Abū Nuwās, The Justified Sinner?* - Books and Journals

Oriens 39 (2011) 75-164 brill.nl/orie 

Abū Nuwās, The Justified Sinner?* 

James E. Montgomery 

University of Cambridge 

Abstract 

This article sets out to ponder why few contemporary scholars interested in the early history of 

Islamic theological and philosophical ideas have had recourse to ʿAbbasid poetry as a source. It uses 

the wine poetry of Abū Nuwās (d. ca. 198/813) as a test case and inches towards the suggestion that 

Abū Nuwās and the Caliph al-Amīn (r. 193-198/809-813) may have been the promoters of a 

charismatic form of Islam informed by notions of spiritual election and sinning as virtue. 

Keywords 

Early Islam; ʿAbbasid poetry; Abū Nuwās; wine poem; poetry and theology 

It is not only that to read a poem as a manifesto is a sin of facticity: to read it as 

an ethical treatise, or as the projection of a theological, psychological or legal 

system is surely not a violent act, but it is as deadening as holding up to the gaze 

of poetry — and, alas, with the best intentions in the world, e.g., to cast light on 

it — the severed, but still petrifying, head of the interpretive Gorgon. 

John Hollander 1 

* I would like to express my deep gratitude to Elizabeth Key Fowden, conversations with 

whom during the Islamic Crosspollinations Colloquium in Cambridge, 2004 encouraged me to 

persist with my unusual reading of Abū Nuwās (see her The Lamp and the Wine Flask: Early 

Muslim Interest in Christian Monasticism, in: Islamic Crosspollinations ed. Anna Akasoy, Peter 

Pormann and James E. Montgomery, Oxford: Gibb Trust, 2007, pp. 1-28) — her comments on 

page 17 are in a sense responsible for this essay (while to be sure all its shortcomings are my 

responsibility and she must not be blamed for my excesses); and to Dimitri Gutas, who cajoled 

me into trying to write about philosophy and literature, and for whose scholarship I have the 

profoundest admiration. Geert Jan van Gelder read a shortened version of this article and my 

work has benefited once again from his wit and erudition. Why I agree with his perceptive 

remark that my translations of Abū Nuwās’s poetry are tendentious, and why I do not think that 

this is quite tantamount to the criticism which I take him to mean it to be, will have to await 

consideration on a subsequent occasion. Professor Dr E. Wagner, Philip Kennedy and Michael 

Cooperson were kind enough to read versions of this article on my behalf, and my audiences at 

Yale (in April 2008) and at the Cambridge meeting of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies were models 

of forbearance. 

1 John Hollander, “Introduction,” in: Poetics of Influence: Harold Bloom, New and Selected 

Criticism, ed. John Hollander, New Haven: Schwab, 1988, p. xlv. 

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/187783710X536987

76 J. E. Montgomery / Oriens 39 (2011) 75-164 

For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research 

burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to 

another. 

J.R.R. Tolkien 2 

This lecture is one of a series of thought-experiments which I have been conducting 

over the last few years on various aspects of classical Arabic Islam. 

They are exercises in toying with the textual tradition conceived as evidence; 

they are attempts to interrogate the categories and epistemologies which 

underpin our use of this tradition as evidence; and they seek to construct 

unwonted and uncustomary narratives based on texts, the evidentiary status of 

which has usually been differently (mis)read or perhaps even dismissed, marginalised 

or neglected. As such these experiments involve a variable element of 

risk for they generally require a familiarity with a number of textual and intellectual 

traditions which in and of themselves have been sanctified as the exclusive 

(and discrete) preserve of the specialist, as restricted demesnes into which 

none but the initiate may venture with impunity. And it is but rarely that I 

might be considered as one of those initiated therein. The risk of dilettantism 

is also clear and present in such exercises, as too are my Scylla and Charybdis: 

the distraction of the novel and the disorientation of the familiar. 

All this is true of the present experiment, and perhaps to a greater degree 

than my previous experiments, for I will present not only a highly unusual — 

perhaps even perversely unusual — story but also a number of suggestions 

which are most distinctly not the product of developed investigation, but 

which are speculative ventures into preserves, the perimeters of which I have 

formed a vague outline but the interior of which remains terra incognita. My 

ambition is, like Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī, to emulate “our Imam 

Suqrāṭ” — sadly, neither in my philosophical acumen nor asceticism, but as a 

gadfly, aspiring to the maieutic craft, seeking to remain zetetic, while exhorting 

the reader to go figure Abū Nuwās from his Dīwān. 

Central to the current experiment are several scenes of inquiry: that the 

study of the classical Arabic textual heritage continues to be dominated by 

obsessions with biography and the reconstruction of the actual intentions of 

the author (intentionalism), to the detriment of an appreciation of its occasionality; 

that the classical Arabic textual tradition itself approaches poems 

primarily as cut loose from the moorings of their occasion; that ʿAbbasid 

poetry is rarely taken seriously as a legitimate discourse for the expression of 

theological, philosophical or even religious or political ideas (and so is consequently 

marginalised in favour of heresiographical or annalistic materials); 

2 J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 

(1936): 245-295, reprinted in: Beowulf, A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney, ed. Daniel 

O’Donoghue, New York and London: Norton, 2002, pp. 102-130 (p. 106).

J. E. Montgomery / Oriens 39 (2011) 75-164 77 

that in order to read a text ironically (or metaphorically or parodically, by 

which I mean humorously in this instance) one must first (I would say, simultaneously) 

entertain an unironical reading, which reading is often overlooked 

or discarded by the reader in favour of her preferred irony. 3 

This article, then, will consider three principal matters: 1) The Deracination 

of Poetry, a programmatic attempt to consider the various entextualisations of 

poetry as recontextualisations which often occlude its occasionalism, in which 

I promote a strategy (“eavesdropping”) for endeavouring to respond to this 

phenomenon; 2) Abū Nuwās and the Transgressive Paradox, a case study 

which seeks to recreate an occasion for a deracinated wine song; 3) The Confessions 

of a Justified Sinner, in which I attempt a contribution to the study of 

the articulations of early ʿAbbasid Islam based on the occasion recreated in the 

second section. In addition, I have taken the opportunity to use three prose 

works in English (Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Wodehouse’s Cocktail Time 

and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner) to help me try to reflect upon these 

matters. 

1. The Deracination of Poetry 

Eminent Victorians 

At the very core of my current experiment lies my reaction to the following 

celebrated paradox coined by Lytton Strachey in his subversive biographies 

published in 1918 as Eminent Victorians: 

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about 

it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian — ignorance, which simplifies 

and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by 

the highest art. 4 

Strachey thus defiantly sets his biographical project in opposition to the dreary 

and piously musty two to three volume tomes, written, with the “air of slow, 

funereal barbarism,” to immortalise Victorian celebrity, and crammed with 

“ill-digested masses of material” (p. 7). Strachey replaces the fetishism of 

Mr Gradgrind from Dickens’s Hard Times (a caricature of the Victorian obsession 

with facts), with the psychologism of Freud (Strachey’s brother James was 

3 I have tried to think about this tendency in my “Al-Jāḥiẓ on Jest and Earnest,” in: Humor in 

der arabischen Welt, ed. Georges Tamer, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 209-239. 

4 Ed. John Sutherland, Oxford; World’s Classics, 2003, p. 6.


Freud’s translator into English). 5 However pococurantish Strachey’s stance 

may strike us, when it comes to the Victorian biographical tradition, it strikes 

me as uncommonly prescient, when applied to the study of the ʿAbbasids, or 

of Classical Arabic Islam generally, for here we are constrained by our ignorance 

to offer simplified and clarifying histories. 

Yet like Strachey, I am repeatedly impressed by the historical unknowability 

of the ʿAbbasids. Therefore, with this unknowability as first principle, I wish 

to adopt Strachey’s method, for: 

It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the 

past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler 

strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the 

flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure 

recesses, hitherto undivined, he will row out over that great ocean of material, and 

lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light 

of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with 

a careful curiosity. 

The “great ocean of material” into which I intend to lower my “little bucket” 

is the Classical Arabic poetic tradition, in particular one type of poem by one 

of its greatest practitioners, al-Ḥasan b. Hāniʾ Abū Nuwās (d. ca 198/813). As 

with Strachey’s Victorians, scholars before me “have poured forth and accumulated 

so vast a quantity of information” that Abū Nuwās the man seems 

almost like a familiar companion. And the familiarity of his persona, constructed 

soon after his death, and probably during his life, and canonised in 

the innocuously titled Akhbār Abī Nuwās, the Accounts of Abū Nuwās, by his 

protégé ( ghulām) Abū Hiffān (d. 255/869) 6 enables us to read his poetry with 

a refreshing spontaneity (and at times perhaps an affection) which I think we 

rarely encounter with other Arabic poets. 

5 See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume 1: Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2003, pp. 1-26 (“Introduction: Seeing Things their Way,” and “The 

Practice of History and the Cult of the Fact,” a refutation of the historical method of Geoffrey 

Elton). Compare Skinner’s remarks on pages 16-17, refuting Elton’s principle of “total acquaintance,” 

with Strachey’s Introduction. 

6 Ed. ʿAbd al-Sattār Aḥmad Farrāj, Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1953. Al-Mutanabbī is the poet in 

whom, perhaps more than most, we can discern the ambition to construct a persona: see Wenchin 

Ouyang’s excellent reading of al-Ḥāṭimī’s evisceration of al-Mutanabbī’s poetic persona in 

his al-Risāla al-Mūḍiḥa: “Literature as Performance: The Theatre of al-Hatimi’s al-Risala al- 

Mudiha,” in: Classer les recits: theories et pratiques, ed. Aboubakr Chraïbi, Paris: L’Harmattan, 

2007, pp. 115-145. Her article is also an incisive exposure of the hegemony of the biographical 

fallacy in Islamic Studies. The antonymical gesture of the biographical fallacy in the study of 

classical Arabic poetry is the assumption that the sole obsession of this poetry is language and the 

dictates of its tradition (“conventions,” “topoi”) as enmeshed in language.


