another in quest of new patrons), was, as we see in occasional examples, veering gradually but very subtly towards the vernacular. This normal poetic tendency, found in many other languages and cultures and resulting in the elevation of the vernacular to a language worthy of poetic utterance, was eventually to cut a separate road for itself in Arabic. Even before the thirteenth century, some colloquialisms had begun to infiltrate the language of formal poetry, something that was to become a notable feature in the later centuries of the post-classical period. This phenomenon was eventually to meet with stubborn resistance, as the nineteenth-century modern renaissance in Arabic letters re-established the language of poetry on a firm classical basis, carefully avoiding any encroachment by the vernacular. Poetry in the many evolved Arabic vernaculars continued to progress separately, and a large, worthwhile body of poetry in the many vernaculars of the Arab world has now accumulated, remaining separate from established formal poetry, which still boasts a unified diction and idiom.¹⁰

Quite apart from this autonomous tendency, there was a medley of other languages spoken around the poet and assailing his auditory sensibility. This must have created a tension in poets who took a distinctive pride in the inherited language of their great poetic heritage, leading to a resistance, albeit mainly unconscious, to any serious intrusion of extraneous factors in their art. Yet there were many instances where this spontaneous resistance almost failed, only to be reinforced once more by two abiding forces. The first was the perennial influence of the Koran, with its imposing quality of language and style which echoed continually in the subconscious of poets and writers in Arabic, and had its own profound impact on creative output over the centuries. The second was the love of classical poetry, which Arabs have cherished, to the point almost of obsession. It was inevitable that the general tension created by all these influences (absent in most other languages), together with other causes, would finally contrive to interfere with the natural and smooth development of the inherited idiom, causing it to deviate, in some way, from a purely autonomous course. There is, of course, no reason why the idiom of any poetic tradition should continue to draw upon the same old, inherited sources, for idioms develop with the times; but preceding criticism had often emphasized the quality of strength and virility (fuḥūla) in poetry, and there was an ongoing argument regarding the new poetry written early in the Abbasid age between al-shi῾r al-muḥdath (modernist) and the inherited verse. Modernist examples had produced doubt and rejection in quarters loyal to the old.¹¹ But in the post-classical poetry under discussion here, the problem was both greater and different. There was, as noted above, a continuing struggle to resist the natural tendency towards a more colloquial orientation and towards any possible hybridization of the language of poetry through the infiltration of other languages.¹² Yet this struggle failed to revive the old verve and style or to safeguard the inherited identity of poetic syntax, which was in fact the element that suffered most. In much of this verse one notices a loosening of the syntax of the poem, of the well-honed progression of sentences and phrases which fit as if by magic – synchronizing, often perfectly, with both the syntactic and semantic divisions of the poem, and with the rhythmic compositions that hold them perfectly together. The old spontaneous balance between pairs of phrases or sentences (mulā’ama)¹³ – which was often impulsively forged from a contrasting strategy (muqābala) built into the poem in a balanced compound – was now often lost, and a kind of imbalance occurred, a lack of harmony in the smooth, well-established divisions within the two-hemistich line about which the critic Tha ῾lab wrote with deep and original perception.¹⁴ The language was not just becoming steadily urbanized. It was also softening in some instances, sometimes to the point of near flaccidity, and the syntax was shedding that old fibre that had held words together in what sometimes seemed an inevitable style of writing; in short, it was losing the smoothness and eloquence of flow so characteristic of good Arabic poetry.

During the Abbasid period, imagery, a major element of the poem, had embarked on a course of complex metaphorical representations, achieving healthy and ingenious expression in the work of Abū Tammām (d. 231 or 232/845–6). During the post-classical period, imagery continued its headlong development towards the more intricate conceit, regardless of the need for a more lucid expression of experience in a stressful age. A high degree of complexity and affectation eventually resulted.

Other major changes to the inherited poem were occurring simultaneously. As early as the beginning of what has been termed the ‘earlier middle period’ of the Islamic empire (945–1258), some of the basic (and cherished) elements of this poetry were showing signs of weakness. Due to changing circumstances, two major poetic themes had markedly lost their former elan. The first was panegyric; the second the love theme.

In the numerous panegyrics written in the period, diction and content remained, by and large, stubbornly conventional, drawing as they did on the prototypes offered by the great eulogists of earlier times, such as al-Akhṭal (19–91/640–710) in the Umayyad period, and Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī (206–84/822–97) and al-Mutanabbī in the Abbasid period.

By the time the Islamic empire reached its zenith in the first Abbasid age, poetry had come to be closely associated with eulogy. A poet’s first concern became, apparently, the writing of panegyrics eulogizing the ruler or some dignitary in the hope of being compensated, usually financially. Poetry for pay came to be not just an accepted concept (in contrast to the state of affairs in pre-Islamic times) but a major incentive for writing verse at all. It became the principal genre of poetry, and the dīwāns overflowed with panegyrics to the eclipse of almost all other types. This created a major problem for poetry.¹⁵ It needs also to be noted that, while eulogy mostly targeted reward, spontaneous panegyrics did flow from the pens of some poets who, while proudly rejecting the idea of gain, still felt it paramount to write panegyrics on men in authority. Such was the case with the famous Shia poet al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (359–406/970–1016), who not only refused to accept any financial reward himself but even paid back the rewards accepted earlier by his poet-father.

By the end of the fifth/eleventh century, the panegyric itself had lost much of its original vigour and lofty purpose: to praise those whose deeds had brought honour and power to their people. As a disintegrating caliphate began to lose much of its former dignity, new rulers came to preside over small regions or single cities rather than the vast stretches of a unified empire. Many of these rulers were not even Arab, and did not much enjoy the rhetorical sweep in the Arabic poems of eulogists. The poet’s enthusiasm was blunted; one can easily imagine his psychological difficulties and the artificiality that pervaded the writing of his panegyrics. These difficulties were substantially increased, too, in that the writing of panegyric had been compromised by the rules that critics had imposed on eulogy, establishing a set of requisite qualities for caliphs and high dignitaries that were to be emphasized by eulogies: courage, wisdom, authority, sagacity, clemency and chastity, while at the same time strongly discouraging the praise of such things as bodily qualities or riches.¹⁶

Even without these critically imposed rules and taboos, the nature of eulogy, targeting as it does people the poet fears and from whom he hopes to gain recompense, would impose certain constrictions. Poet eulogists soon discovered they did not have a vast reservoir of possibilities to draw upon. How many qualities could they attribute to any one human being, even to the greatest of men? If earlier eulogies had been passionate and often informed by a tone of sincerity and enthusiasm, it was because the poet was inspired and enthralled by the brilliance and greatness of the power which kingship symbolized at the time. But now a major confusion of standards, a disappointment at the consequences of political life, had intervened. The only innovation they could introduce was the pursuit of exaggeration, which diminished poetic appeal still further.¹⁷ Gone from these new examples were the genuine awe and deference given to the mighty ruler, the natural eloquence, the inventive imagery, and the supreme command of language and tone. Still later in this period, Arab critics themselves came to realize that most eulogy was now marked by two basic qualities: first, it did not stem from natural, genuine feelings; and, second, it was (one might suggest, characteristically) often untrue in its ascription of great qualities to the person eulogized.

Coming to the age of minor kingdoms and petty kings, eulogy encountered yet another obstacle: many of these alien rulers were not as rich or as spontaneously generous as the rulers of the earlier, more centralized state, and thus reward was not always forthcoming. Poets often humiliated themselves in seeking recompense for eulogy. Even a prince like Shihāb al-Dīn al-Tamīmī, nicknamed ḥays Bayṣ (d. 574/1179), did not hesitate to mention compensation in his verse:

By the sixth/twelfth century, eulogists lead one to believe that life had clearly become less lucrative. Sibt ibn al-Ta῾awīdhī (519–83/1125–87) chides those who hold back their hand from giving; his poetry has humiliated him, he complains, because people do nothing except praise it, and yet one loaf of bread is better than all their praise. Even so, the first three sections of his dīwān are devoted to eulogy: to the caliphate in Baghdad, to ministers and great men, and to powerful families.

