The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli
cite Aḥmad, who cites Aḥmad, who cites Abū Tammām as follows:
One man said to another, “How beautiful your speech is!”
“You make it so by listening so beautifully.” (§§152–3)
Let us then, in conclusion, counterbalance the triumphalist theme of Abū Tammām’s Amorium ode and prolong the theme of listening by invoking the poem that begins “Sleepless night of Abrashahr.” On a visit to the city of Abrashahr, Abū Tammām is said to have fallen for “a singer with a beautiful voice who sang in Persian.” He spent the night listening to her, even though he couldn’t understand her words:
[…] She played her strings, sorrowful and yearning; had they been able, her listeners would have given their life for her.
I did not understand what she meant, but it set my heart on fire, for I understood her sorrow.
All night long I was like a blind man, broken-hearted,
In love with beauties he cannot see. (§§100.1–6)
Reading the poem in English in the twenty-first century is like falling in love with the ghost of her song as embodied in Abū Tammām’s memory of it. He would surely have been pleased to know that both voices, hers and his, had survived close to twelve centuries of cultural conflict, change, and mutually beneficial exchange, crossing unexpected borders on the way.
Terence Cave
St. Johns College, Oxford
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author owes a debt of gratitude to the many people who helped see this volume into print, first of all to the general editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, Philip Kennedy, and the executive editors, Shawkat Toorawa and James Montgomery, for accepting this work in their series, and furthermore to my outside referees, Julia Bray and the late Wolfhart Heinrichs, for their encouraging comments and constructive criticism. It is my great regret that my Doktorvater could not see the completion of the book, to which his example as a scholar contributed so much. My style editor, David Brennan, has been a valiant support and inexhaustible source of ideas in my initial struggle to find modern English voices for al-Ṣūlī and Abū Tammām and his contemporaries. My first project editor, Tahera Qutbuddin, with her precise eye, suggested many improvements in content and form. Hugh Kennedy, Everett Rowson, and Letizia Osti generously helped me resolve puzzles in the text; my MA student Hatim Alzahrani commented on parts of the translation; Chip Rossetti kept reminding me gently but firmly that timeless scholarship has deadlines; and Gemma Juan-Simó assisted with logistical matters. I am grateful to my copy editor Allison Brown for her unfailing precision, to the digital production manager Stuart Brown for his artful Arabic typesetting, and to my Bachelor students at Freie Universität Berlin for their enthusiastic reception of a preprint draft. My special thanks go to my second project editor, James Montgomery, who chaperoned the book through its final stages and spared no effort in revising every detail from substance to style: his copious comments were always on the mark.
To the staff of the Süleymaniye Library I say thank you for making the unicum manuscript available to me, and to Bilal Orfali for providing me with a digital copy. I thank the professional staff of Widener Library, Harvard University, for making its excellent collection available to me for research on questions that arose during the process of translation. I also owe much to those scholars who first identified this important work, Khalīl ʿAsākir, Muḥammad ʿAzzām, and Naẓīr al-Islam al-Hindī; their careful edition left me few things to correct.
I could not have accomplished this (or any prior) book without the loving support of my parents, Lilo and Wilfried Gründler, even though for nearly three decades my work took me away from them to another continent. I complete this, having returned to their side of the Atlantic. And as literature is about life, Normand Mainville ensured that I did not forget and kept me in good spirits throughout the entire process.
Any errors that remain are mine alone.
Beatrice Gruendler
Berlin, June 2015
INTRODUCTION
She longed to read Ulysses, and when Virginia [Woolf] produced it for her, Katherine [Mansfield] began by ridiculing it, and then suddenly said: “But theres something in this.” This scene, Virginia thought, remembering it almost at the end of her life just after Joyce’s death, “should figure I suppose in the history of literature.” 1
The Life and Times of Abū Tammām (Akhbār Abī Tammām) by Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī, more than any other book, illustrates the role of poetry in premodern Islamic society. Composed over ten centuries ago, it brings together two salient personalities of cultural history from one of the most dynamic periods of Arabic poetry. This is the first English translation of the work.2
ABŪ TAMMĀM
Abū Tammām (d. 231/845 or 232/846) is one of the most celebrated poets in the Arabic language. He ranks alongside Abū Nuwās (d. ca. 198/813), famed wine poet and hedonist, and al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965), self-declared prophet and supreme panegyrist. Yet Abū Tammām is virtually unknown in the West. This is largely because his poetic style is very difficult, resulting in a dearth of translations of his verse. Furthermore, Abū Tammām excelled in the composition of the panegyric, a genre that does not sit well with current sensibilities and expectations about the nature and purpose of poetry. Still, classical Arabic poetry, including the panegyric as a major genre, was understood to be a powerful and prestigious form of communication, and a specific audience response was the declared goal of much of this poetry. The present book aims to remedy the dearth of translations and the obscurity of genre and poet by making many passages of Abū Tammām’s odes available in English and by presenting these excerpts within their performance context, showing how these poems “worked”—that is to say, why they were written, which issues they treated, and how their audience reacted to them.
At first glance Abū Tammām3 seems an unlikely candidate for a poetic career. Born in the Syrian countryside, and of Greek Christian background (his father owned a wine shop in Damascus), he engaged in menial occupations until he eventually took up the study of poetry. His success was slow in coming. His first patrons were local Syrian dignitaries whom he lampooned when his praise poems did not yield the desired result—payment. Panegyrics constituted the main source of income for a professional poet, though some deemed (the threat of) lampoons a more effective tool.
Abū Tammām’s next patrons were generals in the army of Caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 197–218/813–33). They became long-standing supporters and were the recipients of many of Abū Tammām’s odes throughout their lives. Abū Tammām’s career reached its peak under Caliph al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 218–27/833–42). The poet celebrated al-Muʿtaṣim’s reign in famous odes, such as those on the conquest of the Byzantine border fortress Amorium, on the quelling of the Bābak revolt, and on the execution of General Afshīn for high treason.
Another group of patrons comprised regional rulers, some from as far away as Khurasan (northeast Iran), where Abū Tammām traveled to present them his odes. Government scribes and high-ranking civil servants also patronized the poet. In the last year of his life, Abū Tammām was appointed head of the postal service in Mosul through the good offices of one such patron. When Abū Tammām died, his loss was mourned by this patron and by many fellow poets.
Unlike many poets of the time, Abū Tammām did not serve an apprenticeship with any other poet, but studied his predecessors’ work in book form (§65.2, §86.3). From such books he also compiled a number of anthologies, among them, The Book on Bravery (Kitāb al-Ḥamāsah). Abū Tammām is said to have put this book together in a patron’s library when he was snowed in during his travels.
Abū Tammām’s poetry captured the atmosphere of his time. In it he promoted and developed an avant-garde aesthetic that mirrored the intellectual and artistic flourishing of the day. It also reflected the greater cultural openness of the Abbasid dynasty, which programmatically