Persona can become biography and biography can subsequently become 

full-blown intentionalism, the strategy of interpreting a poet’s oeuvre as generated 

in accordance with his actual intentions, which intentions in turn are 

reconstructed from the psychology (loosely understood) of the biographical 

personality. And so the circle is complete. 7 

However, to abandon some form of intentionalism in our readings of 

ʿAbbasid poetry would be effectively to presume, for example, that a poet 

composing as panegyrist did not intend his poem to be a panegyric, though 

the case of al-Mutanabbī’s vituperations cast as panegyrics for the Ikhshidid 

ruler Abū l-Misk Kāfūr (d. 357/968) suggests that we should not be overly 

simplistic in whichever stripe of intentionalism we adopt: and I have a marked 

preference for a soft version of what Vivienne Brown refers to as formal intentionalism, 

i.e. one which is tantamount to Eco’s intentio operis. 8 After all, even 

the observation made by some scholars that badīʿ poetry mirrored the duplicity 

of courtly life and “provided the courtier with a medium for indirect didactic 

and ethical injunctions to his superiors” does not dispense with a call 

for intentionalism, for the intentions are still expressed, however obliquely, 

through badīʿ. 9 As Charles Ives once remarked: 

Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see . . . Why it should 

be always present, I can’t see. 10 

7 Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane (RKO Radio Pictures, 1941) is a penetrating exploration 

of this phenomenon, as the review by Jorge Luis Borges suggests: The Total Library. Non-Fiction, 

1922-1986, ed. Eliot Weinberger, London: Penguin, 1999, pp. 258-259 (“An Overwhelming 

Film”). 

8 See Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1992, Chapters 2 and 3, esp. pp. 64-66; Vivienne Brown, “Historical 

Interpretation, Intentionalism and Philosophy of Mind,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 

(2007): 25-62 (an excellent analysis of intentionalism; Brown speaks of how “some interpreters 

might still want to say, however, that Aristotle meant to say this or Adam Smith intended that, 

but this would be recognised for what it is, a façon de parler with no implied substantive claim to 

having recovered the actual intentions of a past writing subject” [p. 61]); Peter Bondanella, 

Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction and Popular Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1997, pp. 126-153. See Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval 

Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls, London: Routledge Curzon, 2003, p. xii. 

9 Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1987, pp. 18-20 (especially note 40) and 38-39; Beatrice Gruendler, Medieval Arabic Praise 

Poetry. Ibn al-Rūmī and the Patron’s Redemption, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, p.17. See 

further note 87 below. 

10 Quoted by Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, London: Fourth 

Estate, 2007, p. 142.


I would therefore want to retain a version of intentionalism, for I think it happens 

to account quite nicely for many of the situations and practices of early 

ʿAbbasid poets, and to reconsider ‘biography,’ though not as the vita of a poet 

or as his persona, and to reject it when it is not an exploration of the historicity 

(or rather: the occasionality) of poetry — in other words, of how early 

ʿAbbasid poems, and in this instance a wine song of Abū Nuwās, can be sited 

in social, intellectual, and cultural occasions. 

Dīwān and Mukhtāra 

Let me state the obvious. Our encounters with a phenomenon, and the preconceptions 

and presumptions which we entertain concerning that phenomenon, 

will determine not only how we receive and respond to the phenomenon 

but will also, to a predominant extent, dictate how we continue to respond to 

it in the aftermath of the preliminary encounter. To be more specific, let us 

think about the ways in which many of us may encounter a classical Arabic 

poem. 11 Classical poems as texts come in three basic formats: 12 

1. As part of a dīwān, a collection of the poet’s extant compositions, be it an 

edition of (a) a collection made by a second-eighth or third-ninth century 

scholar; or (b) a recension with commentary of a later scholar of a collection 

of a predecessor: al-Shantamarī’s (d. 476/1083) recension of al-Aṣmaʿī’s 

(d. 213/828?) collection of the six dīwāns of pre-Islamic poets, for example; 

or (c) a compilation by a modern scholar of poems and verses by a poet 

for whom a classical dīwān has either not survived or was never compiled 

in the first instance. After the first half of the eleventh century, dīwāns 

became the work of the poet himself (al-Mutanabbī [d. 354/965] is an 

early exception); prior to that many were authorised compilations carried 

out by the poet’s rāwī, transmitter, with the poet’s blessing and occasionally 

the poet’s involvement (as in the case of Abū Firās [d. 357/968]); many 

11 I do not consider what happens when a reader has her first encounter with a classical Arabic 

poem in the form of a translation. 

12 This overview, which takes as its starting point the question of how the collectors position 

themselves with regard to their presentations of the poems and how they present the poems, differs 

from other surveys, which concentrate on what kinds of poems the collections contain (e.g., 

poems from one tribe) and on the schemes whereby these poems are organised (e.g., geographically, 

as in al-Thaʿālibī’s Yatīmat al-Dahr, or by poetic form or theme): Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des 

arabischen Schrifttums, II, Brill: Leiden, 1975, pp. 33-102; Andras Hamori, “Mukhtārāt,” EI 2 , 

VII, pp. 526-528; Hilary Kilpatrick, “Anthologies, Medieval,” The Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 

ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, I, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 94-96; Wolfhart 

Heinrichs, “Poetik, Rhetorik, Literaturkritik, Metrik und Reimlehre,” in: Grundriß der arabischen 

Philologie, Band II: Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Helmut Gätje, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1987, 

pp. 177-207 (pp. 177-190).


were the product of intellectual and artistic piety, endeavours to salvage the 

poet’s works for posterity. Clearly those collections authorised or effected 

by the poet represent (even remotely) a projection (I would prefer a narrative) 

of identity which the poet was content to endorse: al-Mutanabbī 

again springs to mind; the salvage dīwāns present posterity with that narrative 

of the poet which his disciples and supporters may have felt was most 

coherent and perhaps best corresponded with the poet as they knew him 

(or as he wanted them to know him) in life. Central to all three species of 

compilation is the presence of what I would call a poetic persona, rather 

than what the pre-modern compilers may have viewed as a presentation of 

the poet as person (assuming such a thing to be possible). 13 Dīwāns can be 

organized according to two principles: alphabetically by qāfiya, rhymeconsonant; 

and by aghrāḍ, by the genre to which any given poem may be 

deemed to belong: zuhd (asceticism), madḥ (panegyric), hijāʾ (vituperation), 

for example. The earliest such example extant is probably the dīwān 

of Abū Nuwās. 14 

2. As part of a mukhtāra, an anthology, a scholar’s selection of poems from 

poets belonging to a particular tribe (of which only the dīwān of the 

Hudhalī poets has survived, in the recension of al-Sukkarī [d. between 275 

and 290/888 and 903]), or a particular epoch (such as the anthologies of 

pre- and early Islamic poets which bear the names of al-Mufaḍḍal [d. ca 

13 See Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, “Abū Nuwās and Ghazal as a Genre,” in: Ghazal as World 

Literature, 1: Transformations of a Literary Genre, ed. Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, 

Beirut-Würzburg: Orient-Institut, 2005, p. 88, note 5, who reminds us that “for the collectors 

of the dīwān, the poems were, on the contrary, directly related to reality and to Abū Nuwās’ own 

feelings,” noting how Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī lists Abū Nuwās’s female conquests, as Leporello does 

for Don Giovanni. As “fictional worlds are parasites of the real world” (Umberto Eco, Six Walks 

in the Fictional Woods, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 83), and as fictional 

worlds express many levels of reality (Italo Calvino, “Levels of Reality in Literature,” in: 

Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1986, pp. 101-121), 

the differences between the two are often negligible and less transparent than we would perhaps 

like as scholars. See further Ewald Wagner, “Die Aḫbār Abī Nuwās in den Dīwānen,” in: Storytelling 

in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature, ed. Stefan Leder, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 

1998, pp. 265-281. 

14 On this subject generally, see Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam, 

London: Routledge, 2006; Gregor Schoeler (in collaboration with Shawkat M. Toorawa), The 

Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Read, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 

2009, pp. 114-115; on arrangement by aghrāḍ, see Gregor Schoeler, “Die Einteilung der Dichtung 

bei den Arabern,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 123 (1973): 9-55. 

Hämeen-Anttila, Abū Nuwās and Ghazal, pp. 90-94, entertains the possibility that “Abū Nuwās 

may . . . have himself compiled his poems even more systematically than has been presumed” 

(p. 94). Sezgin, Geschichte, p. 36, notes that the early term for referring to collections of individual 

poets from pre- and early Islam is either shiʿr or khabar, not dīwān, i.e. as “feeling” or 

“report” and not as “bureau”.


163/780] and al-Aṣmaʿī) or both; 15 or an anthology of what are esteemed 

as the best, most cherished, products of a particular epoch, the pre-eminent 

(and possibly the earliest) among which is the Muʿallaqāt, represented as an 

anonymous selection of a varying number of poems which were prizewinning 

compositions as adjudicated by their contemporary, pre-Islamic, 

audiences. As these anthologies seem originally to have been school texts 

and to have formed part of lecture courses delivered by their eponyms, 

their principles of organization are not always evident and it is not always 

clear whether the collection is discrete or is itself a compendium of other 

versions. Especial mention must be made of the anthology compiled by the 

ʿAbbasid poet Abū Tammām (d. ca 232/845) which he entitled al-Ḥ amāsa, 

Valour, an anthology which is organized along principles of estimation 

discernible in other (prose) compendia from the period. 16 Every anthology 

is, naturally, an act of selection, and the poets and their works are selected 

by the anthologist as representative, be it of tribal identity, epoch or some 

other consideration. 

3. As prosimetra, those hybrid polymetric compositions which juxtapose 

prose and poetry. 17 These works take a variety of forms: the following brief 

survey is not exhaustive. In al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, poetry is 

sometimes quoted as “appropriate for transmitting and memorizing,” with 

a manifest didactic purpose. 18 The Ayyām al-ʿArab, the Battle-days of the 

15 Ewald Wagner, Grundzüge der klassischen arabischen Dichtung, I, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche 

Buchgesellschaft, 1987, pp. 12-15; Schoeler and Toorawa, The Genesis, pp. 61, 86 and 

114-115. 

16 Influential European examples are Theodor Nöldeke, Delectus veterum carminum arabicorum, 

Berlin: Reuther, 1890, the work through which many students in the UK were first exposed 

to early Arabic poetry during the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century (it formed 

part of the curriculum at SOAS and Cambridge, for example); or Malcolm Lyons, Classical 

Arabic Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, the primer in which I first 

encountered classical poetry; or Arthur Arberry, Arabic Poetry. A Primer for Students, Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1965, and Al-Mutanabbī, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1967, to which I progressed, having completed Lyons’s Primer. 

