Bashshār b. Burd, Abū Muʿādh, called al-Muraʿʿath (d. 167/783 or 168/784), a blind poet and orator of Persian extraction who flourished under the first ʿAbbāsids.

Early sources contain differing details as to Bashshār’s origins. Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī lists some twenty-five of his Iranian forebears, and traces his line back to the Kiyānid dynasty (Abū al-Faraj, 3/135; see also Bashshār, 1/101; al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī, 10/136); the poet himself at times vaunts this ancestry (see Bashshār, 1/37…