One of the most revealing examples of poets bewailing the degeneration of eulogy in their time is that of Egypt’s Abū’l-ḥusayn al-Jazzār (601–79/1204–81). Having abandoned his work as a butcher to seek riches through verse, he is forced to resume his former trade:

It would appear that by this time eulogy had become the bane of Arabic poetry, a point explored further in al-Yousfi’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 2).

As we have already noted, urbanization had played a major role in diverting Arab poets from some of the fundamental, resilient qualities of bedouin life. The great influx of slave girls and boys (homosexuality was widespread in the Muslim empire during the Middle Ages) into the cities of the now disintegrating caliphate facilitated access to sensual pleasures, permitting, in effect, a legalized promiscuity. This was a basic factor in altering attitudes of yearning and regret that had suffused the old love verse, attitudes springing from deprivation and commitment to a code of honour and chastity. There was sexual satiety now, and the greater attention paid to sensual delights turned love to more fleeting, promiscuous relationships that stressed corporeal pleasures. Poetry came to reflect this satiety. Although the perennial reproach about abandonment of the lover by his beloved remained a regular feature of ghazal writing, it had by now become a mere repetitive cliché, retaining little or nothing of its erstwhile ardour.

The new life circumstances contributed greatly to the loss of the old spirit in poetry, whether the robust spirit of heroic eulogy, or boasting (fakhr), or the tender sensitivity that informed love lyrics. In the formal verse of this period one misses a sense of inborn freedom, a greater purity of mind, a tenderness towards the beloved. The flatness that resulted from a stilling of the passion led to a flaccid verse, rarely capable of imparting the emotional appeal of former love poetry.

The only remaining avenue for passion was through Sufi poetry. Indeed, it seems clear that, during this lengthy period, Sufi poetry, along with other examples of religious poetry (such as the badī῾iyyāt (poems in praise of the Prophet) discussed by Homerin in Chapter 3) played a major role in rescuing Arabic poetry from the terminal flaccidity of an outworn art. Mystical and other religious verse was the principal genre to preserve the warm emotional and existential aspects of Arabic poetry to any extent; it managed to merge the oblique linguistic venture with complex meanings of profundity and universal appeal.

The series of assaults on the region from east and west and the increasing decentralization of authority led to a gradual but relentless process of change that transformed the nature and direction of the creative environment. The poet, now a mere pawn at the mercy of princes and leaders who controlled his livelihood, was forced to look for a different kind of poetic expression – this time a more neutral one.

One line of escape that could still be viewed as a healthy release from tiresome external demands was through descriptive miniatures that had begun to appear towards the end of the third/ninth century. As noted above, early critics had identified description (waṣf) as one of the four main subjects of good verse. By the sixth century AD, for example, the two main objects of description, the she-camel and the horse, had already acquired a standardized canon. In the second half of the third/ninth century, Ibn al-Mu῾tazz (247–96/861–908) concerned himself with poetry as pure art. Turning to love and the description of gardens, flowers and other refinements that abounded in the Baghdadi royal ambience, he established a special kind of descriptive poetry which became a genre in itself. He was the creator of what came to be called wardiyyāt (rose poems), zuhriyyāt or nawriyyāt (flower poems) and rabī῾iyyāt (spring poems), etc., which became widespread in the fourth/tenth century and after. The following brief example is characteristic of his many tableaux:

Here was a poetry that concentrated on describing objects of nature, usually fragmented nature, in still life, and was the nearest we had to a poetry of art for art’s sake. This genre, which became highly popular in both the east and in al-Andalus, was fully artistic, fully inventive and creatively demanding. Even though it lacked any active communication with the human condition, it nonetheless provided a solution for poets who had reached the end of their tolerance of the age of poetic utilitarianism, a refuge from the burden of eulogy. On this kind of neutral ground, erudition and inventiveness could shine through, independent of extraneous considerations.

During the period under study, poets continued to compose such miniatures with inventive, though often dispassionate, skill. Yet the search for novelty did not abate, as these purely descriptive examples were independent of other themes. As greater affectation seeped in and the impact of external forces became overriding, poets became increasingly preoccupied with linguistic devices applicable to all themes. Gradually a greater artificiality can be seen in the use of poetic conceits and the vast array of figures of speech fashionable at the time.

As the post-classical period proceeded, poetry progressively lost its capacity to filter out extraneous linguistic intrusions and redundancies; its vigour diminished with each century during the lengthy Mamluk period (648–923/1250–1517). Insidious shortcomings became evident in various aspects of the poem, especially the waning of a genuine emotional impulse in many poets and a loss of the old precision and eloquent diction. Most important of all was the loosening of the poem’s previous compactness of sentence and phrase, the fading of much of the old lustre and grandeur. As poets strove for contemporaneity under the shadow of an earlier triumphant eloquence that was no longer spontaneously possessed, their products display a helpless decline as they laboured under the burden of stale, repetitive structures. In retrospect, it is clear that a regression was inevitable. Arabic poetry had enjoyed a prolonged history of potency, and this lengthy and robust tradition had been nourished and sustained by the wide linguistic variety, inventive imagery, lofty eloquence and flowing rhythms of the Koran. However, poetry now found itself hemmed in by the circumstances of Arab life.

Among the most prominent features of this process was an ever increasing focus on ornamentation. It is certainly true that intricate figures of speech had become a primary feature of poetry during the Abbasid era (Ibn al-Mu῾tazz’s Kitāb al-badī῾, written in 274/887) and that they had initially been inventively used by such great poets as Abū Tammām, but during the long period under discussion here they developed into a mere profusion of embellishments and a highly mannered linguistic exercise. The poem became ever more trivialized, with many later examples (especially during the Ottoman period) displaying a trifling preoccupation with amusement and polite exchange. Embellishments such as jinās (paronomasia), ṭibāq (antithesis) and tawriya (double entendre) and a variety of metrical tricks permeated the poetry of the Arabic-speaking world like a pervasive vogue for several centuries, indeed for far longer than fashions normally do. This was a time when poets moved away from those sources of creativity that had once been the essence of a free Arab spirit, linking creative expression to the roots of the soul and imbuing it with the vision and meaning of life and living. This alienation from the human heart and spirit, this preference for skill over spontaneity, for the limitations of a rigid and exacting style and the constrictions of formulaic rules and demands, over the expansive, the instinctive, the primordial, the impulsive, the tender, the passionate, the ardent, this was to be the scourge of Arabic verse for many centuries.

At base, writing in the poetic genre was highly resistant to change and dedicated to the imitative; a ‘clever’ brand of versification, devoted to witticisms and plays on words and sometimes characterized by a hedonistic tendency to depict dissolute behaviour, with poets such as Ibn῾Unayn (549–630/1154–1233) excelling in perverse and graphic sexual depictions, devoid of either aesthetic or human value. Poets perpetually sought to outdo each other in ever new inventions, spinning in a vacuum around each other.

How estranged had the Arabs of the urban centuries become from the values of the Arabs of old whose poetic attainments had become legend, who had aestheticized their contradictions through the eloquent sayings of their poets and made a principle out of them: tenderness, devotion and selflessness towards woman and love, but also a defiant and boastful self-centredness in tribal hostilities; gallantry and magnanimity, but also honourable vengeance; generosity and hospitality, but also a relentless aggression bent on plunder and the use of force for survival? This was the law of the desert, of scarcity and aridity, and it organized their life, gave it shape and challenge, and filled it with nostalgia, a constant sense of loss, a perennial craving for the impossible, for a constantly receding point of anchor, for a love that will never be requited. This would remain part and parcel of Arab folk songs, from Oman to Morocco – songs of longing, of hope and despair that seem inseparable from the Arab soul and its vision of life. They were also to re-appear, and with great force, in some of the best formal poetry of modern times. They seeped into the verse of a great neoclassicist, Aḥmad Shawqī (1869–1932), and also of a great innovator, Gibrān Khalīl Gibrān (1883–1931). Thereafter they filled the poetry of the romantics of the twenties and thirties, and imbued the verse of great neoclassicists like Badawī al-Jabal (1907–82), before touching with splendid decorum the poetry of some leading modernists such as Adūnīs (b. 1929), Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1926–65) and Maḥmūd Darwīsh (b. 1941).