17 Wolfhart Heinrichs, “Prosimetrical Genres in Classical Arabic Literature,” in: Prosimetrum: 

Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, ed. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl, 

Brewer: Woodbridge, 1997, pp. 249-275; Geert Jan van Gelder, “Poetry in Historiography: 

Some Observations,” in: Problems in Arabic Literature, ed. Miklós Maróth, Piliscsaba: Avicenna 

Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2004, pp. 1-14. Arabists working on prosimetra would 

benefit from recent work done on the Libro de Buen Amor: see A Companion to the Libro de Buen 

Amor, ed. Louise M. Haywood and Louise O. Vasvári, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004. 

I am grateful to my friend and colleague Dr Louise Haywood of Trinity Hall for the many 

stimulating discussions we have had on the Libro and on many of the issues which I try to 

address in this article. 

18 See J.E. Montgomery, “Speech and Nature: al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 2.175- 

207, Parts 1-4,” Middle Eastern Literatures 11/2 (2008): 169-191; Middle Eastern Literatures 12/1


Arabs, accounts of pre- and early Islamic tribal wars, for example, were 

probably first collected by the early authorities Abū ʿUbayda (d. 209/825) 

and Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 204/819 or 206/821) and are conspicuous for their 

use of excerpted poetry as a historical source and as a corroborative commentary 

on events. Heinrichs notes that 

the poetry cannot really be understood without the prose, and the prose is 

not considered trustworthy and true without the poetry to corroborate it. 19 

The Kitāb al-shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ, the Treatise on Poetry and Poets, by Ibn 

Qutayba (d. 276/889), sets selections of poems, usually though not always 

approved of, by a given poet within a potted biography of that poet. The 

most famous of such treatises is the Kitāb al-Aghānī (the Great Book of 

Songs) of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967), whose biographies are 

often extensive and constitute the starting-point for any subsequent biography, 

appreciation or treatment of the poets whom his treatise contains. 20 

Al-Iṣfahānī rarely quotes poems in their most complete form but uses 

choice selections of individual verses. In the case of Abū Nuwās we have 

two biographies which have survived: the Akhbār Abī Nuwās of Abū 

Hiffān and that of Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311). 21 There are some points 

which we can note: prosimetrical collections obey their own logic and 

respond severally to the conerns of the compiler and his audience; 22 in 

them, the correspondence of poem to event is presumed to be close, the 

latter often being accessed through the former — that is poetry is used as a 

shāhid, a witness or locus probans, i.e. as a corroborative (often historical) 

source; the correspondence of poem to biography is presumed to be closer 

(2009): 1-25; Middle Eastern Literatures 12/2 (2009): 107-125; Middle Eastern Literatures 12/3 

(2009): 213-232. 

19 Heinrichs, Prosimetrum, p. 260; see the discussion of one such yawm in J.E. Montgomery, 

The Vagaries of the Qaṣīda, Cambridge: Gibb Trust, 1997, pp. 10-25. 

20 Hilary Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs. Compilation and the Author’s Craft in 

Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 

21 Abū Hiffān, Akhbār Abī Nuwās, ed. ʿAbd al-Sattār Farrāj, Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1953; Ibn 

Manẓūr, Akhbār Abī Nuwās, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Rasūl Ibrāhīm and ʿAbbās al-Shirbīnī, I, 

Cairo: Maktabat al-Iʿtimād, 1924. I have not been able to consult the second part edited by 

Shukrī Maḥmūd Aḥmad, Baghdad, 1952. 

22 See the study of al-ʿAskarī’s Kitāb al-Maʿānī by Beatrice Gruendler, “Motif vs. Genre: Reflections 

on the Dīwān al-Maʿānī of Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī,” in: Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World 

Literature, 1, pp. 57-86; Heinrichs, Prosimetrum, pp. 262-270 (for a fascinating taxonomy and 

discussion of the poetry contained in al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt); Wenchin Ouyang, Literary Criticism 

in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 

Press, 1997 (on the cultural dialectics informing and propelling critical responses to poetry).


still; thus, as with dīwāns, collections, and mukhtārāt, anthologies, a central 

feature of the prosimetrum is the biographical fidelity to a poetic persona. 

We are, I think, prone to be blind to this interference, and unconscious of this 

activity, preferring instead to imagine that we have unmediated access to a 

poem. Indeed, in many instances, and this is particularly acute with the dīwān 

and the mukhtāra, the poem and not the poet is our sole focus of interest. 

Both formats present us with the poem as cut loose from other considerations, 

by deracinating it from its occasion. 23 The third type of format, the prosimetrum, 

constrains us in the opposite direction: we can only gain access to the 

poetry through the biography of the poet or the author’s settings of the akhbār 

as they are presented to us. 24 It consequently becomes almost impossible to 

read the poetry against this context, i.e. in spite of the biographer’s representations, 

and it is comfortable to be seduced into acquiescence with the biographer’s 

vita or the compiler’s (sometimes dramaturgical) contextualisation. 

Even the apotheosis of deracination through pseudonymity and anonymity is 

not at all straightforward in the classical Arabic tradition, as van Gelder and 

Kilito have recently pointed out. 25 

Therefore the entextualisation of classical Arabic poetry, in view of the formats 

in which we encounter them, presents us with two entwined interpretive 

responses: 

1. To the poem as a sequence in a collection, and thus as a paradoxically isolated 

artefact, an object of scrutiny, which in a real sense anticipates the 

New Criticism and Barthes’s famous dictum, “the death of the author,” 

despite being attributed and so tied to the poet who is identified as its 

author in the collection; 26 

23 I maintain deracination to be true even of Dīwān compendia such as that of Ḥamza 

al-Iṣfahānī’s collection of Abū Nuwās’s works which is remarkable both for the editorial interventions 

of its editor and the persona of the poet who looms large in many of these interventions. 

24 Beatrice Gruendler, “Verse and Taxes: The Function of Poetry in Selected Literary Akhbār 

of the Third/Ninth Century,” in: On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, ed. 

P.F. Kennedy, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005, pp. 85-124, has demonstrated that the akhbār 

narratives which feature the use of poetry are “literature, not historical record” (p. 89). Heinrichs, 

Prosimetrum, p. 271 notes of the function of the tamaththul (“quoting a poetic parallel”) 

that “the poetry is . . . in a way parallel to the narrative, not within the narrative”. 

25 Geert Jan van Gelder, “The Anatomy of Anonymity. The Poet Anon. and his Reception in 

Classical Arabic Literature,” in: Reflections on Reflections: Near Eastern Writers Reading Literature, 

Dedicated to Renate Jacobi, ed. Angelika Neuwirth and Andreas Christian Islebe, Wiesbaden: 

Reichert, 2006, pp. 17-34; Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and his Doubles. Essays on Classical 

Arabic Culture, trans. M. Cooperson, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001, pp. 1-33. 

26 Mohammed Arkoun, “Introduction: An Assessment of and Perspectives on the Study of the 

Qurʾān,” in: The Qurʾan. Style and Contents, ed. Andrew Rippin, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum,


2. To the poem as expression of the poet’s intentions, as his response to the 

events of his life. 

And this is how the study of Arabic poetry in the late twentieth century Western 

academy has by and large been content to articulate its critical responses: 

(1) as a showcase of rhetoric; and (2) as straightforward expressionism or 

intentionalism. There are, of course, some conspicuous exceptions to this 

characterization. 27 

Literary History and The Great Chain of Being 

There is one further feature of the twentieth century study of classical Arabic 

poetry which I must mention and which is equally at home with either of 

these scholarly preoccupations: the creation of literary histories. 

Literary histories present us with either a sequence of great and canonical 

poets or with the archaeology and evolution of a specific genre. In the case 

of the early ʿAbbasid poets and Abū Nuwās in particular, literary historical 

2001, pp. 297-332, has argued that al-Suyūṭī’s “Itqān provides an abundance of material for 

anyone who wishes to show how classical Islamic thought, as systematized by the guardians of 

orthodoxy, used materials, procedures, and an historiographical corpus in order to dehistoricize 

both the time of the revelation and the collection of the muṣḥaf ” (p. 311) (my emphasis). Barthes’s 

article originally appeared in the New York avant-garde journal Aspen 5-6 (1967). Annette 

Lavers remarks, in her discussion of S/Z, that while the work is “meant to demonstrate the irrecoverability 

of author from text,” Barthes’s “own voice is readily heard, if only when we recognize 

aspects and opinions also found in other works by him”: “Roland Barthes,” in: The Cambridge 

History of Literary Criticism: Volume VIII, From Formalism to Poststructuralism, ed. Raman Selden, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 131-165 (p. 161). In other words, the act of 

writing creates a fact of authorship which perpetuates an identity of the author to which she is 

liable, despite her best efforts, to be reduced. See Jonathan Culler, Barthes. A Very Short Introduction, 

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 and Vivienne Brown’s discussion of the theories of 

Alexander Nehamas: Historical Interpretation, pp. 38-40. Pseudonymous, apocryphal or anonymous 

writing would seem to be the only way to break the link, for those who as the writers of 

more than one work wish not to be identified as the writer of a given book: see Kilito, The 

Author, p. 113, note 2 — providing the author avoids detection, of course. For two fine studies 

of individual poems by Abū Nuwās, which showcase the insights of New Criticism, see Philip F. 

Kennedy, “Perspectives of a Ḫ amrīya — Abū Nuwās’ Yā Ṣāḥir al-Ṭarf,” in: Festschrift Ewald 

Wagner zum 65. Geburtstag. Band 2: Studien zur arabischen Dichtung, ed. Wolfhart Heinrichs 

and Gregor Schoeler, Beirut: Steiner, 1994, pp. 258-276; Gregor Schoeler, “Ein Weingedicht des 

arabischen Dichters Abū Nuwās (ca 757-815 N. Chr.),” Asiatische Studien 50 (1996): 733-759. 

