Night and Horses and the Desert

by Robert Irwin

  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 clothing 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

  the foe unflaggingly, unswervingly,

  Who’s been with me through wealth and pauperdom,

  his love for me untinctured, unforsworn …

  But ‘Ajrad the Flasher jumps on his mother –

  a sow giving suck to a hog –

  Though any appeal to his purse is met

  with a leonine bearing of fangs.

  What good to anyone is a man

  Who won’t even pray, the scum?

  You son of a rutting beast, you are

  a pustulous, foul, filthy bum! …

  Julia Ashtiany (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge

  History of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 279

  As the satirical poem (hija’) above suggests, Bashshar was a combative character and a misanthropic satirist, who was fond of and skilled at coining epigrams – and skilled, too, at making enemies. There are various versions of Bashshar’s death – none of them good. He was probably beaten to death on the orders of the caliph before being sewn into a sack and thrown into the Tigris. After his death it was said that ‘only people remained who knew not what language was’. It was also said that ‘he travelled a road which no one else had travelled before’.

  The Iraqi poet Abu al-Fadl al-‘ABBAS IBN AL-AHNAF (d. after 808?) worked under the patronage of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who particularly valued Abbas’s conversation and jokes. He was also good-looking – always a useful quality for a courtier. ‘Abbas was a leading poet of courtly love and he produced ghazals devoted to love in the melancholic, submissive and unsatisfied vein. (Imru’ al-Qays would have found ‘Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf hard to take. Also, favoured Jahili beauties had tended to be much fatter than the women who were sighed over by ‘Abbasid poets.) Love in ‘Abbas’s poetry was a mark of nobility of spirit: ‘only lovers count as people’. He was a specialist in the short poem, the qit’a.

  Many of his poems were addressed to a certain Fauz, also referred to as Zalum (‘the Tyrant’), but nothing is known of her. A number were set to music and sung by singing-girls of the type who were the subject of poetry by him and other would-be submissive ‘Abbasid courtiers.

  Fauz is beaming on the castle.

  When she walks amongst her maids of honour

  you would think that she is walking upon eggs and green bottles.

  Somebody told me that she cried for help

  on beholding a lion engraved upon a signet-ring.

  J. C. Bürgel (trans.), in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot (ed.),

  Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam

  (Malibu, Calif., 1979), p. 94

  My heart leapt up, when I espied

  A sun sink slowly in the west,

  Its beauty in that bower to hide

  Where lovely ladies lie at rest:

  A sun embodied in the guise

  Of a sweet maiden of delight,

  The ripple of her rounded thighs

  A scroll of parchment, soft and white,

  No creature she of human kind,

  Though human fair and beautiful,

  And neither sprite, although designed

  In faery grace ineffable.

  Her body was a jasmine rare,

  Her perfume sweet as amber scent,

  Her face a pearl beyond compare,

  Her all, pure light’s embodiment.

  All shrouded in her pettigown

  I watched her delicately pass,

  Stepping as light as thistledown

  That dances on a crystal glass.

  Arberry, The Ring of the Dove, pp. 210 n

  A craze developed during the ‘Abbasid period for girls dressed as pageboys (ghulumiyyat) and amorous poetry was addressed both to these girls and to pretty boys. As the drinker moved from contemplation of what his cup contained to contemplation of the boy who had brought it, poems came to be composed in praise of beautiful cup-bearers; so wine poetry shaded into love poetry. Notwithstanding conservative views of what the qasida should be, new genres evolved in the ‘Abbasid period from the qasida form and went on to acquire an independent existence outside it. Khamriyya, or verses devoted to the celebration of wine and drinking, constituted one of the most important of what were effectively newly independent genres. (It is, however, true that some wine poetry had been produced in the Jahili period, particularly at the court of the Lakhmid kings of Hira and, later, under the patronage of certain Umayyad princes, such as Walid II.) Khamriyya poems were by convention fairly short. Under the ‘Abbasids the stock forms of khamriyya poetry were elaborated: the description of the wine-cup, the colour of the wine, the evocation of the beloved’s saliva, the appearance of the beautiful cup-bearer, and so on. There was even a sub-genre of ‘Abbasid
wine poetry devoted to visits to monasteries, since Christian monasteries in the Middle East were noted producers of wine; the Arab aristocracy tended to resort to these places in search of wine and other diversions. Up to the tenth century Iraqi monasteries were favourite resorts of libertines. Anthologists such as Abu’l-Faraj al-Ishfahani and al-Shahbusti (d. 1008) produced guides to monasteries which were simultaneously evocations of the pleasures of life, since drinking bouts, picnics and assignations with lovers took place in monastery gardens.

