LIFE

Abū ʾl-Ṭayyib Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn, known as al-Mutanabbī, was born in 303/915 into a poor Kufan family. He took up the career of professional panegyrist while still a boy, and early began his travels in search of patrons. For years he had to content himself with offering hyperboles to men of modest distinction. In 322/933 we find him in prison in Ḥimṣ (Horns): according to most Arabic sources, he had attempted to lead a bedouin revolt in the Syrian desert. The religious tincture of his call (of which his collected verse may retain some samples) earned him, according to this tradition, the name al-Mutanabbī, “He who sets up as a prophet.” This appears to have been his only try at advancement by extraliterary means. Gradually he grew in fame, and his patrons in rank. The nine years he spent, from 337/948 to 346/957, at the court of the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawlah in Aleppo were his longest stay with any one patron, and must have been the most satisfying. Sayf al-Dawlah was an Arab prince – a matter of great importance to Mutanabbī – and he truly possessed the virtues – generosity and courage – that are the twin pillars of the Arabic panegyric. It was not an altogether easy relationship: Sayf al-Dawlah was quick to anger, and Mutanabbī had more pride than pliancy. But respect appears to have been mutual. Sayf al-Dawlah accepted Mutanabbī's conditions for the ceremonial recitals: the poet would not have to kiss the ground before the prince, and would not stand to recite.

One of the foremost prose-writers and poets of the fourth/tenth century, Ibn ʿAbbād was also an able politician and administrator and a great patron, a kātib who for more than eighteen years successfully held office as vizier to a branch of the Buwayhid family. Biographical sources are agreed upon his name (ism) and genealogy (onasab): Ismaāʿīl b. ʿAbbād b. al-ʿAbbās b. ʿAbbād b. Aḥmad b. Idrīs. They also agree on his agnomen (kunyah), Abū ʿl-Qāsim, which must have been given to him in childhood, since he had no son. Varying explanations are given of the honorific title (Jaqab) of al-Ṣāḥib usually prefixed to his name. Some sources say that the form of the title was originally ṣāḥib Ibn al-ʿAmīd, “the companion of Ibn al-ʿAmīd”, because it was Abū ʿl-Faḍl Ibn al-ʿAmīd, vizier to the Buwayhid amir Rukn al- Dawlah, who had trained him as a kātib. Others claim that the title in its full form was ṣāḥib Muʿayyid al-Dawlah, and that it was given in recognition of Ibn ʿAbbād's loyalty to the Buwayhid amir of that name. Whatever the true explanation, it was soon forgotten, and the title al-Ṣāḥib thereafter entered the repertory of Muslim honorifics. The zeal and efficiency with which Ibn ʿAbbād discharged his duties as vizier also earned him the more formal title of Kāfī ʿl-Kufāh, “the most competent of the competent”.

REGIONAL IDENTITY

In common with general historians, most literary historians view the year 656/1258, in which Baghdad fell to the Mongols, as the end of an era, the ensuing period, lasting until modern times, being considered an age of decadence. While the wisdom of such periodization is strongly to be questioned, it may be useful to point out some significant dates in Egyptian history which might serve as more appropriate terms of reference for the discussion of Egyptian literature.

Only eight years before the fall of Baghdad, the Crusaders of Louis IX had suffered a crushing defeat near the Egyptian town of al-Manṣūrah; the fact that the common people had taken part in the campaign added to its importance. The year in which Baghdad fell also witnessed another, less momentous event: an epidemic raged in Cairo, and one of its victims was the old poet Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zuhayr, who had for the first time given expression to the Egyptian character as we now know it. Thus we might accept 656/1258 as approximately marking the end of our period, albeit for other reasons than those posed by the general historian. On the basis of the two events just described, we might characterize this period as witnessing tne maturing of the Egyptian national character within a community of Arab entities. The purpose of this chapter is to try to discover some of the main traits of this character as reflected in creative literature, bearing in mind that the increasing role played by Egypt as a meeting-ground for various trends coming from East and West prepared the developing Arab- Egyptian culture to act both as a focus and as a point of diffusion to a wide circle of Arab lands which enjoyed less political stability and ethnic homogeneity.

