In the year 1078 at the age of twenty-four, ʿbd al-Jabbār ibn Ḥamdīs, the scion of a Muslim family that had inhabited Sicily for generations, left his homeland and set out in pursuit of fame and fortune. He had lived his youth in the splendor of a privileged class of landed gentry. But the times were changing: by the beginning of the third Islamic century in Sicily, internal strife was tearing apart the Muslim community. War, disease, and destruction were wreaking havoc on the land, while the hordes of Norman armies lay in wait, preparing to carve their name on Sicilian history. As political stability and economic security declined, so too did the courtly atmosphere of the princely palaces in which poets like Ibn Ḥamdīs could pursue lucrative and prestigious careers.

Since the opportunities for a promising professional poet, particularly a court panegyrist, were to be found elsewhere, Ibn Ḥamdīs chose temporary exile, first to al-Andalus and then to North Africa, to make his fame and fortune as a poet-warrior. Like all good native sons of Sicily, Ibn Ḥamdīs had every intention of one day returning home. But the return to his beloved homeland would never come to pass. The pain and regret he suffered would be a constant theme in much of his poetic oeuvre throughout his long life. In the sixty years he lived following his departure from Sicily, Ibn Ḥamdīs witnessed the destruction of Muslim Sicily by the Norman armies, the fall of Muslim principalities to the Reconquista in Spain, civil wars, plagues, the death of most of his relatives, and finally, his own blindness at the end of his life.