by Robert Irwin
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.
Know that the first signs of love in the man of polite behaviour are the emaciation of his body, long sickness, the paling of his colour, and sleeplessness. His eyes are cast down, he worries unceasingly, his tears are quick to flow. He carries himself with humility, moans a great deal, and shows openly his yearning. There is no end to his shedding of tears and his heaving of deep sighs. A lover will not remain hidden even if he conceal himself. His claim to have joined the ranks of the addicts to love and passion cannot but become public knowledge, for the signs of passion are glowing and the symptoms of the claim are manifest.
‘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:
To love is to kiss, to touch hand or arm
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.
‘One evening I was with Rashid,’ said Ishaq Ibn Ibrahim al-Mawsili, ‘and I was singing him an air which seemed to enchant him. He said:
“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
Of this excellent, pure wine!
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 storytelling. The framing concept of the stories seems to have been that of munazara, 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.
In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate.
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.
Long was my night by reason of love for one who I think will not be close to me
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 clot
hing 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.
O Salma, will your guardian tarry;
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
