The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli
erudition. In Baghdad, grammarians and poets were important cultural forces. Poets no longer hailed solely from Arab tribes, nor did they need to follow the standards of linguistic purity generally held to be the preserve of the Bedouin. They now came from many backgrounds, especially Persian and Byzantine, and created new genres that reflected contemporary material and intellectual life. Baghdadi sophistication came to compete with the cultural ideal of Bedouin purity of language. Abū Tammām forcefully promoted a new avant-garde aesthetic that introduced more craftsmanship and rhetorical finesse into poetry. His verse most obviously displays the features of what came to be known as the “New Style” (badīʿ). Even his critics recognized that he had invented an impressive array of poetic motifs.
Abū Tammām relied greatly on his own ingenuity in introducing what some thought were incongruous elements into his particular brand of the New Style. He created logical twists, paradoxes, and antitheses, and specialized in the personification of abstract concepts. But he merged these with an archaic Bedouin lexicon and older poetic motifs. As a result, his poetry sounded very different from what had come before. It echoed the tradition but gave it a new feel, so much so that it shocked. It quickly became both wildly controversial and wildly popular. Some found it daring. Others deemed it strange. Abū Tammām was the talk of his time; whether one liked his verse or not, one had to be prepared to discuss it (§10.1). Al-Ṣūlī says as much himself, referring to Abū Tammām and other modern poets: “Their poetry is also more suited to its time and people employ it more in their gatherings, writings, pithy sayings, and petitions” (§11.2).
One social group that figures prominently in al-Ṣūlī’s book is the scribes, who are ubiquitous as financial supporters and artistic partisans of Abū Tammām. In the far-flung lands of the Abbasid caliphate, these highly educated clerks became the mainstay of government. They came from many different backgrounds, and not all of them were Muslims, but their skills, sorely needed to run the empire, outweighed factors such as religious persuasion or ethnic provenance. In fact, non-Arabs (mostly Persians and Aramaic-speakers) flourished in administrative service. They swiftly climbed the social ladder, and some established veritable dynasties. Financially secure in their government employment, and enjoying the social status that came with their wealth, they were in a stronger position than were the poets and scholars on whom rulers called at their whim. These scribes acted as sponsors of poets, as go-betweens who secured stipends and rewards for them, and as amateur critics of poetry. Their profession necessitated training in sundry subjects of elite culture beyond basic competence in the Arabic language and script; some scribes even tried their hand at poetry themselves. The difference, however, was that they were not dependent on poetry as a source of income. Thus they judged it according to their taste and were open to new fashions, a liberty that the philologists could not afford, because their authority hinged on their expertise in the ancient corpus.
The tumultuous state of Abū Tammām’s reception is conveyed in the fresh and refreshingly opinionated voice of Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā l-Ṣūlī (d. 335/946 or 336/947). He was writing a century after the events he records, but matters were not yet completely settled, though the debate had shifted from the Ancients (awāʾil) versus the Moderns (muḥdathūn) to the pitting of individual modern poets against one another. In introducing and commenting on Abū Tammām’s life and poetry, al-Ṣūlī laid the groundwork for a tradition of serious poetic criticism of Abū Tammām’s work. Al-Ṣūlī’s contemporary al-Āmidī (d. 371/981–82), in his book Weighing Up the Merits of Abū Tammām and His Disciple al-Buḥturī (al-Muwāzanah bayn shiʿr Abī Tammām wa-l-Buḥturī), champions the latter. Some half a century later al-Marzubānī (d. 384/994), in his Embroidered Book (al-Muwashshaḥ), collects Abū Tammām’s poetic shortcomings.4 Al-Āmidī also includes in his book the record of a long debate between supporters of the two poets. A shorter debate is cited by al-Ḥuṣrī (d. 413/1022) in his Flowering of the Literary Arts (Zahr al-ādāb).5
AL-ṢŪLĪ
Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī6 was a man steeped in the culture of his time, positioned through descent and education at the very top of society, and gifted with an aesthetic perception that enabled him to compose nuanced portraits of literary life both of the earlier third/ninth century and his own day. His Turkish ancestor Ṣūl had governed the region of Jurjān southwest of the Caspian Sea and adopted Islam under the general Yazīd ibn al-Muhallab (d. 102/720). Subsequent family members were mostly officials in the chancery, with the exception of al-Ṣūlī’s uncle Ibrāhīm ibn al-ʿAbbās (d. 243/857 or later), who excelled both as a poet and a secretary.
Al-Ṣūlī studied with the leading scholars of his day, including the philologists Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī, Thaʿlab, and al-Mubarrad, and he quotes many additional authorities in his works. His student al-Tanūkhī (d. 383/994) became a celebrated adab author in his own right, and eminent luminaries like al-Marzubānī and Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967) quoted al-Ṣūlī extensively.
The bulk of al-Ṣūlī’s life was devoted to serving several caliphs as companion, helping them to while away their idle hours with erudite and entertaining conversation, and as tutor of their sons. It was his chess playing that first earned him the attention of Caliph al-Muktafī (r. 289–95/902–8). Thereafter al-Muqtadir (r. 295–317/908–29) entrusted him the care of his two sons, one of whom, when he became Caliph al-Rāḍī in 322/934, gave al-Ṣūlī a privileged position at court. With al-Muttaqī (r. 329–33/940–44) al-Ṣūlī’s fortunes waned. In search of new patrons, he made his way to the Turkish commander and future regent Bajkam (d. 329/941) in Mosul before retiring to Basra, where he died in 335/946–47.
The composition of The Life and Times of Abū Tammām probably dates to the last two decades of al-Ṣūlī’s life. The addressee of its introductory epistle, Muzāḥim ibn Fātik, remains strangely obscure.7 No contemporary source mentions him, but al-Ṣūlī tells us that the composition of The Life and Times of Abū Tammām took place during a period of disgrace (§2.4), which means that it probably happened during al-Ṣūlī’s temporary absence from court under al-Qāhir (r. 320–22/932–34), or after his final departure from it under al-Muttaqī. The eulogies al-Ṣūlī appended to the names of the two grammarians al-Mubarrad and Thaʿlab (§4.1), who died in 286/899 and 291/904 respectively, provide a post quem for the epistle. Muzāḥim may thus have been a military man of minor importance but with literary interests, whose favor al-Ṣūlī sought when his star was fading. The dedicatory epistle may be a petition for sponsorship and patronage.
Al-Ṣūlī lived at a time when literary scholarship about an earlier oral tradition had become primarily a written exercise, though it did not sacrifice person-to-person teaching and transmission. During the previous century, the standardization of the Arabic language (ʿarabiyyah) and the introduction of papermaking from Central Asia had supported a flourishing book culture. Oral transmission continued to alternate with the use of written sources and is preserved in the introductory chains of transmission (isnād). Thus a text’s journey from memorization to oral transmission to written transcript, sometimes over as long a period as three centuries, was carefully documented, transmitter after transmitter. Al-Ṣūlī owned a large library,8 but claimed to have studied all his books with relevant authorities.
The books of this era, however, show the history of their inception in their structure—and they differ from the continuous text we expect of books today. The main ingredient of early Arabic prose was short texts, or akhbār (sg. khabar), which had been transmitted from as early as the sixth century ad. In fact, the large body of orally transmitted literature accelerated the process of book composition and was one of the conditions for the cultural revolution that led to the emergence of the Arabic book; the oral texts in circulation needed to be collected, sorted, and presented on the page. There were two main terms for the production of a book. One kind, the redacting of oral