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Abū Yaʿlā l-Sharīf Niẓām al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAbbāsī al-Hāshimī was an Arab poet and littérateur of the Saljūq period, better known as Ibn al-Habbāriyya (after Habbār, an ancestor on his mother’s side). Born in Baghdad in 414/1023–4, he was raised and educated there. Apart from language and literature he presumably studied ḥadīth and genealogy in some depth, for he reportedly transmitted ḥadīth and was also very knowledgeable about genealogy (al-Dhahabī, 35:231–3; Ibn Ḥajar, 5:364). His most notable and important patron was Niẓām al-Mulk (408–85/1018–92), the wa…

Abū ʿAlī Ismāʿīl b. Ibrāhīm b. Ḥamdawayh (c.200–70/816–84), known as al-Ḥamdawī (or al-Ḥamdūnī, an incorrect version of his patronymic often found in the sources), was a Basran secretary poet, who mainly composed satiric epigrams. Hailing from nearby Maysān, he spent most of his life in Basra, employed presumably in the local administration. He socialised with local notables and entertained good relations with several contemporary poets and philologists. His fame rests on two series of witty epigrams. The first thematises the used, supposedly threadbare ṭaylasān (hooded cloak)…

Muḥammad Ibn Yasīr al-Riyāshī was an early ʿAbbāsid poet of Basra who died sometime after 198/814. He was a member of the Riyāsh clan of the Khathʿam tribe and reportedly never left his native Basra to seek the patronage of wealthy grandees in Baghdad or elsewhere. Nevertheless, Ibn Yasīr maintained good relations with local notables, the governors of Basra, and several Hāshimites and members of the ʿAbbāsid family that lived in the city, regularly attending their drinking parties. Even though on s…

Jarwal b. Aws, nicknamed al-Ḥuṭayʾa (“the midget”) because of his dwarfish and ugly looks, was a mukhaḍram poet (one straddling the pre-Islamic and the early Islamic periods) who died after 41/661, possibly as late as 54/674. He was the son of a male member of the ʿAbs tribe and his female slave who, for fear of her master’s wife, initially claimed that the boy had been fathered by the latter woman’s brother. Hence, apart from the ʿAbs, al-Ḥuṭayʾa sometimes claimed descent from the Dhuhl, a sub-tribe of the Bak…

Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī b. Jaʿfar b. ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Saʿdī, widely known as Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ al-Ṣiqillī (433–515/1041–1121), was a distinguished Arab philologist and anthologist. He was born in Sicily on 10 Ṣafar 433 (9 October 1041) and was descended from the Aghlabids, a dynasty which ruled Ifrīqiya (Eastern Maghreb) in the third/ninth century and that seized Sicily from the Byzantines. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were all known littérateurs. Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ studied under several scholars in his h…

Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā b. ʿAbd al-Malik Ibn Quzmān (born sometime after 479/1086 and died 29 Ramaḍān 555/2 October 1160) was an Andalusian poet of the Almoravid period. He was undisputedly the greatest master of the zajal—a vernacular strophic poem with specific rhyme-patterns—which he established as a genre of elite literature. Born into a Córdoban family that had produced a number of civil officials, littérateurs, and religious scholars, Ibn Quzmān seems to have been very well connected to the social elite of most Andalusian metropolises. In…

Tāj al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 762/1361), known as Ibn al-Durayhim al-Mawṣilī, was a polymath and merchant. He was born in Mosul in Shaʿbān 712/December 1312. Orphaned as a child, he was dispossessed of his inheritance by his legal guardians and could only recover a small part of his father’s large property when he came of age. Nevertheless, he acquired a good education in the traditional sciences and in mathematics, studying under several scholars in Mosul. Among his teachers wer…

Maʿn b. Aws was an excellent early Islamic poet of the Muzayna tribe—hence his nisba al-Muzanī (apparently born in pre-Islamic times, died around or after 64/683–4). Maʿn was presumably a native of the area south of Medina, a territory inhabited by his tribe, where he owned some land, palm trees, and cattle. Besides repeatedly visiting Medina and Mecca, he travelled more than once to Basra and Syria to engage in trade. He is said to have married a Syrian woman named Thawr, as well as Laylā, a wealthy woman of…