One of the most striking movements in Arabic cultural history and literature, especially during the third/ninth century, is that assertive movement, collectively known as Shuʿūbiyyah, which represented a powerful, sometimes extreme, backlash amongst the conquered peoples against the Arabs of Arabia in particular, and has been characterized as “a more or less successful attempt on the part of the different subjected races to hold their own and to distinguish, at least, between Arabism and Islam”. The whole movement, however diversified and uncoordinated it may have been, extended from Spain and the furthest Maghrib to the remoter parts of Central Asia, and was especially espoused by the Persians and by the Aramaeans (Nabaṭ) of Iraq.

Opinion now favours the view that the bitter attacks directed against the Arabs in the literature of the third/ninth century were probably not the expression of nationalism, Persian nationalism in particular, but rather a movement, widespread among the new middle class of mixed race and the influential government secretaries (kātibs), aimed at remoulding the political and social institutions and the whole spirit of Islamic culture on the model of Sasanian institutions and values, which were then in favour and which the new urban society and the administrative class held forth as the highest ideal. It is clear, though, that the movement was not confined to secretaries, but was wider, nor can its aims be so clearly defined.

Abū Muʿādh Bashshār b. Burd al-Muraʿʿath (c. 95-167/c. 714-83), Abū Isḥāq Ismāʿīl b. al-Qāsim, nicknamed Abū ʾl-ʿAtāhiyah (130-c. 210/748-c. 825) and al-Ḥasan b. Hāniʾ al-Ḥakamī, known as Abū Nuwās (c. 140-200/c. 757-815) are among the earliest and most important representatives of a group of poets whom medieval Arab critics describe as “moderns” (muḥdathūri). In this context, “modern” simply means that these poets belong to the “modern”, that is ʿAbbasid, period, or, to be precise, that their poetic activity falls mainly within this period. However, these three poets can be grouped together not only because they lived at much the same time, but also because they came from the same region and belonged to the same ethnic stock or to the same social class. All three were from Iraq or the neighbouring part of Persia: Bashshār from Basra, Abū ʾl-ʿAtāhiyah either from Kufa or ʿAyn al-Tamr, and Abū Nuwās from a village near Ahwāz. The first two passed the formative years of their lives in their native towns; Abū Nuwās spent his youth first in Basra, then in Kufa. All three poets were decisively influenced by the social and cultural life of Basra or Kufa respectively before they came into contact with the newly founded capital of the ʿAbbasid empire, Baghdad, and its court. Abū ʾl-ʿAtāhiyah and Abū Nuwās settled permanently in the new centre; it is not quite clear whether Bashshār did so too, although we often find him there, and for extended periods. Bashshār died near Basra, Abū ʾl-ʿAtāhiyah and Abū Nuwaās in Baghdad.

Wine poetry is found in all periods of Arabic literature, though with fluctuating frequency, and variation between incidental references and pieces devoted wholly to wine; in some periods, the theme of wine dominated poetic production. Prose works devoted to wine are also found, but far less frequently; two typical examples may be cited. In North Africa, at the turn of the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhām b. al-Qāsim, known as al-Raqīq al-Nadīm, wrote Quṭb al-surūr ft awṣaj alkhumūr (“The Acme of Joy in Praise of Wine”), an encyclopaedic work discussing the etiquette of wine and wine-parties, wine's remedial qualities, how to profit from its blends, textual citations dealing with it, legal arguments centred on it, entertaining stories about it, and an appendix of poetical references. In the East, at the beginning of the ninth/fifteenth century, Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. ʿUthmān al-Nawājī wrote Ḥalbat al- Kumayt (“The Bay's Racetrack”; a punning allusion to the fact that kumayt, “bay-coloured”, is a conventional epithet for both horses and wine), which discusses the origins of wine, its names, appearance, advantages and properties according to learned writers, tales about persons accused of addiction to it, its qualities, both material and moral, the correct behaviour for a drinking-partner or boon-companion (nadīm), how to offer wine and issue an invitation to a wine-party, and description of the wine-party and all its appurtenances – drinking-vessels, singing, instrumental music, candles, flowers and gardens.

In the early decades of this century, the poet and prose-writer al-Maʿarrī was an object of particular interest to western scholars as one of a number of possible links between medieval Christian and Muslim literature. More recent studies have investigated his writings in the light of a wider range of concerns, literary, historical and philosophical. A more general approach is attempted in the present chapter; many aspects of al-Maʿarrī's thought are of great contemporary appeal, and it is these that it is proposed to address here.