27 The works of Julia Bray, especially “Third and Fourth Century Bleeding Poetry,” Arabic and 

Middle Eastern Literatures 2 (1999): 75-92 and “Al-Muʿtaṣim’s ‘Bridge of Toil’ and Abū Tammām’s 

Amorium Qaṣīda,” in: Studies in Islamic and Middle Eastern Texts and Traditions in Memory of 

Norman Calder, ed. G.R. Hawting, J.A. Mojaddedi and A. Samely, Oxford: Journal of Semitic 

Studies Supplements, 2000, pp. 31-73, and Beatrice Gruendler (especially her Medieval Arabic 

Praise Poetry) spring to mind.


interest has concentrated on how a variety of monothematic poetical genres 

appears to have been generated out of the polythematic Qaṣīda. 28 

Literary history, when conducted in this manner, is conspecific with the 

kind of history of ideas pioneered by Arthur Lovejoy in his The Great Chain of 

Being, 29 according to which a diachronically schematized series of unit ideas is 

studied from the vantage point of an ideal articulation of any given doctrine 

hypostasized as its fullest expression. This conduct of history is liable to what 

Quentin Skinner has identified as the “mythology of prolepsis,” in which the 

emergence of anticipations of the ideal are charted, individual authors are 

congratulated for what Skinner calls their “clairvoyance,” and heated “debates 

proliferate as to whether a given ‘unit idea’ may be said to have ‘really emerged’ 

at a given time, and whether it is ‘really there’ in the work of some given 

writer.” 30 

What is lost in the asymmetry of observer and observed occasioned by this 

process is a real awareness of the historicity of the poem or composition, and 

poetry, thus, is permitted to intersect but tangentially with its histories. Therefore 

we find crude explanations for the appearance of the early ghazal such as, 

say, the creation of a leisured class in Medina or the alienation engendered by 

the resettlement of the Arab tribes in military cantonments outwith the Arabian 

peninsula, as a result of the Futūḥ, the Conquests. 31 But would we be 

inclined to read ahistorically poems which insist on their occasion, such as, for 

example, Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode, Upon Cromwell’s Return from 

Ireland” (June-July, 1650) (which is not the same as denying that it could be 

read, and quite profitably too, ahistorically)? 32 Why, then, should we want to 

read ahistorically Abū Tammām’s mammoth qaṣīda on al-Muʿtaṣim’s conquest 

28 In many cases, I suspect what is really at issue is the question of the creativeness of Islamic 

civilisation, but that is another story for another occasion and I will simply refer to my recent study 

“Islamic Crosspollinations” in: Islamic Crosspollinations, pp. 148-193 (especially pp. 150-162). 

29 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964 (1936). 

30 Skinner, Visions of Politics, p. 73 and p. 63, respectively. 

31 See, e.g., Bauer and Neuwirth, “Introduction,” in: Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World 

Literature, 1, p. 12: “the societal upheavals during the era of the conquests, as integration into 

tribal structures was loosened, created the preconditions for the emergence of individual love 

poems.” See further p. 24. I am unable to understand why, for example, a change in mentality is 

a sine qua non for the shift from pre-Islamic Nasīb to Umayyad Ghazal whereas the emergence 

of Ghazal poems for boys (mudhakkarāt) is accounted for by the observation that “Abū Nuwās 

merely picked up a theme that ‘was in the air’ ” (p. 24). 

32 That the title of the poem provides its own occasion and that the poem can be quite accurately 

dated (from an internal reference) have led some scholars to ponder its essential ambiguity: 

L.D. Lerner, “An Horation Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” Interpretations: Essays 

on Twelve English Poems, ed. John Wain, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955, p. 59-74. 

His study considers the appropriateness of “double-edged” and “poised” readings of the poem: 

“the former offers two alternative readings, the latter conveys a dual attitude at the same time, in 

which the praise would not be possible without the disparagement, and vice-versa” (p. 69).


of Amorium? Anyone who has read Julia Bray’s wonderful article “Al-Muʿtaṣim’s 

‘Bridge of Toil’ and Abū Tammām’s Amorium Qaṣīda” will be familiar with 

the insights to be derived from her realisation that “poetry registers responses 

to ephemeral political factors that retrospective prose accounts regularize or 

omit.” 33 The fact that attentive and perceptive critics have attempted to read 

this qaṣīda despite its occasion is worth pondering. 

The Aprioricity of Prose? 

Indeed, there is a further assumption aiding and abetting the deracination of 

classical Arabic poetry which must be considered, one which is exogenous to 

the tradition. This is informed by certain widely held assumptions of what 

poetry is and how it differs from prose by its special nature. I will refer to this 

as the aprioricity of prose, according to which prose is thought, a priori, to 

precede poetry, because poetry is a form of expression which is obligated to 

conform to numerous ‘artificial’ rules as a special form of expression, unlike 

prose which, contrary to poetry, is manifestly natural, relatively untrammelled 

by rules, less challenging to read and write, and thus simpler. This set of 

assumptions, very much the product of our education, encourages us to imagine 

that it must also be valid for other societies, and across time. 34 

That poetry is not a priori posterior to prose should not require any proof. 

To be sure, according to some scholars of societies and cultures in which writing 

does not dominate the conventions of expression, it can often be difficult 

to distinguish between poetry and prose. The aprioricity of prose, however, 

sets poetry at an even greater remove from history. Prose is unquestioningly 

thought by many of us to be the most natural and most fitting vehicle for the 

expression of history or philosophy or theology: it is, for example, the handmaid 

of historiography, the medium which assures it veracity. And correspondingly, 

poetry somehow becomes inappropriate as a medium for history, 

for philosophising or theologising, despite, for example, the examples of the 

pre-Socratics, of Lucretius’s Epicurean epic De rerum natura or John Milton’s 

Protestant masterpiece, Paradise Lost. 

Cocktail Time 

In P.G. Wodehouse’s farce, Cocktail Time (1958), the irascible Q’C Sir Raymond 

(“Beefy”) Bastable, incensed at the indigence and lax morals of modern youth, 

under a pseudonym, pens Cocktail Time, an excoriating attack on modern 

33 Al-Muʿtaṣim’s “Bridge of Toil,” p. 72. 

34 See Donoghue, “Old English Language and Poetics,” in: Beowulf, p. xv.


society, an act of outrage at having his top-hat knocked off his head by a walnut 

fired from a catapult. Upon publication, the novel is heralded and fêted as 

a risqué celebration of the very scandalous morality Beefy sets out to condemn. 

The ensuing comedy of errors centres on Beefy’s attempts to (re)claim his 

authorship of the work. Having thus wittily anticipated Barthes’s dictum, 

Wodehouse’s narrator also facetiously highlights the interpretative conundrum 

of intentionalism: 

The question of how authors come to write their books is generally one not easily 

answered. Milton, for instance, asked how he got the idea for Paradise Lost would 

probably have replied with a vague “Oh, I don’t know, you know. These things 

sort of pop into one’s head, don’t you know,” leaving the researcher very much 

where he was before (p. 14). 

He even finds time to have a joke at the expense of canon-formation: 

Narrowing his gaze, Lord Ickenham released the guided missile, little knowing, as 

it sped straight and true to its mark, that he was about to enrich English literature 

(p. 14). 

I have chosen Cocktail Time not only because I love Wodehouse’s wondrous 

style and his consummate ability to control the intricacies of the most intricate 

of plots, nor because of the appositeness of his humorous reflections on the art 

of interpretation, but because I am often struck, when I read much of the 

scholarship devoted to ʿAbbasid poetry, of the similarities between its projection 

of a hedonistic and pleasure-seeking society and the picture of the English 

aristocracy drawn by Wodehouse, an aristocracy whose sole concerns are the 

perfect cocktail, the right tie to wear, the mot juste, falling in and out of love, 

and in Wodehouse’s own words, “ignoring real life altogether.” And surely, if 

ever a Arab character might match one of Wodehouse’s incorrigible hedonists, 

it would be the Abū Nuwās of the khamriyyāt and the Akhbār, and if ever an 

Islamic social setting might rival the Drones Club, it would be his rakish nocturnal 

adventures in the taverns of Basra. 

The Biography of Personality 

I propose, therefore, to attempt to subvert the received persona of Abū Nuwās, 

not to discern the empirical ‘poet’ under the persona (this would be a naïve 

though wonderful thing to expect to be able to achieve) but, by better understanding 

the production of the persona and its influence on subsequent readings 

of the poetry, to investigate the asymmetries between the versions of the 

poet’s persona bequeathed to us by his posterity and the poems anterior to the 

hegemony of this tradition.


Abū Nuwās’s poetic persona exists in two principal versions, neither of 

which is mutually exclusive nor necessarily contradictory, but both of which 

elect to emphasize different aspects of his persona. Let me begin with the 

biography of Abū Nuwās as it predominates in the Western and the modern 

Arabic scholarly tradition. 

This biography is, principally and fundamentally, indebted to the representations 

of the poet’s persona which also gave rise to the Abū Nuwās of the 

Alf layla tradition: Abū Nuwās as the palace poet-cum-jester and wayward 

boon companion of Hārūn al-Rashīd. 

It has been meticulously researched and established by Ewald Wagner 35 and 

Philip Kennedy, and has been perceptively analysed by Malcolm Lyons (to 

choose but three examples). Central to this biography are apolausis and austerity: 

i.e., pederasty, libertinage, wine and repentance, or the genres of ghazal, 

mujūn, khamriyya and zuhdiyya. Each scholar is, of course, mindful of the 

excesses of psychologism, is brilliantly sensitive to the dictates and prerequisites 

of genre and convention, but is in the end, as we all are, unable to resist 

the Svengali-like magnetism of the Nuwasian persona. Here are two quotes 

from Kennedy: 

Abu Nuwas could refashion the world in poetry, and the world he created and 

inhabited was both real and imaginary. The medieval compilers of his life stories 

too created a largely imaginary world which we cannot but inhabit a part of it 

when we reconstruct his life. 

When Abu Nuwas was living that pleasure-seeking life for which he is famous and 

which he wrote up in his euphoric and often decadent lyric poems, he saw the 

glass of life half full. The focus simply shifted when, prompted by a religious sensibility 

or the demands of being a complete poet, the glass of life was seen as half 

empty, the pleasures of life delusional, and the poetry became the reminder to the 

living that they are mortal. 36 

I have myself attempted a version of Abū Nuwās’s persona and biography in 

an article entitled Abū Nuwās the Alcoholic, in which I toyed with the idea that 

Abū Nuwās’s poems of wine and asceticism were the immediate products of 

the alcoholic condition, in which euphoria and dysphoria alternate, in an illness 

dominated by need, guilt and anxiety. 37 

35 Ewald Wagner, Abū Nuwās. Eine Studie zur arabischen Literatur der frühen ʿAbbāsidenzeit, 

Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965. 