Al-Farazdaq (c. 20–114/c. 641/732) is the nickname of Abū Firās Hammām b. Ghālib b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa, a great Umayyad poet and one of the best Arab poets of all time. His nickname, meaning “lump of dough” or “loaf of bread,” was purportedly given to him because of his plump face. He was born into a prominent and wealthy family of camel-breeders settled in the bādiya (desert) of Basra. He belonged to the Mujāshiʿ b. Dārim, a sub-tribe of the Tamīm, while his mother was descended from the Ḍabba, another powerful North Arabian tribe. Both his father Ghālib and his gran…

Fakhr or iftikhār (self-praise) is a genre of premodern Arabic poetry that flourished especially in pre-Islamic, early Islamic, and Umayyad times (sixth to mid-eighth centuries C.E.). Even though fakhr was the dominant genre of early Arabic poetry, it began to lose its importance in the Umayyad period(41–132/661–750), for both religious and social reasons. The predominance of fakhr gives early Arabic poetry a special tenor that distinguishes it from the poetry of the ʿAbbāsid (132–656/750–1258) and later periods. Fakhr was, in fact, the most genuine expression of the pre…

Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Jurāwī (d. 609/1212) was perhaps the best Maghribī poet of the Almohad period. He was descended from the Berber Gurāwa tribe (hence his nisba), a branch of the Zenata Berbers settled in the area of Fez. (As suggested by the various spellings of the tribe’s name and the poet’s nisba found in the sources, the correct pronunciation is either al-Gurāwī or al-Garāwī.) Al-Jurāwī was born in Tadla in the third decade of the sixth/twelfth century. He studied in his native town, as well as in Marrakech and Fez and in al…

Abū l-Ḥasan Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh Ibn Sukkara al-Hāshimī (d. 11 Rabīʿ al-Ākhir 385/15 May 995), a descendant of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85), was a Baghdadi poet of the Būyid era (320–454/932–1062), best known for his satirical verse. His dīwān, which according to al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038, Yatīmat al-dahr, 3:3) comprised more than 50,000 verses, has not survived. Sālimān’s edition of his extant poetry contains only 537 lines. Several of his preserved short pieces may be excerpts of longer poems, but he evidently had a flair for epigrams. More than 10,000 of his …

An Umayyad poet of the Asad tribe, al-Ḥakam b. ʿAbdal al-Asadī was born in Kufa and spent most of his life in Iraq (d. c. 102/720). He was lame and hunchbacked or hemiplegic, disabilities which he sometimes mentioned in his poetry. When ʿAbdallāh b. al-Zubayr, seeking the caliphate, gained control of Iraq and expelled the Umayyad officials in 64/684, Ibn ʿAbdal followed them to Damascus, where he was admitted into the entourage of the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705). After the restoration of Umay…

Dhū l-Rumma is the nickname of Abū l-Ḥārith Ghaylān b. ʿUqba (c. 77–117/696–735), a great Bedouin poet of the Umayyad era. This nickname, meaning “the one with the frayed cord”, was most probably given to him because of an amulet he wore as a child. He belonged to the ʿAdī tribe, a member of the Ribāb confederation settled in Yamāma and the adjacent desert of al-Dahnāʾ, in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula. He was born and spent most of his life there, although he made frequent visits to Basra and Kufa. Very little is known about his life, and the narratives regarding him found …

Abū l-Fityān Muḥammad b. Sulṭān b. Muḥammad Ibn Ḥayyūs (394–473/1003–80) was a prominent Syrian poet descended from the Arabian Ghanī tribe. The scion of a notable Damascene family, he started his career as a eulogist of Anūshtakīn al-Dizbirī, the Fāṭimid governor of Damascus and Syria (419–33/1028–42), on whom he composed forty odes that celebrated his just rule and victories over his enemies, both the Byzantines and the local Arab tribes and rulers that opposed Fāṭimid rule. He also eulogised some of …

Abū l-Maʿālī Saʿd b. ʿAlī al-Ḥaẓīrī (d. 25 Ṣafar 568/16 October 1172) was an Iraqi littérateur, copyist, and bookseller, widely known as Dallāl al-kutub (the Book Merchant). Born in al-Ḥaẓīra, a village north of Baghdad, he moved to the capital as a youth. There, he studied under prominent literary scholars such as Ibn al-Shajarī (d. 542/1147–8) and al-Jawālīqī (d. 539/1144–5), and became close to Ibn Aflaḥ (d. c.535–7/1141–3), one of Baghdad’s most prominent poets at the time. He also socialised with the popular prea…