With regard to the poets themselves, the period we are dealing with is marked by a number of major characteristics. In the first place, numerous poets emerged throughout the length and breadth of the Arab-Islamic dominions. Second, in spite of the many internal feuds and external wars, and for all the varied types of dynasty that presided over different regions and cities, poets were, for the most part, at home throughout the ample regions inhabited by Arabs and Arabic-speaking people. Poets might move from one region to another that, at least in the context of the times, was reckoned remote, but, wherever they went, they would be recognized as Arab poets or poets writing in Arabic, and thus as participants in the living tradition of Arabic poetry. There was a basic concept of Arab literary identity – cohesive, inclusive and wide-ranging, and it made of poetry and literature not a regional but rather a national cultural output. The third characteristic – and a thoroughly disturbing one – was that poets were markedly similar in their output, themes, approaches and expectations. Of course there were different, even contrasting groups of poets, each attuned to poetry’s distinctive, sometimes oppositional orientation (a good example is the opposition between Shia, especially Ismaili, poets and Sunni poets). Nevertheless, for all the differences reflected within the confines of each group, in elements of attitude and belief (the last merely a matter of theme) the main resemblances stand. Thus, just as we may find mystical or directly pious religious poetry throughout the Arabic-speaking regions, so we find everywhere debauched poetry reflecting a dissolute indifference to Islamic morality. Homosexual poetry was a widespread phenomenon, as were other themes like the bewailing of old age, reiterated ad nauseam and mostly employing the same set of motifs, similes and comparisons (for example, the comparison of white hair to day and black hair to night). The fourth characteristic, a crucial one, is that, despite the large number of poets that emerged, this period cannot boast a single great poet equal in stature and poetic gifts to any of the bards of earlier periods. More than six hundred years seem to have passed without the Arab world producing a poet whose verses could attract and hold the attention of major critics, either then or now, on the basis of poetic as opposed to purely semantic content. It is, of course, inconceivable that this long epoch should not have produced a single poetic genius. Many such were surely born, and yet the development of their talents was hampered by the standards and expectations in vogue during their lifetime.

Discussion of the main output of certain poets from various parts of this period will shed further light on the general situation and development of the poetry. In order to provide a context, the discussion will be prefaced by a very brief discussion of their immediate predecessors.

The major poets who came after the zenith of al-Mutanabbī were Abū’l-῾Alā’ al-Ma῾arrī (363–449/973–1057) and al-Sharīf al-Raḍī (359–406/970–1016) – a markedly contrasting pair. Al-Raḍī, as noted earlier, was the last heir of the great Arab fuḥūl poets, but one whose normally virile and well-knit style was sufficiently mellow and urbane to be influential in modern times. By contrast, al-Ma῾arrī was a maverick with no familiar ancestors and no apparent heirs, one who coupled a wealth of original, profound and subtle views on the divine and the profane, on life and the afterlife, with a formidable capacity for paradox and refined irony and an exceptional command of language and style.

Many, but not all, among the two generations of poets directly following al-Raḍī and al-Ma῾arrī continued to exhibit an inherited strength. The poetry of Ibn Nubāta al-Sa῾dī (327–405/939–1015), an older contemporary of al-Raḍī – like him, originally from Iraq, but one who roved the Arab world to eulogize princes, ministers and dignitaries – still reflects the riches of emotion, the composed ardour and flowing rhythms found in good inherited verse. His contemporary, Abū’l-Fatḥ al-Bustī (330–401/941–1010), is the author of a famous and well-knit nūniyya full of maxims and reflections on life and the world, beginning with the famous verse:

To this period also belongs the Iraqi Ibn Zurayq (d. before 428/1037), author of one of the most famous love poems in Arabic, the fine and much memorized῾ayniyya: ‘Do not blame him, blame inflames him.’ Then there is the Persian poet Miḥyār al-Daylamī (d. 428/1037), whose bā’iyya, vaunting his Persian ancestry, has even so been memorized by millions of Arabs:

The famous lāmiyya poem of the Arabized Persian poet Mu’ayyad al-Dīn al-Ṭughrā’ī (453–515/1061–1121), beginning ‘Authenticity of mind has protected me from error *** and the jewel of virtue adorns me’, is still known among moderns for its virile yet confessional tone, challenging the vicissitudes of his circumstances.

Yet, for all the continuity of the old traditions in these and some other poets, there was a relentless, ongoing change in style, strength of language and poetic essence. The parallel phenomena of change and continuity that are so evident in the poetry of the eleventh and twelfth centuries may be seen as clear illustrations of a process that would be repeated constantly throughout the ensuing period under discussion here, with some poets still simulating the old rhetorical address while others veered towards a much more simplified mode of expression.

This famous poet from Cairo lived just before 1250, but a short perusal of his verse seems essential to show the way poetic weaknesses and decadent trends had already entrenched themselves in certain poetic contributions. He grew up in an affluent family and was able to study and mix with the prominent dignitaries and men of letters of his day. Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk lived in a new urban age, which, for all its instability on the political front, had acquired newly established sets of social and literary relationships. The poetry demonstrates joy in friendship, deference to already established social conventions and a kind of communion of souls among men. The art of friendship had asserted itself, in a different kind of relationship from the one we find in early Islamic poetry, where the presence of such male friendship was not pronounced. Now, as a result of sustained urban life, an inner sociability had been formed, and one sees poets alluding to or directly eulogizing their friends as poetic peers.²⁵ Eroticism itself was now divided between the heterosexual and homosexual, with the latter often gaining the upper hand in the verse of Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk and others.

His greatest patron was al-Qāḍī᾽l-Fāḍil (529–96/1135–1200), the senior administrator of Saladin, famous epistle-writer, essayist and poet, and a leader in the new style decked with embellishments and figures of speech (discussed in detail in Musawi’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 5). His fame rests less on his status as poet than on his attempts to write innovative muwashshaḥāt and on his excellent book on the muwashshaḥ genre, Dār al-ṭirāz fī ‘amal al-muwashshaḥāt, in which he demonstrated a sensitive understanding of the intricate and to this day much misunderstood technique of this art and of its origins.²⁶

Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk wrote eulogies, ghazal (much of it homosexual), satire, fakhr and some descriptive poems. During the Ayyubid wars against the Crusaders, we see him praising Saladin’s victories, especially the one at Tibnin.²⁷ Yet one senses immediately that the fire and passion of a genuine poetic reaction to a great victory are almost totally absent. Missing also from his long elegy on his mother, a hamziyya,²⁸ is the sense of grief one encounters in, for example, Ibn al-Rūmī’s elegies, particularly the one on his middle son.

Yet this tepidity does not persist in all his poetry. Reading his long dāliyya²⁹ that begins ‘Others fear death, not I’, the first part of which is dedicated to vaunting his pride and status, one is impressed with a sense of emotional fullness that pervades this part of the poem, reminiscent – in its fiery words, its defiant tone, its well-phrased word order and its faithfulness to the inherited passion and balance within the poem – of fakhr poetry from pre-Islamic times:

We recognize a familiar voice as the poet lets his words flow with a smooth lucidity. However, in the second part of the poem, on ghazal, one is immediately faced with a different orientation and a divergent, incompatible construction. What can have happened to rupture the smooth flow of diction in such a sudden and radical fashion? Nothing more nor less than a change of subject. The vaunting part of this dāliyya proves his complete mastery of the old order in writing verse, the well-honed, traditional poetic address which, when internalized by young poets, had become an integral part of the creative process. However, ghazal was one of the themes which, as already noted, had undergone a major change since the nostalgic and fervent love lyrics of the poets of the Umayyad era and the vibrant lyricism of a poet of the early Abbasid era such as Dīk al-Jinn al-ḥimṣī. Poets now lived in an age of sexual promiscuity (a trend noticeable in this poet’s work), one in which various intricate figures of speech were the vogue for both prose and verse.

His large dīwān is, in fact, full of examples of deliberately laboured efforts to construct a verse bedecked with figures of speech, a new kind of phraseology and diction. Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s poetry reflects his conscious effort to opt out of the old style, to innovate in a verse that had already lost its stamina and emotional core. For the reasons discussed above, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s poetry, and that of many poets of his age, was not merely veering towards sterility and rigidity, but also combating the increasing infiltration of colloquialisms. However, the most sterile aspect of Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s verse appears in his attempts to invent embellishments and ornamentations. The more he strives to coin new words and demonstrate originality, the more his verse falls apart under the weight of artificiality. In his elegy on his own mother (the above-mentioned hamziyya), for example, he conveys his personal feelings in an inappropriate mix of unfamiliar words and awkwardly spun phrases.