  ABU NUWAS, called the ‘Father of the Locks’ because he had curly hair, is perhaps the most accomplished, and certainly the most famous, of those poets. He was born sometime between 747 and 762 in Ahwaz, in Persia, and his early years are a trifle obscure. Abu Nuwas was proud of his Persian culture and his wine poetry can be seen, in part at least, as a literary continuation of the old hard-drinking culture of the Sasanian Persian court. Having first found patrons among the Barmakis, he fled to Egypt after their downfall. Later, however, he became the nadim of the Caliph al-Amin. Abu Nuwas’s end is as obscure as his beginnings. He died sometime around the year 814, possibly in prison.

  Although Abu Nuwas followed convention in going out to the desert to spend time with the Bedouin so as to improve his Arabic, he later proved himself to be a literary innovator and rejected the stale bluster of the qasida. He expressed his contempt for the conventional nasib: ‘I do not weep because the dwelling-place has become an inhospitable desert.’ He followed Bashshar in rejecting Bedouin values and in one famous poem he parodied the abandoned campsite theme of the traditional qasida by composing a lament for the disappearance of old drinking taverns. More generally, he sought out new and sometimes rather disreputable subjects for poetry. According to Adonis, a leading twentieth-century Arab poet, ‘Abu Nuwas adopts the mask of a clown and turns drunkenness, which frees the body from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation.’ As well as wine poetry, Abu Nuwas wrote erotic poems addressed to both men and women. By contrast with the poetry of Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf, Abu Nuwas’s erotic poetry has a more sensual feel to it. While it is clear that Abu Nuwas was homosexual, it is doubtful whether his poems addressed to women were anything more than fictional exercises.

  One of the disreputable things which Abu Nuwas did was to steal lines from other people’s poems. Lots of poets did this and a sophisticated technical vocabulary evolved to describe the different types of literary thieving that went on – of metaphor, of theme, precise wording, etc. However, Abu Nuwas went further than most in recycling other men’s words and he was blamed for it.

  Abu Nuwas, the professional nadim, declared that the ideal majlis should consist of three guests and a musician. Also, the nadim should bear in mind that what was said in the evening should be forgotten by the morning (although to judge by the surviving literature, it rarely was forgotten). According to a thirteenth-century Persian joke-book, Abu Nuwas claimed never to have seen anyone drunk. This was because he was always the first to get drunk, and soon he was so drunk that he did not know what was happening to anyone else.

  In the poem which follows, the themes of wine-drinking and homo-erotic love are combined in typical fashion, as Abu Nuwas addresses the cup-bearer:

  On every path Love waits to ambush me,

  a sword of passion and a spear in hand;

  I cannot flee it and am sore afraid

  of it, for every lover is a coward.

  My hearth affords no amnesty, and I

  have no safe-conduct if I stir outside.

  His face, a goblet next his lip,

  looks like a moon lit with a lamp;

  Armed with love’s weaponry, he rides

  on beauty’s steed, squares up eye’s steel

  Which in his smile, the bow his brow,

  the shafts his eyes, his lashes lances.

  Julia Ashtiany (trans.), in Ashtiany et al., The Cambridge History

  of Arabic Literature: “Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 298

  But I say what comes to me

  From my inner thoughts

  Denying my eyes.

  I begin to compose something

  In a single phrase

  With many meanings,

  Standing in illusion,

  So that when I go towards it

  I go blindly,

  As if I am pursuing the beauty of something

  Before me but unclear.

  Catherine Cobham (trans.), in Adonis,

  An Introduction to Arab Poetics, p. 53

  Satanic Panic

  I quarreled with my boy –

  my letters

  came back marked ‘Unknown

  At This Address – So Bugger Off’

  In solitude & tears

  I damply prayed – to Satan:

  ‘Weeping & insomnia have got me

  down to 90 pounds –

  don’t you care

  that I’m suffering?