36 Philip F. Kennedy, Abu Nuwas. A Genius of Poetry, Oxford: Oneworld, 2005, pp. 28 and 

134, respectively. 

37 J.E. Montgomery, “Abū Nuwās the Alcoholic,” in: Philosophy and Arts in the Islamic World: 

Proceedings of the 18th Congress of the UEAI, ed. U. Vermeulen and D. de Smet, Leuven: Peeters, 

1998, pp. 15-26.


In 1973, Andras Hamori argued that we should consider Abū Nuwās 

“a ritual clown.” In a fascinating, erudite and seminal piece, he extrapolated 

from his reading of an anthropological study of the “sacred clowns” of the 

“Pueblo and the Mayo-Yaqui Indians” of whom it had been observed that they 

“as a rule act contrary to the norm and are called Fariseos and the like, but 

during Lent serve as guardians of the image of Christ and his special servitors” 

(p. 62). On this basis, he argued that the khamriyya inherited from the pre- 

Islamic Qaṣīda 

Two characteristics from which the libertine poet was never to escape: the emphasis 

on the tempting of personal catastrophe — which was now a catastrophe for 

all eternity — and the poetic stance of being an object of reproof among the reasonable 

. . . in pre-Islamic poetry, the heroic gesture was a peremptory social need 

and constructed a model for the entire community: the gesture in the khamriyya 

answered the subordinate need of institutionalised rebellion, the poets and his 

companions becoming a band of outsiders. The rebellion . . . comes to transcend 

mere gouffre and takes the form of an inchoate rival religion. 38 

There is much in this analysis with which I agree. Let me anticipate one of my 

principal points: the “inchoate rival religion” to which Hamori refers but 

declines to identify is Islam, just as the Pueblo Fariseos remain Christian. 

In a series of lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1984, Adūnīs 

discerns in Abū Nuwās’s poetry the “unity of poetry and thought” predicated 

upon “the dialectic upon what the poet rejects and what he accepts and 

commends”: 

Abū Nuwās adopts the mask of a clown and turns drunkenness, which frees bodies 

from the control of logic and traditions, into a symbol of total liberation . . . the 

insolence of the clown purifies and liberates. It is a celebration which holds in it 

the promise of something capable of going beyond this culture of orders and 

prohibitions to a culture of freedom, in which human beings will be masters and 

mistresses of their thoughts, actions and conduct. 

This is libertinage as the ultimate expression of liberty, “the exploration of the 

unknown, both in the self and in the natural world.” 39 

Lyons has devoted a comprehensive survey to the twin features of classical 

poetry which he designates “identification” and “identity.” Chapter Seven is 

devoted to Abū Nuwās of whom he comments: 

38 Andras Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 1974, pp. 59, 60-61 and 71 respectively. 

39 Adonis, An Introduction to Arabic Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham, London: Saqi Books, 

1990, pp. 60 and 61.


There is nothing unique in the identifiable roles that Abū Nuwās plays, but 

although the ingredients of his poetry can be seen in their relation to a tradition, 

he himself is strong enough to shape their admixture in the mould of his own 

personality, whose basis, reflected perhaps in his life, appears as one of paradox. 40 

Viewed diachronically, Abū Nuwās represents for Lyons a critical moment in 

the transition from a poetry of the desert to one of an imperial capital, 

As the survival of empire does not appear to rely on the transmission of values 

learnt in a harsh environment, the generalised first person, reflecting communal 

experience, can be replaced by the individual, who deals with his own concerns. 

Orthodoxy can be challenged in all fields without immediate and unacceptable 

risk . . . He can disregard Islamic prohibitions without engendering the political 

supremacy of Islam, secure, on a personal level, in the belief that he will return to 

a merciful God. 41 

The earlier (synchronic) caution of the disjuncture between poetic and individual 

personality seems to be forsaken in favour of the sweep of history. Thus, 

Abū Nuwās’s elite audience 

Comprises those whose circumstances and inclinations allow them to enjoy the 

paradox of an epicurean lifestyle within the formal bounds of a religiously oriented 

society. As a reflection and extension of this lifestyle, the poetry of Abū 

Nuwās, and the universe which it reflects, produces a dynamism of contraries, 

identifiable on an individual level and expressed in terms of contrast rather than 

of comparison. 42 

That the only piece of evidence which Lyons appears to offer to substantiate 

this context is his observation that “imperial capitals, such as Rome or Abbasid 

Baghdad . . . can appear, at least to their inhabitants, as undisputed centres of 

a world civilisation” 43 simply alerts us to the presence of other paradigms. The 

influence of the work of Hamori is unmistakable. Yet there is an even more 

fundamental paradigm in evidence in each of these readings: the polarity of 

Jidd, earnestness or gravity, and Hazl, playfulness or levity. 

Kennedy and Lyons view Abū Nuwās resolutely within an Islamic context, 

and Adūnīs and Hamori would, I am sure concur. Here is Kennedy: 

40 M.C. Lyons, Identification and Identity in Classical Arabic Poetry, Cambridge: Gibb Trust, 

1999, p. 190. 

41 Lyons, Identification, p. 191. 


43 Lyons, Identification, p. 190.


Abu Nuwas was not irreligious in the sense that he belonged to a heretical group. 

His license with religious pre- and proscription was affected irreverence, as was in 

essence his reliance on God’s clemency as a pliant excuse. 44 

I concur: Abū Nuwās, according to the reading which I will present here, was 

not irreligious, but, and to anticipate once more, he did belong to a group 

which appears to have been deemed by its community to be heretical for the 

radically alteritous way in which it practised Islam. Lyons introduces Abū 

Nuwās as follows: 

He is not an opponent of Islam, to which he returns as a repentant sinner, but like 

a Restoration poet reacting against the Puritans, he produces the poetry of personal 

enjoyment . . . By claiming that his religion is his own affair he is rejecting 

generalised identification as a member of the Muslim community. 45 

Jidd and Hazl also inform the antinomian analysis of John Mattock, who with 

his customary acumen and mischievous flair, mooted the idea that: 

a good case might well be made out . . . for Abū Nuwās’s having been an impotent 

teetotaller . . . the more I think about the matter, the more I incline to believe that, 

in spite of the quantity of verse that he wrote on these subjects, Abū Nuwās was 

not as experienced as he would have us believe in either sphere, 46 

these spheres being the bedroom and the tavern. 

Contrast this scholarly consensus with the accounts of the poet given by 

Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908) in his Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ. 47 Ibn al-Muʿtazz’s lives 

of the poets are driven by his own preoccupations, 48 and he does not highlight 

Abū Nuwās’s transgressive or sybaritic excesses. There are a number of key 

features: his ṭabʿ, natural gift; his badīha, ability to produce poetry spontaneously; 

his suhūla, facility, as exemplified in a number of key settings, and demonstrating 

how thereby he surpassed many prominent poets; his legal and 

Qurʾanic accomplishments. His verse is prized for its ability to combine 

diction and rhetorical artifice. In other words, the khamriyya is marginalised 

44 Genius, p. 22. 


46 J.N. Mattock, “Description and Genre in Abū Nuwās,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5-6 (1987- 

1988): 536-537. See the discussion in Schoeler, Eine Weingedicht, p. 754 (Mattock’s remarks 

were, I think, intended to be sensationalist, to be sure, but also to point to what he saw as a 

discrepancy between persona and poetry not too dissimilar to the position which this article 

proposes, but expressed in the literary critical language available to him). 

47 Ed. ʿAbd al-Sattār Aḥmad Farrāj, Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1956, pp. 193.12-217.7. 

48 Gruendler, Verse and Taxes.


in Ibn al-Muʿtazz’s appreciation: Abū Nuwās is an extraordinarily ordinary 

ʿAbbasid muḥdath poet, very much a product of his time (however superlative), 

and rooted in the ephemera, the toil and moil of his day. 49 

Jidd and Hazl 50 

Now, when scholars attempt grand reconstructions of Islamic mores based on 

doublets such as Jidd and Hazl (and I might add that I view this as one of the 

foundational paradigms informing the European study of classical Islam), 

great is the corresponding temptation to posit them as irreconcilable opposites 

within the binary poles of the Qurʾanic universe, though, of course, this precise 

doublet is not attested in the Qurʾān. When such a temptation morphs 

into the declaration of a notion “whose importance is seldom realised even by 

Muslim thinkers themselves,” in the words of Charles Pellat, 51 or into a “tension 

between spiritual earnestness and secular restiveness,” in Lenn Goodman’s 

exploration of his categories of “the sacred and the secular,” 52 it seems to 

me that individual figures become too blurred, and local specificities are elided. 

Abū Nuwās’s is a potent voice, stentorian even, but its very individuality which 

posterity has prized is drowned out when it is amplified to such a level. 

I will presently review some of the verses in which Abū Nuwās allegedly 

recuses Islam. For the moment, let me again anticipate by considering briefly 

what kind of Islam we presume Abū Nuwās to be militating against at the end 

of the second and the start of the third Islamic century. The scrupulosity of the 

ascetically driven Ḥadīth folk (as was to typify the followers of Aḥmad b. 

49 For Abū Nuwās’s familiarity with astrology, see Paul Kunitzsch, “Zeus in Bagdad. Zu einem 

Gedicht von Abū Nuwās,” in: Studien aus Arabistik und Semitistik: Anton Spitaler zum 70. 

Geburtstag von seinen Schülern überreicht, ed. Werner Diem and Stefan Wild, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 

1980, pp. 99-113. A full version of this study should consider the portraits compiled 

by Ibn al-Muʿtazz, Ibn Qutayba, in his Kitāb al-shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ, and Abū Hiffān (and Ibn 

Manẓūr), Akhbār Abī Nuwās. That the pull of apolausis is strong in Abū Hiffān’s account is well 

captured in Wagner’s discussion of Abū Nuwās’s release from prison during the reign of Hārūn 

al-Rashīd as presented in the sources: Abū Nuwās, pp. 81-85. 

50 See further Montgomery, al-Jāḥiẓ on Jest and Earnest, from which some of these points are 

taken. 

51 Ch. Pellat, “Seriousness and Humour in Early Islam,” in: Études sur l’histoire socio-culturelle 

de l’Islam (VIIe-XVe s.), London: Variorum, 1976, p. 353-362 (Article VII). See also his “al- 

Djidd wa ’l-Hazl,” EI 2 , II, pp. 536-537. 