His concentration on a search for novelty is one example of a decadent tendency that was already becoming prominent in the poetry of this period, as is his interest in aestheticism – confined in his case to concentration on embellishments and wordplay. A further symptom is his ‘poetic interest in corruption and morbidity’³⁰ encountered in highly obscene satirical pieces that reflect not only his own poetic shortcomings but also a failure of the era to uphold moral ideals. He makes use of sexual imagery of a graphic and repellent quality. The weaknesses we find in much of his poetry – the intrusion of occasional vulgarisms and his addiction to abstruse vocabulary with a merely artificial novelty but no aesthetic worth, rhythmic smoothness or semantic value – these are symptoms of a linguistic recession of serious dimensions, resulting from the poet’s limited apprehension of the poetic, his preoccupation with ornamentation, fanciful conceits and extravagant figures of speech that encumbered poetry and the way that diction was divorced from genuine emotion and from the eloquence that had afforded poetry its former grandeur.

In contrast with Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s affluent upbringing, the Damascene Ibn ‘Unayn, another famous poet of the period, came from a poor family.³¹ He wrote eulogies, ghazal, satire and poems of longing for his home city of Damascus. Unlike Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk, he failed to win favour with princes. Because of his harsh invective, he was banished from Damascus by Saladin and wandered from one region to another, engaged in trade and composing poem after poem to describe his homesickness for Damascus.³² On this topic Ibn ‘Unayn’s poetry shines, since the opportunity to demonstrate true feelings and a personal grief allows for a more genuine expression. He is certainly a better poet than Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk. Like the latter, he tried to rid his verse of repetitive words and phrases, and one can easily detect his often ineffective attempts to introduce novelty through the use of new and still unidiomatic words and the coining of new derivatives. However, far from vesting his language with aesthetic wonder and an escape from the humdrum and outmoded, such a technique manages only to shock the reader’s sensibility with its alien effect, stunting any possible achievement of emotional and rhythmic fulfilment in the poem.

Ibn ‘Unayn’s profanity is even greater than that of Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk. He was a self-declared lecher, notorious in his day for the wantonness of his invective and the obsessive and often repugnant relish with which he depicts utterly reckless sexual escapades. Like Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk and others, he anticipates the post-classical period in the loss of charge and tension that mark good poetry. Much of his poetry is more like versified prose, even when describing experiences that should arouse passion in a genuine poet. In a short poem on death he flatly says:

Interestingly, the kind of poetry we have just described, one that fails the test of art and time alike, was contemporaneous with some of the most interesting and enduring experiments in Sufi poetry. This is not to say that Sufi poetry was free of weaknesses, or that it was always able to produce verse in the best tradition of Arabic poetry. Yet, notwithstanding occasional faults, the Sufi achievement in Arabic verse is momentous: it revolutionized the language of poetry and vested it with mystery and all kinds of obliquity. Many of the faults that did exist sprang from the Sufis’ attempt to overload their language with meaning and from their interest in expressing their often esoteric ideas – multilayered, subtle, paradoxical, antithetical, inclusive, gripping, ecstatic and often dreamlike – ideas for which immediate equivalents did not always exist. But, for all these linguistic difficulties (clearly seen, for instance, in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s awkward use of rhymes in his al-Tā’iyya al-kubrā – discussed in Homerin’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 3), Sufi experiments developed an extremely supple diction, mainly because of the poetry’s authentic emotional core. Muslim mystical poets experimented with words and their symbolic meaning with great audacity and often with great success. At times they succeed in expanding the semantic power of words to its furthest limits, discovering hidden modalities and investing them with a magic that is unforgettable:

The essence of Sufi thought entered the lifeblood of the poem and informed its vision. Every thought they offered was an experience in itself. Reading it, our sensibility is modified. Sufis receive thoughts with their five senses, and find a correspondence between the body and the spirit, and between all the different sense modalities. This is well demonstrated in Ibn al-‘Arabī’s sense of the unity of the universe;³⁸ in al-Murtaḍā al-Shahrazūrī’s (465–511/1073–1117) intricate descriptions of love for the Divine; in Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī’s (550–87/1155–91) complex semantic antitheses; and in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s concept of the ‘correspondence’ of the senses, seen especially in his long tā’iyya in which he mingles the functions of the different senses so as to reflect the totality of the relationship with God.

For the purposes of this chapter the significance of the Sufi experiment is: first, to show the variety of poetic experience that was simultaneously taking place just before and during the post-classical period, with obviously diverse effects on language, syntax and style; and, second, to demonstrate how Sufi poetry, in contrast to much profane poetry, was able to sustain verse in a state of connectedness with the emotional core of experience. It was a mysticism with a genuine spiritual commitment, with a vision: esoteric, complex and mystical, but also apprehensible through the lucid inner logic of fine, meaningful verse. With its passionate zeal, creative freshness, mellow diction, and emotional and rhythmic flow, it managed to preserve the primary prerequisites of verse and protect Arabic poetry from the emotional atrophy that was threatening it. The symbolist successes of the Sufis, their cogent obliquities and many layered devices, represent a substantial addition to an already rich poetic heritage.³⁹

During this lengthy period another kind of religious poetry, primarily the badī‘iyyāt, or poems in praise of the Prophet, of which Sharaf al-Dīn al-Būṣīrī (608–96/1212–96)⁴⁰ was the acknowledged master, was also to uphold even more directly Arabic poetry’s emotional core and passionate commitment in order to sustain a partial continuity with the great tradition of Arabic verse. Eulogies of the Prophet had been heralded much earlier,⁴¹ and had achieved reasonably cogent expression at the hands of the Baghdadi Jamāl al-Dīn al-ṣarṣarī (588–656/1192–1258). While his verse has an uneven aesthetic and emotional appeal, it reflects the deep consciousness of Muslims during times when various religious creeds coexisted in the region: not only the various Islamic denominations (al-ṣarṣarī was a fervent follower of Imam Aḥmad ibn ḥanbal) but also Christian and even Jewish currents of thought.⁴² His verse, like that of al-Būṣīrī, often hovers on the borderline of mysticism, even at times displaying clear mystical features, particularly when he focuses on the theme of divine love. Nevertheless, it lacks al-Būṣīrī’s more cogent style and elevated mode of address.

Al-Būṣīrī came to Egypt from western North Africa and developed an early inclination towards a mystical orientation of Islamic piety. He seems to have lived ten years in Jerusalem, then moved to Medina in Hijaz where he stayed for thirteen years before returning to Cairo. It is interesting to read that, having failed to earn a livelihood through eulogy, he opted to teach the Koran to children. However, his religious bent inspired him to write the most renowned and constantly read eulogies on the Prophet, the famous hamziyya of 517 verses on the life of the Prophet of Islam and the Islamic mission (da‘wā) up to the end of the rule of the four Orthodox caliphs, and the still more famous Burda, a mīmiyya of 160 verses, composed when suffering from a paralysis from which he is said to have recovered after the poem’s completion. The smooth flow of words and rhythms, the intimate, ardent tone, the nostalgic mention of the holy places dear to Muslims, the well-constructed phraseology, have guaranteed this poet’s abiding presence in the memory of Arabic-speaking Muslims.

It was this kind of verse that was eventually to become more influential. Purely mystical poetry could be very difficult for lay people to apprehend, but the eulogies of the prophet, albeit marked by recurrent touches of mysticism, remain more lucid and directly accessible.

Bahā’ al-Dīn Zuhayr (al-Bahā’ Zuhayr) is another famous poetic figure, who, with his well-balanced, calm verse, heralded the Mamluk era. He was a man of upright character and probity, traits well reflected in his poetry. Born in the vicinity of Mecca, he spent most of his adult life in Egypt. He was a favourite of the Ayyubid ruler al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn, and remained loyal during the latter’s imprisonment by his uncle al-Malik al-Nāṣir, who had been ambitious for power. When al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ left prison and went to Egypt in 639/1242, al-Bahā’ Zuhayr joined him there and was well compensated for his steadfastness. Remarks by scholars and men of letters who knew him, along with the poetry itself, suggest an equable man of great generosity, decency and inner decorum, although these qualities do not prevent him from speaking satirically at times about people he found hard to tolerate.⁴³ Personal satire had become fashionable in this age, but al-Bahā’ Zuhayr never descended to the obscenities of Ibn ‘Unayn and Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk. Indeed he may be seen as providing some compensation for the numerous poets of decadent morality (mujūn) with whom the age abounded.