LIFE

Abū ʾl-ʿAlāʾ Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh b. Sulaymān al-Maʿarrī (363-449/973-1058) was of Arab stock, a member of the tribe of Tanūkh, and was born into a learned and distinguished family at Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, a town near Aleppo which had long been a resort of eminent qāḍīs, scholars and poets; from the first he was trained up to assume his rightful place as a member of this social and cultural élite. At the age of four, however, he contracted smallpox, which left him not only disfigured but blind; his education nevertheless continued to follow a conventional course, but his blindness ultimately transformed both his personal and his artistic development. His father supervised his studies; he was taught the Qurʾān by some of the leading shaykhs of Maʿarrah, and ḥadīth by his father, grandparents and the local traditionists, and proved so proficient at the Islamic sciences and at Arabic that he was sent to his mother's family in Aleppo to continue studying Arabic under the leading scholar of the city.

If poetry in which the beliefs or acts of the leaders of a particular sociopolitical system are supported or opposed can be defined as political poetry, then there is no doubt that this type of verse flourished in Arabia well before Islam. Indeed, whatever the subject treated, the ultimate aim of the sizeable surviving body of pre-Islamic poetry was the glorification or criticism of the tribe, the nucleus of the system on which the contemporary social structure was based. In an earlier volume, the political verse, tribal or otherwise, of Jāhilī Arabia and of Arab society in the early Islamic period, has been treated in broad outline.1 It is, however, necessary to retrace some steps in order fully to comprehend the background of the later political verse covered in the present chapter. In ancient bedouin poetry, selfglorification (fakir) celebrated tribal exploits, and satire (hijāʾ) rebuked the tribe or individuals for unworthy behaviour. Poetry of a quasirevolutionary type was composed by the ṣʿātīk the so-called brigandpoets, who attacked not this tribe or that, but the entire social order. The advent of Islam impelled a change in these types of political poetry. The Prophet recognized the important political function of poetry, and employed poets to respond in kind to the attacks of the pagan poets of Quraysh; the weapons were still those of fakir and hijāʾ, but the new way of life gave far greater prominence to the religious element than had been found in old bedouin verse. This was the beginning of a process by which political themes, in the theocratic Islamic states which evolved later, came to be conceived and expressed in confessional terms.

Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr b. Maḥbub al-Kinānī al-Baṣrl, known as al- Jāḥiẓ, is one of the best-known and most prolific of early ʿAbbasid prose-writers and Muʿtazilī theologians, and also one of the most controversial. Little is known of his origins, apart from the fact that he was born in Basra, probably around 160/776, to a humble family of freedmen (mawātī) who were clients of the Banu Kinanah (a tribe related to Quraysh). Jāḥiẓ's forebears were probably of African descent; his grandfather was black, and he himself retained some of the pigmentation of his ancestors; his ugliness, caused by his bulging eyeballs, became proverbial and earned him the nickname jāḥiẓ (pop-eyed). Nothing is known of his father, who died soon after his birth, and little of his mother, to whom jāḥiẓ must have been a source of considerable anxiety; she had managed to send him to the local Quranic school, but when he left he refused to be tied down to any regular work. It is said that he was once seen selling fish, and this, if true, confirms what other anecdotal sources say about his idle way of life. His idleness, however, was to give him an exceptionally broad experience of human nature. As he strolled around Basra he made an assortment of friends who doubtless fed and sheltered him, and who also gave him the opportunity to indulge his precocious fondness for observation, argument and reading, for despite his intelligence and insatiable thirst for intellectual and factual knowledge, he had no access to any kind of formal training higher than that given in his Quranic school.

PRECURSORS OF THE ZUHDIYYAH

“To renounce”, “to withdraw”, “to abstain from gratification” – these are the senses of the verb zahada. The verbal noun zuhd camz in Islam to mean a life of self-denial and devotional exercises. The master-themes of the poems that medieval Arab anthologists and editors placed in the category of zuhdiyyāt are, accordingly, the cold look at the allurements of the world in which fortune is capricious and life frail, and the need for repentance before time runs out and the accounts are closed. Many zuhdiyyāt are built on motifs of the first kind alone, dwelling on mortality and the vanity of human wishes.

