Rowell Alex - Vintage Humour: The Islamic Wine Poetry

The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu NuwasALEX ROWELL HURST & COMPANY, LONDON First published in English in the United Kingdom in 2017 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL Alex Rowell, 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom All rights reserved. The right of Alex Rowell to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781849049931 www.hurstpublishers.com Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016,United States of America.

To the writers, drinkers, and freethinkers of the Arab and Islamic worlds, long may they live.

When news of Abu Nuwas death (c. 814 AD) reached the reigning caliph, Abd Allah ibn Harun al-Mamun, the emperor styled as the Commander of the Believers is said to have cried out, The charm of our time has departed [] Allahs curse upon whoever disparages him! If it seems odd in retrospect that the supreme authority of the Muslim world should have so lamented the passing of a notorious inebriate, an unabashed bisexual, and an internationally scandalous satirist of religious and cultural conservatism, it is only one in a long line of contradictions and ironies surrounding the poet generally agreed to have written the best wine poetry in the Arabic language, and some of its finest verse of any kind, full stop. To Arabic readers, the man whose poems remain widely loved or reviled (but in either case read) more than 1,200 years on from his demise needs little introduction. To the Anglophone world, however, this Muslim Rochester or Wilde continues to be almost entirely unknown, save for the crude caricature taking his name in the One Thousand and One Nights folk tales. I have found that there is little in the English language or for a matter of fact in any European language about a man who is eminently worth knowing, wrote W.H.

Ingrams in his 1933 Abu Nuwas in Life and in Legend. It would be difficult to argue much has changed in the intervening eighty-four years. In which case, before getting into the qualities that make the man so eminently worth knowing the comic genius, the lyric virtuosity, the striking humanism, for a start it may be useful to begin with a quick biographical gloss, which will also necessarily touch on the history of one of human civilisations truly transformational times. Al-Hasan ibn Hani, who would grow up to be nicknamed Abu Nuwas (He of the dangling hair-lock), was born in the late 750s AD probably 757 or 758 This was an extraordinarily tumultuous, as well as propitious, moment for a future writer to be born, being less than a decade after Islams first dynasty (that of the Umayyads, ruling from Damascus) was overthrown by the rebels known as the Abbasids, who would build their own imposing capital from scratch over a then-insignificant site on the banks of the River Tigris called Baghdad. Al-Hasans father, Hani, affiliated with the Yemeni al-Hakam tribe, had been a soldier in the army of the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan ibn Muhammad, until the Abbasid victory in 750 returned him to his Persian wife, Julluban, in Ahwaz. The penurious newlyweds lived a laborious existence; Hani as shepherd and weaver, Julluban as a maker of saddlebags, socks, and possibly bamboo products.

Along with al-Hasan, they are said to have had a daughter and two other sons. Not long after al-Hasans birth, the family moved southwest to Basra, the nearest major city in what was known (even then) as Iraq. Hani would soon die for reasons that remain obscure leaving Julluban to raise the children alone on the fruits of her artisanry. When he was old enough, al-Hasan was sent to the mosque to receive the conventional instruction in reading, writing, and Quran recitation. To grow up in Basra at that time was difficult as many may, regrettably, find it to imagine now to grow up in an exhilarating intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic hub. As the proud hometown of venerable philosophers, grammarians, and theologians, Basra enjoyed an academic rivalry with its northwestern neighbour, Kufa, analogous to that between Oxford and Cambridge today.

Commercially, as a key maritime port, it was a centre between Syria and Persia, its trade extending eastward to India and China, and westward to the farthest Western countries. leader al-Nafs al-Zakiyya (The Pure Soul) briefly succeeded in seizing Basra and Ahwaz before ultimately being crushed by the Caliph al-Mansur, whose men carried out gruesome reprisals on purported Alid sympathisers in the aftermath. Perhaps most pertinently for the future bacchic bard, Basra was also a distinguished nightlife venue; one of the great metropolises of indulgence, teeming with places of entertainment and outlets of pleasure and causes of temptation and sin. Before very long at all, al-Hasan would be joining the citys literati on their nocturnal tours of the taverns, making the intimate acquaintance of the waiters, singers, and vintners whom he would later portray so vividly in his verse. First, though, he needed to learn the craft, which by all accounts he did with staggering precocity. and jurisprudence, as well as the more secular disciplines of grammar, astronomy, the history and lineages of the old Arab tribes, and, of course, classical poetry. and jurisprudence, as well as the more secular disciplines of grammar, astronomy, the history and lineages of the old Arab tribes, and, of course, classical poetry.

He was at this time handsome-faced, fine-coloured, white and soft of body, slender, with a large head and dangling side-locks, a rhotacism on the letter R so as to make it a gh, and a constant huskiness in his throat. His break, however, would in fact come at the perfume souk, when one of Kufas poetic celebrities, Waliba ibn al-Hubab, chanced to buy some incense sticks from his stall. Striking up a conversation with the youth, Waliba was impressed by his quick wit and knowledge, and offered to mentor him in poetry. Realising who he was, a stunned al-Hasan recited one of his couplets, saying hed hoped to travel to Kufa expressly to meet him one day. Walibas response was to propose he accompany him back to Kufa straight away. With Julluban having by now remarried and abandoned her son to the perfumists, he didnt hesitate to accept.

Under Walibas wing, in Kufa the teenage More would soon follow, and, for all the revelry, Waliba grasped that the young mans talent was exceptional, even unique. Thus did he arrange, at al-Hasans request, for him to spend a year in the desert with the Bedouin to absorb their renowned linguistic purity and peculiar vocabulary. Armed with a now-dazzling lexicon, upon his return from the desert al-Hasan made for Basra to polish his art further still. This he did under the tutelage of a second, and very different kind of mentor, the esteemed literary scholar and poet Khalaf al-Ahmar, whose austere rigour made the ideal complement to Walibas decidedly more informal approach. Khalaf was a philological master of the great tradition of ancient Bedouin poetry and had both the authority and innate skill to round Abu Nuwas poetic education. A popular legend has it that Khalaf refused to allow his disciple to compose anything before he had memorised 1,000 poems from the classical canon.