Al-Bahā’ Zuhayr’s poems are lucid and simple, a far cry from poetry decked out with complex embellishments. While he does use figures of speech, his artistic decorum provides a natural barrier against exaggerated artificiality. The paramount feature of his poetry is its pure lyricism, a quality sadly flawed in the case of other poets by incongruent diction and lack of harmonious flow. In al-Bahā’ Zuhayr’s verse, sound patterns, cadences and intonations, metrical coherence, sensuous quality and subjective mode all coalesce to make this poetry the purest expression of a lyrical spirit that is many centuries old. Based on emotion, it does not, as al-Mutanabbī’s verse does, involve an element of reflective intellectuality, but it is self-sufficient nevertheless in its expressed love of beauty, life and erotic encounters. An example of his love poetry that has remained in the culture’s memory is the overture to one of his eulogies, a lāmiyya:

However, what this poetry lacks is some of the basic elements of elevated poetic expression. It is too tied to the occasion that gave it birth, thus keeping it bound to the immediacy of the here and now and largely incapable of being transferred to the subjective experience of the reader and thus linked to it. It also lacks a vision of life or of the future. While his many love lyrics do provide some indications of universal experience, they are rendered banal by replication as the poet endlessly reiterates the same ideas. Nor is ardour often found in these poems, as though love were a social habit, not a real event capable of shaking one’s very existence.

For al-Bahā’ Zuhayr poetry is part and parcel of daily life, faithfully mirroring his external experience. He has poems for every kind of daily interaction: a note of thanks, an expression of regret at someone’s illness or mishap, a description of a state of mind, an invitation to a party, a meeting for pleasure. Affairs of the heart are all treated in similar fashion: a tryst made or not kept, a reminder of a love covenant, of a promise broken, suffering from separation, a courtship begun or ended, a messenger bringing good or ill tidings, and the perennial lament on lost youth:

Al-Bahā’ Zuhayr’s poetry is a faithful reflection of the urban life of his times at its best, a life that still forms, to some extent, part of the Arab social tradition today. In fact, when one reads this poetry in its entirety, a picture emerges of an age over seven hundred years ago, with its social traditions and restrictions, its addiction to pleasure, its affluent comforts, its strict rules for social interaction, its splendour, its obligations, all of which were abandoned by the true ascetics and Sufis of the age in their quest for freedom from such constraints and compulsions.

Despite its personal references, we are still far removed from the kind of subjectivity found in the great poetry of experience. In his verse there is a kind of divorce from the poet’s inner life and authentic thoughts. Yet we can still sense, here and there, a fleeting rebellion, as if this constant socialization were a mask he was forced to don in order to endure. He refers, often, to the tricks he plays either on those who blame him or on others – the implication being that he deliberately eludes their scrutiny. In one of his shorter poems he says:

This is the ‘Umar ibn Abī Rabī῾a (d. 712 or 721) syndrome par excellence. However, ‘Umar (the renowned seventh/eighth-century ghazal poet) was capable, if not of ecstasy, then at least of a real and splendid celebration of love, coupled with a more particularized experience. One feels that al-Bahā’ Zuhayr is not speaking of persons really important to him; it is as if the beloved were a kind of prototype, as if, finally, any beauty would do.

His poetry provides a fine example of language attaining the level and simplicity of common speech without sacrificing the authentic connection to the inherited idiom. It flows without impediment; there is no attempt to select incongruent words or to introduce unsuitable vocabulary which might obstruct the flow of the poem’s diction and rhythm. Even when he uses words not commonly employed in poetry, as he often does, they seem to fit the verse’s structure and rhythmic fluidity. One distinctive feature is his use of words hitherto unfamiliar to poetry and presumably used colloquially during his own time, words that are still part of the colloquial of some Arab countries but have not become formal language. For example, he uses two words, liḥāf (‘bedcover’ or ‘eiderdown’) and ṭurrāḥa (‘floor cushion’),⁴⁷ both of which are still used in Lebanese and Palestinian colloquials; the same applies to his use of bukrā for ‘tomorrow’.⁴⁸

This is indeed an age of irreconcilable contradictions. How, one might ask, could a single period produce Sufi poetry of such ecstasy and intensity of feeling, coupled to a vast vision of a divinity encompassing the whole world and permeating every atom in it, and yet, at the same time, produce that sometimes placid and dainty, sometimes obscene and crude, and almost always superficial apprehension of an experience devoid of vision and profundity? In al-Bahā’ Zuhayr there is only the reachable, the moment of frolic, of joy, of hope for the immediate gift from a dignitary, of a morning shining with flowers and fragrance, of an evening brimming with friendship and drink; of no time beyond time; of a stolen kiss, of a meeting won or lost, of a little chagrin, a little chiding or praise.

The Syrian poet Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ‘Afīf al-Tilimsānī was born in Cairo, after his father – ‘Afīf al-Dīn Sulaymān al-Tilimsānī, a famous Sufi and a gifted poet – had emigrated from Tilimsān (Tlemcen) in North Africa to join other prominent Sufis. Shams al-Dīn is usually known by the nickname al-Shābb al-Ẓarīf (the elegant youth). He grew up in Cairo, but left it early in his youth when his father took a job in Damascus. The young poet was in touch with the men of letters of his day and gained a substantial following in Damascus, becoming a recognized poet there while still in the prime of youth. However, this provoked the envy of certain poets. Alien though it was to his own temperament, he was dragged into a battle of satire and counter-satire against them. ‘Why should poets deny me my honour?’ he asked,

These poets managed to aggravate him, and his works include several poems that denounce their antagonism and hatred. When the situation finally became unbearable, the desperate poet went into seclusion and later died suddenly during his father’s lifetime.

Most of his poetry concerns ghazal and wine, but he also composed nature poetry, eulogies, elegies and verse on other topics. In addition he wrote muwashshaḥāt and, having been brought up in a religious family, wrote some badī‘iyyāt. He wrote cultivated verse that reflected an urbane outlook on the world. Relevant here is an observation made by Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī (791–837/1389–1434), a connoisseur of badī῾and author of the prestigious Khazānat al-adab, a study of the poetic art of al-Sharaf al-Anṣārī, an immediate Syrian predecessor of Shams al-Dīn (by whom the poet was greatly influenced). Al-Sharaf al-Anṣārī, says Ibn Ḥijja, took care to achieve harmony in his verse, implying that the poem ‘comes free from incongruence, like flowing water’ and adding that poets writing on love should not burden its simplicity with badī‘ of any kind unless it comes easily and spontaneously to them. Most of the poetry of Shaykh Sharaf al-Dīn al-Anṣārī, he says, is characterized by this quality,⁵⁰ and the same remark can plausibly be made regarding the poetry of Shams al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī.

Al-Shābb al-Ẓarīf’s ghazal is in fact quite gentle and musical, and one wonders why the poems in question have failed to enter the broad, ever living memory of Arabic poetry. The following poem, for example, is truly lovely:

While this reads very melodiously in Arabic, little is known today of this poem or of the poet and his work. This is perhaps because in places the language, for all the poem’s melodious sway, lacks the necessary immediacy; more importantly, it is because the expression is not a decisive avowal of an exclusive emotion. Love is linked merely to the beauty of the desired object of love, not to her real person, whereas it is always the particularity and exclusivity of love, its transcendence of beauty and physical qualities, that really matters. The whole period, it must be said, exhibits this deficit, the love it offers being more dependent on physical passion and desire than on any absorbing and abiding attachment. The lack of dedication, the concentration on transient relations based on outward attractiveness, is one of the most unconvincing features of this period’s profusion of ghazal poetry. Despite this particular poem’s strong avowal of suffering in love, it too is unconvincing. It fails to arouse the reader’s deeper emotions about the universal experience of love.

