LIFE

In the annals of Arabic literature Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ occupies a central position. For it is with his work that the history of ʿAbbasid prose literature begins; it is he who opens the door to the golden age of Arabic prose writing; it is by him that a wide humanistic concept of letters is introduced to the Arabs. Though rightly classified as an ʿAbbasid writer and littérateur, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ lived most of his life in Umayyad times, and it was under the Umayyads that he served his literary apprenticeship and began his career as a chancery secretary (kātib). Like his Umayyad precursor and older contemporary, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, he was to become the luminary of the secretarial school of his day. As such, he won for himself unprecedented renown as a master of Arabic prose and contributed signally – though no more so perhaps than ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd – to the development of a written artistic prose tradition.

Born in Fīrūzābād in Fārs some time in the very early years of the second/ eighth century, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ was the son of an Umayyad tax-officer of noble Persian origin and, indeed, bore the Persian name Rōzbih until at a mature age he converted to Islam from Manichaeism and took the name ʿAbdullāh. The date of his execution at the age of thirty-six is imprecisely known, but it was not earlier than 139/757 and in all likelihood fell in that very year.

Perhaps one of the first types of poetry to have emerged from the framework of the polythematic qaṣīdah as an independent genre – a process often held to mark the beginnings of the development of “modern” poetry – was the hunting-poem or ṭardiyyah. There can be no doubt that the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world have practised hunting in some form or another as far back into the past as our records go. Pre-Islamic poetry, stereotyped as it undoubtedly is, nevertheless records ample vivid descriptions of the oryx hunt, and it is in such poetry that we must look in order to find the origins of the hunting-poems of the late Umayyad and ʿAbbasid eras, although the poetry of the chase of these later periods is vastly different from the compositions of the Arab poets of pre-Islamic days. It was not only the poetic revolution of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbasid periods which brought about this change. The “moderns” (muhdathun) felt no qualms in depicting quarry and hunter which could play no part in the strictly limited area in which the pre-Islamic poet was forced by convention to operate; in addition, the oryx, the Jāhilā hunter's traditional quarry, from an early date was over-hunted and by the time of the ʿAbbasid assumption of the caliphate the animal's numbers must have been seriously depleted. The moderns were thus in part forced, though in part also perfectly willing, to broaden the scope of their poetic descriptions of hunting. Now, too, the Islamic borders were far and away beyond the desert confines of the Arabian peninsula proper. Mountainous and even wooded areas, terrain of relatively high rainfall and dense vegetation, were within the ken of the poet, as was the varied game of such areas, which had to be hunted by much more sophisticated methods than those employed by the pre-Islamic bedouin.

The ʿAbbasid period opened with a major political revolution in the Islamic world. The ʿAbbasid movement had developed in Khurāsān, the vast province which lay on the north-east frontiers of Islamic Iran, during the first part of the second/eighth century. The reasons for the revolt against the rule of the Umayyads in distant Damascus have been intensively debated by historians, and much remains unclear; but we can be certain that it was a movement among all the Muslims of the area, Arab and non-Arab alike, and it was intended to replace the Umayyad government, thought to be authoritarian and indifferent to both religion and the local concerns of the Khurāsānīs, by the rule of a member of the “Family of the Prophet” who would usher in an era of peace and justice. Perhaps because they came from a frontier province and had ample military experience, the Khurāsānīs were able to succeed where so many before them had failed; marching westwards across the great plains of central Iran and through the passes of the Zagros mountains, they took Iraq in 132/749 and, while the leaders stayed in Iraq and Iran to consolidate their position, an expedition was sent to the west to defeat the demoralized Umayyad army and eventually to kill the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan b. Muhammad, in Egypt, where he had taken refuge.

This outline survey of Yemeni literature broadly contemporary with the ʿAbbasid caliphate of Baghdad by the nature of the present situation inevitably has many imperfections. Yemeni civilization is very little known beyond its own borders, and editions of Yemeni texts prepared abroad often misunderstand the background or are inaccurate in other ways; nor are Yemeni editors themselves always beyond reproach. Moreover the bulk of Yemeni literature is still in manuscript, including many major works, so that much of it remains unknown outside the Yemen. A great proportion of the works known by report from such sources as the medieval biographical dictionaries and listed by al-Ḥabshī in his Maṣādir al-fikr … fi ʾl-Yaman are not known to be extant, though they may yet be discovered in the Yemen, where some texts previously thought to be lost are coming to light, as indeed are documents and writings not noted in the literary sources; but it was only in 1978 that the new catalogue of Ṣanʿāʾ Jāmiʿ Mosque Library appeared, and the four-volume catalogue of documents stored in the waqf depository was published as this chapter was being written. Yet if what has been discovered since 1962 is compared with what was known to Brockelmann almost half a century ago, it is clear that the horizon of our knowledge of Yemeni literature is vastly extended.

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

Abū Ḥayyān ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. ʿal-cAbbās al-Tawḥīdī was born, in either Iraq or Fārs, between 310–20/922–32; he died in Shiraz in 414/1023. His life was spent under Shīʿī Buwayhid rule, and on several occasions he served the Buwayhids, though himself a Sunnī; but, although his beliefs were not those of the Shīʿī ruling classes, neither were they always congenial to his fellow Sunnīs. Consequently, though he now holds an acknowledged place in Arabic literature, he underwent a long period of neglect. Besides their literary merit, his writings are of considerable historical interest, and new editions of his works, together with manuscripts discovered over the past thirty years, provide valuable material for the detailed study of social and intellectual developments in the fourth/tenth century.

Medieval sources and modern studies alike (the latter beginning in 1883 with Aḥmad Fāris Shidyāq, one of the movers of the nineteenth-century Arab “renaissance” or Nahḍah) reveal a wide range of interest in Tawḥīdī, a fact which indicates how varied, and sometimes controversial, were Tawḥīdī's own beliefs. Of the main sources, which date from the seventh/ thirteenth to the ninth/fifteenth century, over half are hostile, and the complete lack of biographical sources during the two centuries following Tawḥīdī's death is probably best explained by the fact of his intellectual non-conformism and unflinching promotion of humanist ideals, which made him a suspect figure in the eyes of many Muslims.

The telling and hearing of anecdotes has been a favourite pastime in all ages and places: round the bedouin camp-fire, in the literary salons of ʿAbbasid Baghdad, in the English public house and over the after-dinner port. The nature of an anecdote varies enormously. In length it may range from the retailing of the briefest piece of repartee, to what is virtually a short story; in content it may deal with a humorous or pithy saying, a remarkable event, a piece of literary criticism, a riddle, or even (in the Arabic ambience) a grammatical observation or a well-expressed piece of religious homily. But the anecdote proper has three features. First, the point of the piece shouldbe set against a background of circumstantial detail which adds to its vividness. Secondly, it is either true or presented as true: a repartee gains greatly in effect if presented, for instance, as “what Churchill once said to de Gaulle”, even if it is manifest that the teller has no means of knowing what Churchill really said, and an anecdote is hence most often presented on the authority of a transmitter (Ar. rāmī) or narrator, whether historical or imaginary.

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.