The literary history of many of these motifs goes back to the pre-Islamic age. This was obvious to the authors of medieval literary studies and adab works (treasuries of prose anecdote and verse, intended for the pleasant teaching of practical wisdom and polite culture). Verses on the inevitability of death, or the succession of feeble old age on vigorous youth, are quoted from pagans and Muslims alike in the zuhd chapters of such books as al- Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Bayān wa ʾl-tabjīn or Ibn Qutaybah's ʿUyūnal-akhbār. Pagans and Muslims both used such motifs as premises, but to different results. Al- Jāḥiẓ, for example, quotes the pagan poet ʿAntarah: "I answered her: death is a watering stop where, no doubt, I will have to drink." This, a convention of the pre-Islamic poetry, is the warrior's reply to a scold who disapproves of his reckless ways with his money and his blood.

GENERAL NOTIONS

The word ṣūfī – usually derived from ṣūf (wool), supposedly in reference to the coarse woollen garments of the early Muslim mystics – does not appear to have been yet in use at the outset of the āAbbasid period, but for the sake of uniformity it will be used here throughout – if need be retrospectively – in the sense of “Muslim mystic”. The mystic has by definition one interest only; Sufi poetry is thus centred, explicitly or implicitly, on the eternal and infinite source from which the soul of the poet originated and to which it seeks to return. There is no difficulty in understanding this; but, before we go on to a separate consideration of individual authors, it is imperative to comment on two general points which are often misunderstood. One of these is the state of spiritual expectancy, poised between longing and patience, a state epitomized in the following distich attributed by Sufis to the Baghdadi mystic Abū Bakr al-Shiblī, (d. 334/945), though in fact al- Shiblī is probably quoting from the second /eighth-century poet Bashshār b. Burd, or possibly from ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-Raqāshā (d. c. 200/815-16) to whom the lines, with some variants, are also attributed:

No independent love lyrics survive from the pre-Islamic period, but love remembered is frequently the first of the themes through which the archaic qaṣīdah ranges. In the introductory section of the qaṣīdah, the nasīb, the poet conjures up lost love through a variety of conventional motifs: the recognition in a deserted encampment of the place where he and a loved woman once enjoyed days of friendship; a dream haunted by the woman's phantom; or the evocation of the morning when her tribe, neighbours for a season, made ready to leave. At times, the poet's grey hair has caused the woman to deny her favours; less often, the poet has tired of waiting for them. Some poets – al-Aʿshā for example – describe the lady in sensuous detail. The names vary but it is, from top to toe, always the same woman: all pampered softness, languor, plenitude.

The poet may suffer and weep, but he lets us know that he can bear it. By the conventions of the poem, the loss of intimacy with a gentle, sweet and indolent creature of luxury leads him to proclaim his intimacy with hardship and danger in the desert. The poet al-Muthaqqib al-ʿAbdī tells in three lines of Hind's change of heart, then continues:

The foregoing chapter offered a general survey of ʿAbbasid literary theory and criticism, described some of their basic concerns and discussed a number of major critics. It must always be remembered, however, that the background to much ʿAbbasid criticism is still far from having been exhaustively researched, and this must be borne in mind in any attempts at interpretation. A case in point is one of the most notable works of Arabic criticism, Ibn al-Muʿtazz's (d. 296/908) Kitāb al-Badīʿ. This chapter will discuss some of the technical problems surrounding the use of this text.

MODERN STUDIES OF KITĀB AL-BADĪʿ

At the time of its appearance in 1935, the edition by I. Kratchkovsky of Kitāb al-Badīʿ did not receive the attention it deserved. Only in the years following the Second World War have scholars become fully aware of the importance of this publication, which brought to light one of the first, and certainly the most fundamental, work of a genre that was to be amongst the most brilliant achievements of medieval Muslim scholarship. In the introduction to his edition, Kratchkovsky made a significant attempt to shed light on the early history of Arabic rhetoric. A further contribution by Kratchkovsky dealing with the terminology of Ibn al-Muʿtazz and the history of Arabic rhetoric in general was published posthumously in 1960 in the edition of his collected works, and appeared in a French translation in 1962. In addition to reviews published in the late thirties, there were some incidental observations on the book in the fifties by G. von Grunebaum, H. Ritter, and the present writer; more thorough studies were conducted in the next two decades, notably by W. Heinrichs.