Although no poet of the post-classical period can boast of having started a major trend in formal poetry, Al-Ḥillī can at least claim to have embraced most trends and poetic genres of his time. He possessed a broad concept of poetry and was ready to embrace, with open-minded enthusiasm, every kind of innovative approach without being particularly attached to any. At the same time, his poetry is deeply rooted in the heritage of Arabic verse.

Ṣafī al-Dīn Al-Ḥillī was born and grew up in al-Ḥilla near Kufa. The murder of one of his uncles provided the initial incentive for the poet’s belligerence, and he seems to have fought courageously in a battle waged to avenge this uncle’s death, one that engendered one of the most famous fakhr poems in Arabic. Like Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s famous fakhr poem, it stems from the heart of the old poetic tradition. The genre had clearly maintained its traditions and vocabulary, almost unaffected by the changes in language, syntax and tone. Although written in praise of his own familial relations and their exploits in battle, it has been adopted by later generations as a poem vaunting Arab virtues and courage in general. Here is the famous verse, memorized by almost all Arabs even up to this day:

Initially, as he proclaims in the introduction to his dīwān, he hated to eulogize for profit, since

Al-Ḥillī goes on to note that, after he had won fame as a poet, numerous wars and disasters forced him to leave his family, wife and city. Leaving Iraq in 701/1302 following the upheavals caused by warring members of the Hulagu dynasty, he seems to have made a living in commerce travelling from one place to another. Needing the support of a dignitary, however, he eulogized princes, especially al-Malik al-Manṣūr Najm al-Dīn Ghāzī of the Urtuq dynasty in Mardin⁵⁴ for whom he composed twenty-nine eulogies, each based on a letter in the Arabic alphabet, with verses that begin and end with the same letter. These he collected in a volume called Durar al-nuḥūr (Jewels for Necks).⁵⁵ His dīwān, that he himself organized for posterity, is divided into twelve sections: 1. Fakhr and ḥamāṣa (bravery). 2. Eulogy, praise and thanksgiving. 3. Hunt poems (ṭardiyyāt) and other description. 4. Friendship (ikhwāniyyāt), an important new subject in this age. 5. Elegy and condolence. 6. Ghazal and other erotic themes. 7. Wine and flower/nature poems. 8. Complaints and chiding (‘itāb). 9. Gifts, apologies and the request for leniency. 10. Riddles and complex ideas. 11. Adab, asceticism and other things. 12. Funny and satirical anecdotes.

The firm control exerted by Al-Ḥillī on his art is clearly indicated by his immense capacity to write in both the old and the new styles without seeming a stranger to either. Perhaps the one single quality that marks this poetry is its lower calibre as compared to other more efflorescent eras. Al-Ḥillī seems to have shared an affinity with all periods, not excluding his own – with its heavy dependency on embellishments and complex figures of speech. Yet, while Al-Ḥillī’s poetry might reflect considerable interest in badī‘ of all kinds, we do not meet the stark artificiality and the gross incongruence which mar the poetry of Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk.

Al-Ḥillī’s poetry, like that of al-Bahā’ Zuhayr, is a superb mirror of his age. The flagrant way poets spoke of wine drinking and homosexuality still remains a source of amazement; Al-Ḥillī provides a prime example. As noted above, he has a whole section on wine (‘the origin of all pleasure’).⁵⁶ In one poem he urges his listener ‘to commit the loveliest of sins’:

Al-Ḥillī also composed a substantial amount of erotic poetry, reflecting the essence of the tradition of love poetry in his time, more of a divertimento, a continuation of a tradition, than an expression of ardour and deep emotion. A polygamous outlook on love and sexuality was the vogue now, further complicated by widespread homosexual practices since a profusion of slave girls and boys furnished a great variety of choice. In one poem he can inform the beloved that he would lay his cheeks in the pathway of her shoes;⁵⁸ in another, he adopts a haughty tone, assuring the fickle beloved that:

Al-Ḥillī is famous for his active interest in the new experiments in form that were affecting both formal and vernacular poetry, composing muwashshaḥ,⁶¹ musammaṭ⁶², dūbayt⁶³ and poetry in other forms as well.⁶⁴ His experiments with poetic language are full of interest. We have seen how with al-Bahā’ Zuhayr the simplification of language fitted the syntax and rhythms of his poetry. In Al-Ḥillī a further dimension is added. He was aware both of the inherited poetic idiom he had mastered and of the vocabulary in use in his day, and showed great dexterity in incorporating words from the new vocabulary into the entrenched syntax of the inherited verse, so harmonizing the new with the old without hindrance to the assimilation of meaning or to the flow of the poem’s rhythms. This is the basic difference between the linguistic innovations of poets like Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk and Ibn ‘Unayn on the one hand and of Al-Ḥillī on the other. However, his greatest weakness lay in his inability to speak with profundity and with the mind of a man of more urbane times. Although he participates easily enough in the poetic innovations of his age, he seems also to belong to previous ages. Unlike many poets of the post-classical period, he was not tepid in his expression of emotion, but he sometimes goes to such banal emotional extremes that the authentic emotional tenor of elevated poetry is lost, and the tone vulgarized.⁶⁵

Ṣafī al-Dīn Al-Ḥillī was undoubtedly a highly gifted poet, endowed with a poetic talent rarely encountered. By virtue of his innovations, his interest in new forms and the generally strong tone of his verse, he was indeed the best poet of this long period. Nevertheless, his frank avowals of coarse ideas and declarations of certain feelings and interests without the finesse and decorum to befit a major poetic figure, and, above all, his often unperfected poetic expression, all these preclude his placement in the higher echelon of poets in Arabic literary history.

Ibn Nubāta embarked on poetry in a period when eulogy had become so entrenched as to be synonymous with poetry.⁶⁶ He also lived in the age when numerous figures of speech, prolifically used, had taken hold of poets’ imaginations.⁶⁷ His poetry bears witness to the weakening hold of poets and audience alike on what was poetic in verse, to the erosion of the relationship between poetry on the one hand and life and the inner soul of the poet on the other.

Ibn Nubāta was born and raised in Egypt, but spent most of his adult life in Syria, which at the time was politically united with Egypt. Having failed to make any profit from his verse in Egypt, he gained access to rulers in Syria who were prepared to compensate him for eulogizing them. The most important of these was al-Mu’ayyad al-Ayyūbī, better known to posterity as Abū᾽l-Fidā, the famous historian and author appointed by the Egyptian Mamluks to be ruler of Hama in Syria. He seems to have honoured Ibn Nubāta, and the poet wrote many eulogies on him, also elegizing him when he died in 732/1331.

Ibn Nubāta’s copious dīwān is full of eulogies (a few of them in praise of the Prophet) and elegies; together these two genres comprise over 70 per cent of his verse. In fact almost all his longer poems are eulogies or elegies on important personages, other topics being treated in short pieces. His verse does, however, provide substantial material for the study of historical linguistics, for tracing the notable, if problematic, way that poetic language had begun to change seriously vis-à-vis previous ages. He was quite knowledgeable about classical poetry in all periods, habitually including excerpts (taḍmīn) from this vast repertoire, usually in the form of half verses or ashṭār. What strikes one immediately on reading those lines with taḍmīn, is the difference in address and eloquence between these brief excerpts and adjacent verses. There is in Ibn Nubāta’s verse a culpable nonchalance in the use of words, coupled, often, with an unaesthetic disturbance of the syntax of verse, resulting in a loss of fluidity, of the lucidity that should accompany eloquent utterance, and of the selectiveness characteristic of great poetry. Gone from this poetry is the old, effective sweep and rhetorical majesty of the verse; and gone, along with it, is that splendid usage of the telling phrase and the lucidity of intent which is so evident in even the most complex poetic constructions of some of the great poets of classical times.

