Abu Nuwas (756 - 814) was a classical Arabic poet of the early Abbasid period, generally counted among the greatest poets in the Arabic language. [1] Born in Ahvaz and active chiefly in Baghdad, he served at the caliphal court and became the acknowledged master of the khamriyya, the wine poem, as well as a leading voice of the modernist badi style. [2]
Origins and education
Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami was born about 756 in Ahvaz, in south-western Persia, to an Arab father and a Persian mother. [1] The family moved to Basra, then one of the principal centres of Arabic learning, where he studied grammar, the Quran, hadith and the classical poetic corpus under teachers including the philologist Abu Ubayda and the poet Waliba ibn al-Hubab, who took him to Kufa.
Tradition holds that, like other aspiring poets of his generation, he spent a period among the bedouin of the desert in order to acquire the pure Arabic idiom of the old odes, a discipline he later mocked in his verse. [3]
Poetry
Abu Nuwas moved to Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, and entered court circles under the caliph Harun al-Rashid, later becoming closely associated with his son and successor al-Amin. [2] He worked in most of the established genres, writing panegyric, elegy, satire and hunting poems, but his reputation rests on the khamriyyat, poems in praise of wine, drinking companions and the taverns of the city.
His most famous gesture is the rejection of the traditional opening of the Arabic ode, in which the poet weeps over the abandoned desert campsite of a departed beloved. Abu Nuwas replaced these ruins with the wine shop and the pleasures of urban life, a substitution that announced a new sensibility in Arabic poetry. [3] He also composed love poetry addressed both to women and to young men, and the frankness of these verses, along with his treatment of drinking, made his work controversial in his own time and later subject to censorship in some editions.
Later life
His court career was uneven. Accounts describe periods of imprisonment and of flight to Egypt, occasioned by the offence his verses gave and by the political upheavals of the period, including the civil war between al-Amin and al-Mamun. [1] He died in Baghdad around 814; the circumstances are disputed in the sources, and some traditions report a repentant turn to ascetic and devotional poetry at the end of his life.
Legacy
Abu Nuwas is regarded as one of the founders of the badi or "modern" style, marked by elaborate figurative language and a self-conscious break with the pre-Islamic model. [2] His collected diwan was assembled by later scholars and has been transmitted in several recensions. He entered popular tradition as a trickster figure in stories told across the Arab world and beyond, and appears in tales associated with the Thousand and One Nights. [4] Modern scholarship treats him as a central figure in the transition from the classical Arabian ode to the cosmopolitan literature of the Abbasid empire. [3]