52 Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 68. 

The most informed and acute analysis of this polarity is the study by Yaseen Noorani, “Heterotopia 

and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 

36 (2004): 345-366, who considers them as the “productive paradox” of “normative selfhood”. 

I read this important article when the present study was already complete and so I am unable to 

discuss it properly here.


Ḥanbal) was at best a nascent phenomenon. It certainly was not hegemonic. 

Conventional piety generally took the form of the grave ḥilm, self-restraint, 

of al-Aḥnaf b. Qays, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī or ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd and the proto- 

Muʿtazila such as Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ. Zuhd was effectively coterminous with ḥilm. 

Indeed even a poet so revered for his ascetic poems as Abū l-ʿAtāhiya could, for 

whatever reason, be accused of deviant religious beliefs. Kharijism, of which 

Abū Nuwās was himself, according to one source, suspected, was the most 

severe in its unwavering condemnation of a cardinal sin and was relentless in 

demanding ostracism from the Muslim community for all who were guilty of 

such, but Murjiʾism had come generally to predominate over Kharijism. 

Shiʿism was in the process of consolidation. Thus, the followers of Abū Manṣūr 

or Abū l-Khaṭṭāb in Kufa or Ibn Ḥarb in Madāʾin or the Mukhammisa variously 

limited the extent of the application of the Sharīʿa to their Imams or 

themselves and adduced Qurʾanic verses in support of their stances, tending to 

view themselves as ‘free’ believers, and not as ʿibād, believers enslaved to the 

regulations of the Sharīʿa. In his survey of their antinomianism, Heinz Halm 

concludes that 

En islam, l’ibâha est la jumelle de la Sharîʿa; elle est le revers caché de la médaille. 53 

Consider how al-Jāḥiẓ describes the situation in his Fī ṣināʿat al-kalām (On the 

Craft of the Kalām) (the epistle may possibly be dated to the last two decades 

of Abū Nuwās’s life, at the earliest, but is more likely to stem from some two 

decades after his death): 54 

that it was now in your power to anticipate compensation 55 

and that you were desirous of a pious reputation and that you had seen the extent 

of the damage caused by the Rāfiḍa (Rejecters) and the Māriqa (Rebels: i.e. the 

Khārijīs), by the long separation of the Murjiʾa (Postponers) and the Nābita 

(Upstarts), and by all who protested against them and deviated from them, and 

53 Heinz Halm, “Courants et mouvements antinomistes dans l’islam medieval,” in: The Concept 

of Freedom in the Middle Ages: Islam, Byzantium and the West, ed. George Makdisi, Dominique 

Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985, pp. 135-141. A fuller 

version of this study would postulate a conversation between Abū Nuwās’s poetry and Muḥammad 

b. Sinān’s Kitāb al-Aẓilla, a ghālī (“hyperbolic” Shīʿī) text from the third/ninth century. 

54 Al-Jāḥiẓ, Fī ṣināʿat al-kalām, in: Rasāʾil al-Jāḥiẓ, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn IV, 

Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1991, p. 243.7-10. Al-Jāḥiẓ’s reference to “the long schism between the Murjiʾa 

and the Nābita” is presumably the istithnāʾ controversy: see W. Madelung, “Murdjiʾa,” EI 2 , VII, 

pp. 605-607 (p. 607), revolving around figures such as Wakīʿ b. al-Jarrāḥ, Sufyān al-Thawrī, and 

al-Aʿmash. 

55 I.e. in the Hereafter, by proceeding further with Kalām, above and beyond what is expected 

of the average believer.


by that which is specific to the Jabriyya (Compulsionists) and is common to the 

Mushabbiha (Likeners). 

Al-Jāḥiẓ’s point is that there is as yet no one hegemonic brand of Islam (though 

there ought to be — and Kalām is central to its realisation): instead furqa 

(sectarian bigotry) has predominated. Furthermore, I would add that it is by 

no means clear what form of Islam the Caliphs al-Mahdī (r. 158-169/775- 

785) and al-Hādī (r. 169-170/785-786) promoted when they carried out their 

persecution of deviant beliefs referred to by the appellation zandaqa between 

163/779 and 170/786. 56 Indeed, it is astonishing how credally heterogeneous 

Muslim societies of the second and third centuries appear to have been — in 

other words, before the consolidation of the ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa and 

their effective monopolisation of textual accounts of Islam. 

So where exactly (outside of the poet’s own protestations) are these ‘Puritans’ 

and where their values for our ‘Restoration’ poet to rail at, deride and 

flaunt? Consider a poem which Abū Nuwās is said to have composed when 

cast in prison by al-Amīn: 57 

1. My Lord, people have done me wrong: they have imprisoned me though I 

committed no fault; 

2. They have concocted a slanderous connection between me and religious repudiation 

( juḥūd ) because of what was in my inner mind ( ṭawiyya), 

3. Whereas in most of what I did (ḥāl ) I simply followed their course while dissimulation 

(taqiyya) was my religion (dīn). 58 

4. No excuse will help me curb my envier among them, no swearing of an oath 

of piety (birr)! 

5. Al-Amīn — I do not expect him to protect me , so who will be a 

Maʾmūn for me today? 59 

56 Melhem Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’Hégire, Damascus: Institut 

Français de Damas, 1993; Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early 

ʿAbbāsids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 63-69. 

57 Al-Amīn imprisons him for an offensive line of poetry which leads to an accusation of 

heresy, ilḥād, which centers on a claim he is alleged to have made, that every drop of rain contains 

an angel: Dīwān Abī Nuwās al-Ḥ asan b. Hāniʾ al-Ḥ akamī, ed. E. Wagner, I, Berlin: Das 

Arabische Buch, 2001, p. 385.13-386.5 (= Stuttgart: Steiner, 1958, p. 340.2-7). (Hereafter WD1.). 

See also Wagner, Die Aḫbār Abī Nuwās, pp. 275-276. 

58 Al-jaryu fī maydāni-him: literally, running in their race track. I take the opposition in the 

bayt to be between adhering to cultic practice and the dissimulation of one’s true beliefs. 

59 WD1, p. 386.6-15 (1958, p. 340.8-12) = (al-ʿitāb) §4; Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 87-88. 

The poet’s pun on the ideas of loyalty, security and trustworthiness in the names of the brothers 

is presumably an allusion to the pulpit attacks directed by al-Maʾmūn at al-Amīn for his association 

with Abū Nuwās.


The poet establishes a disjuncture between his true beliefs, which he conceals 

by practising taqiyya, and his outward conformity with the beliefs of his 

accusers and enviers. This disjuncture is consistent with the cultivation of 

criticism which Abū Nuwās voices so vociferously in his khamriyyāt. His allusion 

to the Shīʿī practice of taqiyya is telling. Whilst I think Abū Nuwās was a 

Shīʿī, though I cannot prove it, this should not deter us from the temptation 

to discern herein an inflection of the great debate among Muslims during 

what Montgomery Watt labels “the century of struggle”: that between the 

merits of belief in God (īmān) and of action (ʿamal ), a debate in which both 

Shīʿīs and Murjiʾites voiced similar sentiments. 60 

It may seem a trite remark, but the kind of Muslim we presume Abū Nuwās 

to have been is as significant for our reading of his rebelliousness and his antinomianism 

as the kind of Islam we presume his antinomianism to be directed 

against. Not enough attention has been given to the former — the latter 

inquiry has tended to eclipse it. These two kinds, however, of Muslim and 

Islam, should not be presumed to belong to the same inquiry, just as the rejection 

of one or several kinds of Islam does not entail a wholesale rejection of 

Islam, however it may be construed or articulated. 

The Sounds of Biography 

Despite (or rather: because of) the attractiveness of this persona, so ably established, 

I find myself mindful of a comment which Seamus Heaney makes 

about biography and vocabulary: 

60 W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

University Press, 1973; W. Madelung, “Early Sunnī Doctrine concerning Faith as Reflected in 

the Kitāb al-Īmān of Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām (d. 224/839),” Studia Islamica 32 (1970): 

233-254. See p. 242 (“like the Shīʿa, and unlike the Khārijites, the Kūfan traditionalists evidently 

did not deny the legal status of a Muslim to the grave sinner”) and p. 253 for his comment that 

the majority of the Imāmiyya “defined faith and knowledge essentially like the Murjiʾa.” That the 

Irjāʾ debate seems to have originated in Kufa may be important for locating the ideas expressed 

by Abū Nuwās who was an associate of Wāliba b. al-Ḥubāb and the “Libertines of Kufa”: see 

below, pp. 66-73. Maria Massi Dakake, The Charismatic Community: Shiʿite Identity in Early 

Islam, Albany: SUNY, 2007, examines Shīʿī ḥadīths which exhibit a remarkable consonance with 

Murjiʾite doctrine. See further Andrew Newman, The Formative Period of Twelver Shiʿism: Ḥ adīth 

as Discourse between Qum and Baghdad, Richmond: Curzon, 2000 (on the development of 

the Ḥ adīth among the Shīʿa); Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im. 2. und 3. Jahrhundert 

Hidschra, I, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991, pp. 152-221; Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma: 

A Source Critical Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Patricia Crone and Fritz 

W. Zimmermann, The Epistle of Sālim ibn Dhakwān, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 

especially pp. 219-243; Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

University Press, 2004, p. 388.


Joseph Brodsky once said that poets’ biographies are present in the sounds they 

make (Beowulf, p. xxxiii). 

Such biographies may be lost to us, they may be beyond our ken, they may 

have been rendered too opaque by time and space, even when a common sense 

approach may impel us to consider the obvious givens of someone, somewhere, 

at some time and for some reason or purpose — i.e., a poem must have 

been composed by someone, with a certain background, set of experiences and 

ambitions, at some age, in some situation, somewhere, at some period in time 

and for some occasion, reason or purpose (intention), even in cases where that 

reason or purpose be private or solipsistic. 61 But Brodsky also impels us back 

to the sounds which the poet makes, in other words, to the poetry itself. 