Ibn Nubāta’s verse exudes the spirit of someone constantly at a loss as to how to deal with life, finding no means other than eulogizing powerful men. He was, in fact, dedicated to the act of asking, sometimes shedding part of his dignity in the process. Consider the following:

He does manage to display a genuine sense of sorrow about old age, a theme that had become something of an obsession for Arab poets. He also writes descriptive poems, riddles, poems of yearning for his birthplace, Egypt, along with rather tepid depictions of events in his life, most importantly elegies for the many sons he lost, for the death of both his wife and concubines. In his elegy on his wife it is interesting to find him dwelling on her physical beauty, ‘How can I forget a figure like the spear? or a face which every moon would commend, eyes which all gazelles would praise?’⁶⁹ This short poem only reflects his sense of loss to a degree; a greater intensity is to be found in his elegy for one of his concubines: ‘It is as if I transferred her [when she died] from my eyes to my heart, for she had possessed all my six senses.’⁷⁰

In Ibn Nubāta’s verse one senses little depth or philosophy of life. He has never attained any real prestige, nor has his verse been preserved in the annals of great poetry. While he is an almost exact contemporary to Ṣafī al-Dīn Al-Ḥillī, the latter’s place in the collective memory of Arabic poetry is assured, while that of Ibn Nubāta is not.

The poets of the later Mamluk age that preceded the Ottoman era remain largely uncelebrated in works of literary history. ‘Umar Mūsā Bāshā, the scholar best known for his specialization on the Syrian poets of this era, closes his study with al-Shābb al-Ẓarīf. Muḥammad Zaghlūl Sallām has some brief references to various later poets in al-Adab, and the same applies to the works of ‘Umar Farrūkh. This particular period is the focus of al-Yousfi’s contribution to this volume, in which he considers not only the poets and poetry of the era but also the cultural factors that were involved in the determination of their aesthetics (Chapter 2).

The establishment of a vast Ottoman empire over Arab lands and other places beginning in the fifteenth century coincided with a long period of poetic decline, although it should be clear by now that such a decline had in fact already been in process for some time. Here again the religious angle proves crucial for the preservation of the language and rich heritage of the Arab world. The Muslim Ottomans had a profound respect for the Koran and Koranic and other religious studies, something that guaranteed the status of Arabic among religious savants and a select literary hierarchy. Indeed during the Ottoman era a number of Ottoman scholars of Arabic culture made significant contributions to the heritage. Nevertheless, the Arabic language and its literary expression were considerably weakened. To give a single example, Muḥammad Sayyid al-Kīlānī, the author of a book on literature during the Ottoman period in Egypt, fails to cite a single example of good poetry throughout this long period (1516–1798). He extols what he terms its ‘sweetness, melodiousness and strength’,⁷¹ yet the examples he provides reflect a prosaic type of poetry, mere versification (including a number of syntactic, grammatical and other errors) but with nothing approximating the genuinely poetic.

However, this same period witnessed the rise to prominence of popular literary genres, both in verse and in the many heroic romances composed during a long era of subjugation (discussed in detail in both the Popular Poetry and Popular Prose sections of this volume – Parts Ⅲ and Ⅳ). Some romances, such as Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan, had been created earlier (Sayf was created in the eighth/fourteenth century), but a number of others were compiled during the Ottoman era. Urban and provincial settings provided a backdrop against which these delightful, mostly heroic tales, often interposed with a deformalized and sometimes vulgarized poetry, were narrated to gatherings of eager listeners.

It is impossible to surmise how Arabic verse might have fared if poetry in the vernacular had been free to flourish and develop in technique, semantics and profundity.⁷² However, this did not happen. As noted above, the eloquent Koranic language on the one hand – with its sublime echoes ever present in the ear – and, on the other, the weight of a rich and much admired poetic heritage – thousands of verses and half verses reiterated by Arabs as proverbial or reflective utterances in a wide variety of situations – constituted a barrier to any development of the vernacular as a major mode of poetic expression.

However, as noted above, the most common factor was the general perception of debility and emptiness, a divorce from crucial aspects of the human condition, a tepidity in emotion and a less potent syntactic formation. For the many reasons discussed above, but also because Arabic poetry was already many centuries old and had (like that composed in a number of other languages) moved beyond its era of classical efflorescence, these phenomena became more prevalent with the passage of time. In much altered circumstances, they were to form the direct but ineffective precedent for modern Arabic verse, which, by the mid-twentieth century, was destined to rise to a third zenith in Arab poetic history.

What did this lengthy era, full of significant political and social developments, contribute to the course of Arabic poetry on the one hand, and, on the other, to the knowledge of poetry as a universal art form? First, it provides fertile ground for various studies in the theory of literature, showing many aspects of the nature of ‘change’. It also illustrates the effect of tradition on art, the hold that it has on the imagination of creative writers, the struggle during periods of change between various idioms and also between those forces of resistance and surrender that are a continuous part of the very stuff of poetry.The verse of this era also furnishes a unique source for linguistic studies, especially historical linguistics, and an example of the struggle that may ensue between various idioms and different levels of linguistic utterance at any one period. Also illustrated are the vast riches of the Arabic language in obliquities and its perhaps matchless capacity for ever new ramifications of meaning derivable from semantic root forms.

The ways in which the poetry of this period developed testify clearly to the relationship between art and the Weltanschauung of the artist; indeed no period of Arabic verse demonstrates this better. While this does not invalidate the notion of the inner, autonomous, purely artistic forces that are at work, directing the development of art and (especially) its capacity for acquisition and rejection, it does emphasize the dimension of the self and the role that an artist’s vision plays in the direction of his or her craft. As has been demonstrated several times in this chapter, this proves to be a crucial dimension, particularly in the contrast between Sufi (and other religious) poetry and that of lay poets.

This study has also shown that poetry can experience major differences in treatment, language, emotion, elevation, attitude and tone between one theme and another, not only among different types of authors (religious and lay poets, for example) but also in the work of a single poet, as one follows the treatment of a single theme over time. This too is a crucial differentiation which should interest the critical historian of literature.

Although this study has been primarily devoted to a process of degeneration, there are quite a few instances where the period reflects the underlying, more robust forces in Arabic verse, and the enduring, latent power of a once great poetry, along with its enormous capacity for rejuvenation. The period forms a crucial, if dilapidated, bridge between two robust periods, and yet the very existence of verse as a major genre demonstrates the perennial importance of poetry for the Arabs and the deep reverence in which they have always held it. This, in and of itself, is no mean consideration.

¹ For the purposes of this chapter we will use the terminology adopted by Marshall G. S. Hodgson (The Venture of Islam, Chicago, 1974):

a. The primitive caliphal period (40–73/660–92)

b. The high caliphal period (73–333/692–945)

c. The earlier middle period (333–656/945–1258)

d. The later middle Islamic period (656–909/1258–1503)

² For further details see Jayyusi, ‘Umayyad Poetry’; and her, Trends and Movements, vol. Ⅱ, ch. 7.

³ See for example Ḍayf in his series of works, Tārīkh al-adab al-῾arabī; Bāshā, al-Adab fī bilād al-Shām; and Farrūkh’s series of works on Tārīkh al-adab al-῾arabī.

⁴ See al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-ḥayawān, vol. Ⅲ, pp. 131–2.

⁵ See al-Marzubānī, al-Muwashshaḥ, p. 274.

⁶ Ibn Ṭabāṭabā, ’Iyar al-shi῾r, p. 9.

⁷ Ibn Rashīq, al-’Umda, pp. 184–5, quoted in῾Abbās, Tārīkh al-naqd al-adabī, p. 365.

⁸ al-Qarṭājannī, Minhāj al-bulaghā’, p. 10.

⁹ On this issue, see Jayyusi, ‘Andalūsī Poetry’, p. 345, where I discuss the concept of the propagator who reconnects poetry with its best traditions (Ibn Zaydūn being given as a prime example).

¹⁰ See Chapter 10 on ‘Popular Poetry’ in this volume.

¹¹ Those ‘new’ poets whose language and syntax showed genuine signs of change (such as al-῾Abbās Ibn al-Aḥnaf (d. 193/809), Abū᾽l-῾Atāhiya (132–211/748–826), Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī (320–57/932–68) and, above all, Abū Tammām (d. 231 or 232/845–6) were still able to produce a poetry characterized by correctness of diction and potency of address. In the view of many critics, the problem with these poets was rather one of approach and style: the poetry lacked faithful application of the modes of the inherited verse tradition and was regarded as deviating from the old bedouin standards.