  That I’m so depressed

  I’ve almost run out of lust?

  This obsession’s getting in the way

  of my duty to thee:

  my sinning’s half-hearted – I feel a fit

  of repentance coming on!

  Yes! Thou hadst better stoke up some love for me

  in that lad’s heart (you know how!)

  or I’ll retire from Sin: from Poetry, from Song,

  from pickling my veins in wine!

  I’ll read the Koran! I’ll start

  a Koranic Night School for Adults!

  I’ll make the Pilgrimage to Mecca every year

  & accumulate so much virtue that I’ll … I’ll …’

  Well, three days hadn’t passed when suddenly

  my sweetheart came crawling back

  begging for reunion. Was it good?

  It was twice as good as before!

  Ah, joy after sorrow!

  almost the heart splits with it!

  Ah, overdose of joy! … And of course, since then

  I’ve been on the best of terms

  with the Father of Lies.

  Peter Lamborn Wilson (trans.), Sacred Drift: Essays on the

  Margins of Islam (San Francisco, 1993), pp. 95–6

  Abu Nuwas also wrote hunting poetry (tardiyyat) and his Diwan, or ‘Collected Poems’, was the first to have a special section devoted to poems on the subject. In general the poems produced by Abu Nuwas and others in praise of wine, women, song, boys, hunting and flowers can be seen as a reaction against the fierce and gloomy subject matter of the traditional qasida. Abu Nuwas addressed his verses to attainable objects of desire rather than to some irredeemably lost love. Although he was a libertine poet, like the rakehell Umayyad prince Walid II, in Abu Nuwas’s poems there is often a strong element of self-deprecation. Moreover, while much of his verse celebrated the pleasures of life, this celebration was often mingled with regret for the brevity of such pleasures and even with expressions of repentance. A sensual regret for the passing of beautiful things may shade very easily into an essentially religious sense of contrition – and here perhaps there may be a semantic link between the nadim and nadama, the verb meaning ‘to repent’. Abu Nuwas seems to have died in disgrace, yet he lived on in Arab folklore, and even today in Swahili myth as a disreputable figure to whom all sorts of entertaining escapades were attributed.

  Even such a disreputable figure as Abu Nuwas wrote poems on the themes of asceticism and repentance. It was really only in the ‘Abbasid period that religion and mysticism came to be recognized as proper subjects for poetry. Abu al-Ishaq Isma’il ibn al-Qasim, better known by his nickname ABU AL-‘ATAHIYYA, ‘the Father of Craziness’ (748826), was humbly born and throughout his life remained acutely conscious of his lowly origins. He was also known as Jarrar, ‘the Jar-Seller’, for he ran a pottery shop where poets used to meet and write down scraps of poetry on pot shards. Like other poor but clever contemporaries, he used poetry as a means of self-advancement and secured the patronage of the Caliph al-Mahdi by d
evoting a panegyric to him. Early on in his career he wrote ghazals on the subject of his love for ‘Utba, a slave girl of a caliphal princess, Khaizuran. However, she allegedly despised him for writing poetry for money, and spurned his approaches. In the years of Abu al-’Atahiyya’s success at court, the famous musician Ibrahim ibn al-Mawsili set his poems to music. Abu al-’Atahiyya fell in and out of favour and was in and out of prison during the caliphates of al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid; finally, during Harun’s caliphate, he totally renounced love poetry in favour of poetry devoted to asceticism (zuhdiyyat). He wrote qifas in very simple language on such themes as fear of death, the transience of all things, and contempt for wealth and ostentation (but unkind critics thought Abu’l-’Atahiyya made a very good living for himself, precisely by producing this sort of stuff).

  Will you be warned by the example of him who has left

  His palaces empty on the morning of his death?

  By him whom death has cut down and who lies

  Abandoned by kinsfolk and friends?

  By him whose thrones stand vacant,

  By him whose daises are empty?

  Where now are kings and where

  are the men who passed this way before you?

  O you who have chosen the world and its delights,

  You who have always listened to sycophants,

  Take what you can of the pleasures of the world

  For death comes as the end.

  Lunde and Stone, The Meadows of Gold, p. 99