Occasionalism 

Now, let me once again state the obvious: classical Arabic poetry (and especially 

early ʿAbbasid poetry) is occasional. Whether we rightly make a distinction 

between ceremonial and informal (a much more appropriate distinction 

than that made between private and public), or between professional and 

secretarial, 62 or between “literary” and “pragmatic,” 63 early ʿAbbasid poetry was 

composed for specific occasions, or specific purposes, or specific recipients, in 

specific situations, and not merely as a personal and private response to the 

poetic muse, though I do not mean herewith to exclude or deny creativity or 

the urge to exhibit originality. I wish merely to emphasize once more the 

paradoxical rupture between the deracination of the Dīwān and the occasionality 

of the poem. But of course, the paradox is slightly misleading because 

poems outlive their occasions, purposes and recipients: they transcend their 

contexts. Authorised dīwāns recognise and celebrate this transcendence, as do 

quotations (of poems, sections or of verses) in later akhbār, anthologies or 

compilations. 

61 See the excellent discussion of John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook, Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1997, pp. 159-168. 

62 See Gruendler’s useful survey, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry, pp. 3-25; Gregor Schoeler, 

“Bashshār b. Burd, Abū ʾl-ʿAtāhiya and Abū Nuwās,” in: Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: 

ʿAbbāsid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 

pp. 275-299 (p. 290). 

63 For this distinction, see Thomas Bauer, Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt 

des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts. Eine literatur- und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen 

G ̇ azal, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998, pp. 455-462; Gregor Schoeler, “Abū Nuwās’s Ghazal 

Muʾannathāt no. 25,” in: Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature, 1, pp. 181-195, especially 

pp. 188-195.


Consider one of Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt, poems of wine. The following 

contains most of the requirements of the genre: 

He declaimed and in it described the spring (the metre is Kāmil ): 

1. Time has become sweet, the trees have budded; winter has gone, and Ādhār 

(March) has come; 

2. Spring has clothed the earth in an embroidered tissue of its blazing flowers, 

at the beauty of which the eyes are confused! 

3. So drive away gravity to reveal licentiousness (mujūn), with a sharp , 

red, the colour of which is mixed with moonlight, 

4. And demand justice of the Days for what they bring about — long have the 

Fates (al-aqdār) felled you low — 

5. From the hand of a coquettish , whose brow is as a moon, the rest of 

his face a dīnār, 

6. Boasting the eyes and the neck of a fawn, while, to my misery, his waist in a zunnār, 

7. Who pours you a goblet of a pressing of his vines ( jufūn), while another is 

passed round in his hands, a vintage, 

8. An ancient who refuses to let the hands of the mixture touch her 

skin, not through disapproval though, 

9. A Karkhī wine, like the spirit/pneuma (rūḥ) which creeps , mixed with forbearance intermingled (dākhala) with modesty and 

gravity, 

10. Among braves who have shackled the vicissitudes (al-khanā): 64 their raiment 

is forbearance (ḥilm) and there are no traces of their uncouth lack of selfcontrol 

( jahl )! 65 

Everything which we expect of a Nuwasian khamriyya is present: the conventional 

description of spring which is given the Nuwasian touch as the eyes 

cannot distinguish between embroidered brocade and flowers as they behold 

it and are reduced to the condition of perplexity (ḥayra) such as that attendant 

upon being defeated in a dialectical competition or being overcome by an 

insoluble aporia; the occasion for the abandonment of sobriety and staid decorum; 

the struggle against the surprises which life brings; the beautiful and 

seductive saqi; the exquisite wine (or rather, wines in this case) which is anthropomorphized 

as virginal because unbroached, and yet an old maid, because 

aged, and which is too fine for the coarse water when they are mixed, which 

process is itself humanised — the failure of the mixture is contrary to the vir- 

64 In a private communication Professor van Gelder suggests that khanā here may mean 

“obscenity, indecency” which fits the context equally well: “who have shackled indecency .” 

65 Dīwān Abī Nuwās al-Ḥ asan b. Hāniʾ al-Ḥ akamī, ed. E. Wagner, III, Stuttgart: Steiner, 

1988, pp. 172.10-173.8 = §141. Hereafter referred to as WD3.


ginal wine’s wishes; the pre-Islamic opposition (in ʿAbbasid guise) of ḥilm and 

jahl recasts the anthropomorphized wine in accordance with the value-system 

of the poet’s company of brave fellow topers; the distorting allusion to the 

doctrine of mudākhala held by al-Naẓẓām (d. between 220 and 230/835 and 

845); 66 the conquest of time by the fullness of youth; and ring composition 

(verses 2 and 10 [washy and libās]; 3 and 9 [waqār]; 4 and 10 [aḥdāth, aqdār 

and al-khanā]). 67 

The whole poem is finely crafted, a perfect example of its type, and yet 

somehow instantly forgettable because so familiar — a ‘pragmatic’ exercise, no 

matter how consummate, in generic convention. And here we have the perpetual 

conundrum of occasional poetry which has become sundered from its 

occasion, preserved in a dīwān like an exhibit in a cabinet of curiosities. Such 

perfection is indicative also of another feature to which I wish to draw attention: 

the timelessness of the poem. So despite the mention of spring-time, 

despite the triumph over the vicissitudes, despite the urgency of the Carpe 

diem! injunction, the poem somehow leaves time behind, becoming itself 

timeless. 

That this is one of the most conspicuous features of the khamriyya genre 

(and of a cognate genre, the ghazal ) will become apparent from a comparison 

with a genre which seems, in terms of its engagement with temporality, to be 

its very antonym, one ruthlessly rooted in the here and now: the hijāʾ, the 

vituperative attack. 

The following poem dates from Abū Nuwās’s time in Egypt as part of the 

entourage of al-Khaṣīb b. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, i.e., 190/805 to 192/807. 

He said vituperating Hāshim b. Ḥudayj, who professed to be a philosopher: 

1. We are all, Ibn Ḥudayj, your chattels when it comes to knowledge, 

2. Although physic is the profession which becomes you most. 

3. You are a philosopher in it, with insight concerning maladies and their 

causes! 

4. So why is the penis light, but heavy when upright, 

5. And when it voids what it contains, it sags and droops? 

6. Is that a created or something pre-eternal, always existing? 

7. And why is it so pleasing to commote, when used with repetition, 

8. But, the pleasure complete, the penis drops from debilitation? 68 

66 Al-Naẓẓām’s systematisation of the arguments of Hishām b. al-Ḥakam was a physical (and 

not an ethical) theory: see Josef van Ess, “Kumūn,” EI 2 , V, p. 384; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 

III, pp. 335-346 and 362-369. 

67 On cyclical structure in the Nuwasian Ghazal, see Hämeen-Anttila, Abū Nuwās and Ghazal, 

p. 98 and note 45. 

68 Dīwān Abī Nuwās al-Ḥ asan b. Hāniʾ, ed. E. Wagner, II, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972, 

p. 110.14-111.7 (hereafter referred to as WD2). See Kennedy, Genius, p. 104.


Three of the major topics of early Falsafa are here rehearsed: medical and 

humoural pathology, the nature of the passions and the debate concerning the 

pre-eternity or contingency of creation. Their transference to the male organ 

presents Hāshim with an insoluble conundrum and anticipates al-Jāḥiẓ’s devastatingly 

cornucopious interrogation of an opponent in the Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ 

wa-l-tadwīr, some four decades later. The posing of repeated questions in this 

manner is a feature of early Fiqh texts, of Kalām works and of medical treatises, 

such as, for example, Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq’s Treatise on the Diseases of the Eye. 69 

It is thus absolutely fundamental to the forensic nature of early ʿAbbasid society, 

immortalised in the social and intellectual disruption generated by the 

Miḥna. 70 

Compare this with a less high-brow but no less witty lampoon: 

He said vituperating Khamīs, the mawlā of Ḥusayn b. Ḥasan b. Zayd b. ʿAlī, who 

was imprisoned with him, when he heard him seeking a fatwā one day about battering 

Bobby (jald ʿumayra) 71 from a Shaykh who was a specialist in jurisprudence 

and who was also imprisoned with them: 

1. Since you only allow high-born women to marry their social equals, then allow 

Quintus to marry (H)andy’s Daughter Pa(l)m 

2. And say, “Live happily together with what you obtain from union with a free 

woman, who has a courtyard encircled by five girls!” 

3. She will keep him chaste for as long as he is settled in gaol — the heavy iron 

manacles won’t work against him; 

4. And if the Fates should one day bring about a separation, he will keep her in 

place of every virgin with a cleavage. 

Abū Nuwās was the first to describe masturbation in his verse and a host of poets 

followed his lead. 72 

69 Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq compiled two sets of medical masāʾil: Kitāb al-Masāʾil al-ṭibbiyya; Kitāb 

al-Masāʾil fī l-ʿayn: see Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1970, pp. 118 

and 206. This latter treatise (manifestly under the influence of the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata 

physica) presents 217 questions and answers on optics and ophthalmology: Le livre des 

questions sur l’oeil de Ḥ unain ibn Isḥāq (Mémoires présentés à l’Institut d’Egypte, 36), ed. and trans. 

P. Sbath and M. Meyerhof, Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français de l’Archéologie, 1938. 

70 See Gruendler’s excellent discussion of the centrality of questioning to ʿAlī b. Jahm’s celebration 

of al-Mutawakkil’s termination of the Miḥna in 237/851-2, a poem which is itself a 

recovery of the rightness of, and right to, interrogation in accordance with a (restored) Sunna: 

Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry, pp. 21-24. 

71 Literally, jald is the flagellation of a girl for adultery, while Abū ʿUmayr is the penis. I have 

used a Glaswegian colloquialism as my rendering. 

72 WD2.98.8-17. A different translation is given by Kennedy, Genius, p. 105. Khamīs is lit., 

“Thursday,” the fifth day; or “five-cubits long” used of a spear, here rendered Quintus. In verse 

1, rāḥa can mean rest as well as palm and the root of sāʿid means “felicity”: “Felix’s daughter 

Soothy (Susie).” The furqa, is of course, both a lover’s separation, a cessation in masturbation and


The attack is dominated by its coruscating ephemerality. 

The hijāʾ, then, exists to immortalise the ephemeral (and there is perhaps 

nothing more perpetual yet transient than masturbation), to capture for eternity 

the mundanities and grubbiness, dislikes and disagreements, foibles and 

animosities of an instant. The madḥ, the panegyric, exists to perpetuate the 

momentous, to bring great achievements or noble attainments to completeness 

through enshrining them in words. In both eulogy and vituperation the 

poet and his subject aspire to immortality. It is somehow easier for us to discern 

this process because the lampooned and the eulogised are presumed to 

have been genuine people, and because the poems are presumed to intersect 

with their lives, actions, words, successes or failures. It is the subjects of the 

poems which give these poems their historicity. Thus, a eulogy of al-Amīn or 

a lampoon of Abān al-Lāḥiqī are contextualised by their recipients, unlike 

celebrations of the “fiery” wine, or the idealised symposium or the moonfaced 

beloved. And yet, I would like to propose that the same contextualisation 

does obtain for the khamriyya and the ghazal, especially when we do not 

know the identity of the beloved or the occasion of the drinking session. 

