The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli

      FOREWORD

      TERENCE CAVE

      “Rhymes and great deeds last forever

      like a string when fitted with a center pearl.” (§60)

      In 223/838, the armies of the Abbasid caliphate, led by the Caliph al-Muʿtaṣim himself, carried out a devastating retaliatory attack on the Byzantine Empire, laying siege to the key city of Amorium, sacking it, and slaughtering large numbers of its inhabitants. The victory, which marked a significant realignment in the balance of power between the Muslim and the Christian worlds in the East, was celebrated by Abū Tammām at the peak of his career in his most famous ode (for an abridged version, see §§61.2–3; also §§20.2–5). It was written down, copied, memorized, and widely read among the cultural elite, and brought Abū Tammām immediate financial rewards from the caliph as well as fame. Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī’s compilation, The Life and Times of Abū Tammām, provides us with abundant insights into this and other similar episodes.

      At the other end of the Mediterranean, just sixty years earlier, another memorable battle was waged between Christians and Muslims. In 161/778, the rearguard of Charlemagne’s expeditionary force was ambushed and destroyed at Roncesvaux in the Pyrenees as they were returning northwards. What is now known as the Song of Roland, written down some 300 years later, represents this disaster as an episode in a long-term struggle between the Christian forces of Charlemagne and his Muslim adversaries. In fact, it seems that Charlemagne had done a deal with the Abbasid dynasty in Spain to quell the Umayyads, whose army had earlier ventured north as far as Tours, while the ambush at Roncesvaux was executed by Basque forces, angry at Charlemagne’s pre-emptive destruction of the city walls of their capital Pamplona. Throughout the whole of this period, the Carolingian dynasty traded with the Abbasid caliphate and sponsored reciprocal diplomatic visits, receiving handsome presents from (among others) al-Muʿtaṣim. The conquest of Amorium was indeed welcomed by the Carolingians since it weakened the political outreach of the Eastern Church and the threat it posed to their own imperial ambitions.

      The culture of the Carolingian court is often celebrated as a high-water mark in earlier medieval history. Charlemagne promoted an intensive program of copying and compilation which ensured the transmission of the extant writings of classical (primarily Latin)antiquity, carried out by scribes who for the most part belonged to religious orders. Charlemagne himself couldn’t write, and probably couldn’t read either, and nearly everything written down in this period was in Latin, the lingua franca of the linguistically diverse regions and kingdoms of Europe. The first extant document written in the European vernaculars was the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842, when Abū Tammām was still alive. The native cultures of Europe were handed down orally until the rise of vernacular writing as a cultural instrument in the eleventh century, as the example of the Song of Roland shows.

      The Life and Times of Abū Tammām, compiled nearly a century after the death of the poet himself, bears retrospective witness to a culture where the habits of oral composition—live performance, improvisation, memorization, authentication by personal witness—are still deeply ingrained. At the same time, it shows that culture at work preserving valued texts in written form. So we find copying and collection here too, facilitated by new technologies of papermaking;the agents in this process of transmission were not clerics, however, but members of a literate class who also participated in the day-to-day administration of the social and political world. And what was thereby made available for posterity was not a canonized set of texts imported from an alien culture, written in a language that had already become remote from the vernacular, but the rich repertory of classical Arabic poetry stretching unbroken from the pre-Islamic