¹² It is noteworthy that the intrusion of other languages into diction was noted long before this period. Al-Tha῾ālibī (d. 429/1038) in his anthology, Yatīmat al-dahr, declares his preference for Syrian poets over those of Iraq and the surrounding regions: ‘The Arab poets of Syria and round about are better than those of Iraq and round about . . . This is because they are nearer to the original regions of the Arabs, especially to Hijaz, and further away from Persia, so that their tongues have been spared the hybridization to which the Arabs of Iraq were exposed because of their proximity to the Persians and Nabataeans.’ See the selections from this source edited by Munīr Kan῾ān (Damascus, 1991), and compare the selections from poets in Syria, particularly those around the Ḥamdānī court of Sayf al-Dawla, in the first part of vol. Ⅰ, with some of the poetry that al-Tha῾ālibī quotes from other regions.

¹³ ‘Mulā’ama’ and ‘muqābala’ became important features later on in the age of poetic embellishments, used then with deliberateness. In the old poetry they existed spontaneously as normal features of the poem, in obedience to the dictates of the two-hemistich form, as the critic Tha῾lab (d. 291/904) realized.

¹⁴ In Tha῾lab’s Qawā‘id al-shi῾r the patterns of syntax within the two-hemistich verse are discussed. The symmetrical division of the single two-hemistich line of poetry produces a distinctive syntactical arrangement whereby certain divisions within the verse and methods of distributing words gave rise to syntactic formations that were spontaneously internalized by poets when they were young.

¹⁵ While eulogizing for pay had become a standard profession, it was criticized by such great figures as Abū’l-῾Alā’ al-Ma῾arrī (363–449/973–1058), who rejected the idea outright. Recognizing the indignity of writing for pay, Ibn Rashīq (al-῾Umda, vol. Ⅰ, p. 51) commends those poets who prefer to maintain their self-respect.

¹⁶ In the fourth/tenth century both Ibn Ṭabāṭabā (d. 322/934), in῾Iyār al-shi῾r (p. 12), and Qudāma ibn Ja῾far (265–337/879–948), in his Naqd al-shi῾r, pp. 68–72 and 214–18, had reiterated these points.

¹⁷ The greatest eulogistic exaggerations are to be found in Fatimid poetry of the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries. One poet, al-Mu’ayyad fī’l-Dīn, addressed the Fatimid imam al-Mustanṣir (d. 486/1094) as follows: ‘You are not less than Christ. He was called God, why should we not call you God?’ See Farrūkh, Tārīkh al-adab al-῾arabī, vol. Ⅲ, pp. 44–5.

¹⁸ He is alluding to Qiss ibn Sā῾ida al-Iyādī, the pre-Islamic orator famous for his eloquence.

¹⁹ Quoted in Farrūkh, Tārīkh, vol. Ⅲ, p. 370.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 644.

²¹ Ibid., p. 683.

²² Ibid., p. 379.

²³ The similarity in metre, rhyme, tone and syntax between this poem and that of the Andalūsī Abū’l-Baqā’ al-Rundī (d. 685/1286), mourning the fall of Cordoba to the Iberians, leaves no doubt as to al-Bustī’s influence on the later poet.

Everything that reaches its fullness, will diminish

Let no one stand deluded by the good life.

Quoted by Farrūkh, Tārīkh, vol. Ⅲ, p. 49.

²⁴ Dīwān Mihyār al-Daylamī, p. 60.

²⁵ See Farrūkh, Tārīkh, pp. 451–4; and see the introduction to his dīwān by the editor M. ῾Abd al-Ḥaqq, Dīwān.

²⁶ See Jayyusi, Trends and Movements, vol. Ⅱ, Appendix Ⅱ, where there is a detailed discussion of his idea that the muwashshaḥ was dependent on already existing tunes and that the authentic examples have no pre-existent metrical patterns in the Arabic ῾arūḍ. See esp. p. 758.

²⁷ See, for example, his rā’iyya, Dīwān, pp. 283–9, and his mīmiyya, Dīwān, pp. 688–91.

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 2–6.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 165–71.

³⁰ See the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, s.v. ‘Decadence’.

³¹ On him, see Bāshā, al-Shi‘r fī bilād al-Shām, pp. 297–308; Farrūkh, Tārīkh, pp. 514–17; and see the introduction to his dīwān by the editor Khalīl Mardam Bek, Dīwān.

³² See the section on his poems of yearning for Damascus, Dīwān, pp. 68–90.

³³ Ibid., p. 116.

³⁴ From the lāmiyya of al-Murtaḍā al-Shahrazūrī.

³⁵ From the ḥā’iyya of al-Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl.

³⁶ From the tā’iyya al-kubrā of Ibn al-Fāriḍ (577–632/1181–1235).

³⁷ From the nūniyya of Ibn al-῾Arabī (560–638/1165–1240).

³⁸ Other mystics such as ῾Afīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (d. 690/1291) and al-Shushtarī (610–68/1214–70) also reflected this unity of the universe in their poetry.

³⁹ The strangeness and idiosyncratic use of language, as well as occasional weaknesses in the verse of most mystics, from Ibn al-῾Arabī to Ibn al-Fāriḍ, al-Suhrawardī and al-Shushtarī of al-Andalūs, is clearly noticeable. For a comment on the diction of al-Shushtarī, see Sallām, al-Adab, vol. Ⅰ, 251 note.

⁴⁰ On al-Būṣīrī’s life, see Farrūkh, Tārīkh, pp. 673–80; Ṣāliḥ, al-Madā’iḥ al-nabawiyya, pp. 63–94.

⁴¹ For an account of the early experiments in this subject, see ṣāliḥ, al-Madā’iḥ al-nabawiyya, pp. 15–34.

⁴² See for example his ghayniyya, ibid., p. 122 and his ṣādiyya, ibid. p. 123, for which he chooses awkward and unfamiliar rhymes, alien to the repertoire of the poetic idiom.

⁴³ See Bahā’ al-Dīn Zuhayr, Dīwān, pp. 178, 274, 275, 342 et passim.

⁴⁴ The Arabic text of the poem uses the masculine gender to refer to ‘the beloved’ in this instance, but it is hard to know whether he is talking about men or women, as the masculine gender was commonly used during the Middle Ages to allude to either sex. See p. 290 of his dīwān.

⁴⁵ Dīwān, p. 33.

⁴⁶ The ‘blamer’ (al-‘ādhil) is a common negative figure in Arabic love songs, along with the more malignant wāshī (the person who gossips about the lovers and exposes them). See p. 21 of his dīwān.

⁴⁷ See his fā’iyya, Dīwān, p. 222.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 165.

⁴⁹ Dīwān al-Shābb al-Ẓarīf, p. 79.

⁵⁰ See Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī, Khazānat al-adab, p. 190; Bāshā al-Shi‘r fī bilād al-Shām, p. 340.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 21.

⁵² Ibid., p. 14.

⁵³ Al-Ḥillī, Dīwān, pp. 5–6.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 6.

⁵⁵ Ibid. See the end section of his Dīwān.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 328.

⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 325–6.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 261.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 266.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 288.

⁶¹ Note, for example, the interesting form of a muwashshaḥ he wrote (ibid., pp. 136–9).

⁶² See a musammaṭ he wrote as an elegy, using the verses of Ibn Zaydūn’s famous nūniyya on the Umayyad princess, Wallāda (ibid., pp. 234–7).

⁶³ See his attempt at writing a muwashshaḥ in the metre of the dūbayt (ibid., pp. 125–7).

⁶⁴ See for example a hamziyya he built on two metres, imitating a similar work by another poet (ibid., p. 192).

⁶⁵ To give just a single example among many, he says, in an elegy on his slain uncle (ibid., p. 216): ‘Shedding tears is mere hypocrisy if not mixed with flowing blood [from the eyes]’.

⁶⁶ In one of his short pieces he begins with ghazal, then immediately moves to eulogy. See his large collection, Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī, Dīwān, p. 411.

⁶⁷ When Ibn al-Mu῾tazz (d. 296/908) wrote his Kitāb al-badī῾ in 274/887, he mentioned only seventeen kinds of badī῾. By the time of ῾Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, over 150 kinds had been classified: see al-Nābulusī, Nafaḥāt al-azhār, pp. 3–5.

⁶⁸ See Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī, Dīwān, p. 352.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 516.

⁷⁰ Ibid., pp. 73–4.

⁷¹ See Kīlānī, al-Adab al-miṣrī, p. 63.

⁷² In a longer study, creative literature in the many Arab vernaculars would merit close attention.