Occasionalist Yet Atemporal 

Thus, the tradition of classical Arabic verse is a poetry that seeks to transcend 

temporality, but delivered for the moment and designed for the specific; one 

which, in the words of Beatrice Gruendler, offers “an intensely subjective 

perspective of itself,” 73 a perspective which is at once disarmingly persuasive 

yet profoundly ambiguous. It is preserved in two principal formats: the Dīwān 

and the khabar, which each, in its several ways, and with its several schemes of 

arrangement and organization, seeks to recast that poetry in contexts which 

are no longer those of its originary occasions. We will all agree, I presume, that 

we should not leave these occasions out of our accounts of their poetic instantiations. 

But this ambition is made immeasurably more difficult of achievement 

by the operation of several culturally and religiously sanctioned tenets 

and by some conspicuous characteristics of ʿAbbasid compositions. 

1. The gravity (and the perils) of speech 

There is a pervasive awareness in early ʿAbbasid society of the very real 

dangers (personal, religious and social) of loose or open talk in a society in 

which allegiances and loyalties were pledged in words and in which one’s 

a release from prison! The contextualising remarks given by Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, the editor of the 

Dīwān, are helpful, though most of its details can be inferred from the verses. 

73 Verses and Taxes, p. 85.


security often depended on the whim of a superior, as al-Jāḥiẓ puts it succinctly: 

You do not hear people saying, “So-and-so was flogged when he stayed silent 

or so-and-so was killed when he said nothing.” What we do hear them saying 

is, “So So-and-so was flogged when he said such and was killed when he said 

such and such.” 74 

This awareness is evident when Ibn al-Dāya seeks to dissuade Abū Nuwās 

from releasing an “elegy effectively questioning the Hereafter, since according 

to his impish logic, no-one has returned from there to testify to its 

existence,” 75 on the grounds that the poet’s enemies were lying in ambush, 

awaiting just such an opportunity to wreak revenge. Undaunted, Abu 

Nuwās promulgates the poem and is imprisoned by Hārūn al-Rashīd. 

Whatever the reasons for this (and despite the fact of his imprisonment), 

Abū Nuwās might naturally have been confident of getting away with it. 76 

Thus, Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī recounts how he outwits Hārūn al-Rashīd on the 

occasion of a ribald ṭāʾiyya: 

When al-Rashīd heard his words, “Come, my lord, (let us disobey the tyrant 

of the heavens),” he called for him and said, “Enemy of God, you are guilty of 

unbelief in God with this phrase!” He replied, “Commander of the Faithful, 

you know that sodomy is an act of disobedience .” “Yes.” “Then that 

is what I meant,” and he turned away from him (WD3.58.7-10). 

The poet’s response rebuts the accusation by pointing out that both he and 

the caliph agree that sodomy is an act of disobedience to God, but he makes 

no comment as to whether the liwāṭ actually took place (the verse is an amr 

and as such does not commit him by claiming that the act took place) 77 and 

in fact the object of his attentions wishes, in the final verse of the poem, that 

he were the chaste ʿUdhrī lover Qays, sitting next to Lubnā. 

Abū Nuwās’s confidence on this occasion would have been informed by 

two other cultural tenets which tended to contribute to creating the cultural, 

social and artistic space which the poets needed to perform their 

compositions. 

74 Al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Salām Hārūn, I, Cairo: 

Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1985, p. 270.13-14. 

75 P.F. Kennedy, “Abu Nuwas,” in: Arabic Literary Heritage: Dictionary of Literary Biography 

311, ed. M. Cooperson and S.M. Toorawa, Detroit: Layman, Brucoli & Clark, 2005, p. 29. 

76 See Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 81-92, for a discussion of the incarcerations of Abū Nuwās, 

and his conclusion that in general Abū Nuwās appears to have gotten off lightly (p. 92). 

77 Compare this with WD3.75.5 = §49.7, bitnā ʿalā maʿṣiyatin kullun bi-kullin lahijū.


2. The performative notion of poetry as truth 

A poem’s truth-value pertained only to the first instance of its delivery or 

performance, though a poet’s ownership of his verses, as the discourse on 

Sariqāt reveals, persisted long after its first pronouncement. Thereafter, it 

could neither be asserted nor rejected. Beatrice Gruendler has studied the 

use of this concept by ʿAbbasid panegyrists, especially Diʿbil al-Khuzāʿī, ʿAlī 

b. Jahm and Ibn al-Rūmī 78 and it is to be discerned in the khabar of Abū 

Nuwās’s lampoon of Abān al-Lāḥiqī as narrated by Ibn al-Muʿtazz. 79 It 

finds a refraction in the aphorism that “the best poetry is the most deceitful” 

(aḥsan al-shiʿr akdhabu-hu) and in its antonymical formulation (aḥsan 

al-shiʿr aṣdaqu-hu), aphorisms which combine this performative notion of 

truth with antithetical responses to the ambivalence of the Qurʾanic position 

on poets. 

3. The Qurʾanic ‘condemnation’ of poets 

Consider the following anecdote. It is the time of the sunset prayer and 

Abū Nuwās and the other Muslims have assembled in the Mosque. The Imam 

recites the Fātiḥa, the Opening Chapter of the Qurʾān, and commences his 

presentation with the first verse of Chapter 109 (Al-Kāfirūna): qul yā 

ayyu-hā l-kāfirūna (“Say, O you unbelievers!”), to which Abū Nuwās 

responds by crying ‘Labbay-ka’ (“Here I am Lord,” the formula uttered by 

Muslims at the Kaʿba on the Pilgrimage), effectively pronouncing takfīr, 

the declaration of an unbeliever, upon himself. The enraged populace drag 

him before the Chief of Police and testify that he is a zindīq. Then 

Ḥamdawayh, the ṣāḥib al-zanādiqa, is summoned, and he reacts to their 

charges with the words, “This individual is a libertine (mājin) who says 

what he does not believe ( yaʿtaqid ),” alluding to verse 226 of Qurʾān 26 

(Al-Shuʿarāʾ): “they say what they do not do.” The people demand that Abū 

Nuwās be put to the test and he is required to spit on a figural representation 

of Mānī. He obliges by vomiting over it and is freed. 80 What I find 

intriguing in this anecdote is the extension of the Qurʾanic condemnation 

of poetry and poets (traditionally understood by many as a declaration that 

poets are liars, because their words are not matched by their actions) to a 

78 B. Gruendler, “ʿAbbāsid Praise Poetry in the Light of Speech Act Theory and Dramatic 

Discourse,” in: Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: A Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches, 

ed. B. Gruendler and V. Klemm, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000, pp. 157-169, esp. pp. 168-169. 

79 Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ, pp. 202.12-204.10 (especially p. 204.6-9): see also Wagner, Abū Nuwās, 

pp. 53-57. 

80 Dīwān Abī Nuwās al-Ḥ asan b. Hāniʾ, ed. E. Wagner, V, Beirut: Schwarz, 2003, p. 323.12- 

18 (hereafter WD5); Wagner, Abū Nuwās, p. 113; Georges Vajda, “Les zindīqs en pays de l’Islam 

au début de la période abbaside,” Rivista dei Studi Orientali 17 (1937): 173-229 (pp. 184-185).


non-poetical utterance by a poet and indeed to his very public demeanour. 

Therefore it far transcends what Alexander Pope described as the poet’s 

“freedom of saying as many careless things as other people, without being 

so severely remark’d upon.” 81 Irrespective of whether we may conclude 

from this tenet that poetry can scarcely be anything other than marginal, 82 

it was paradoxically one of the few ways whereby a poet might seek publicly 

to violate custom, convention and taboo and still hope for his safety. 

In the poet’s own words, 

When I command the right, it is not from dissimulation (taqiyya). How could 

it be when my words are not made true by my acts? 83 

4. Resistance, multivalency and obfuscation 

Of the uncertainty surrounding the accounts of the death of al-Kindī’s 

disciple, al-Sarakhsī, Franz Rosenthal noted that 

Under such circumstances, those very few individuals who are in a position to 

tell the true story, are identical with those who are most interested in concealing 

their information. Even those details which leak out on the authorities of 

persons who are seemingly informed, are largely guesswork. 84 

In a separate study, I have identified this compositional procedure as 

“resistance.” 85 In the context of poetry, it is as applicable to the creation of 

a poet’s persona or his biography as to the poems themselves, though the 

preceding anecdote concerning Abū Nuwās and Ḥamdawayh suggests how 

poetic production might thereby be informed. 86 The observations concern- 

81 Alexander Pope, “The Preface of 1717,” in: The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 

London: Methuen, 1985, p. xxvi. 

82 As I tried (quite unsuccessfully) to do in my article “Of Sex and Alcohol: The Marginal 

Voice of Abū Nuwās?,” in: Marginal Voices in Literature and Society. Individual and Society in the 

Mediterranean Muslim World, ed. Robin Ostle, Strasbourg: European Science Foundation, 2000, 

pp. 25-38. 

83 WD5.43.7 = §55.5. This is a difficult verse, as the poet plays the possibility of taqiyya off 

against the Qurʾanic stance on poets: i.e., I do not need to have recourse to dissembling, for 

Qurʾān 26: 226 already condones my poems and testifies that the good which I enjoin is not 

matched by my actions. 

84 Aḥmad ibn aṭ-Ṭayyib al-Saraḫsî. A Scholar and Littérateur of the Ninth Century, New Haven: 

American Oriental Society, 1943, p. 26. 

85 J. E. Montgomery, “Serendipity, Resistance and Multivalency: Ibn Khurradādhbih and his 

Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik,” in: Kennedy, On Fiction and Adab, pp. 177-230. 

86 See however note 10, on the duplicitous capacities of badīʿ in a courtly setting; Geert Jan 

van Gelder, “Some Types of Ambiguity: A Poem by Abū Nuwās on al-Faḍl al-Raqāšī,” Quaderni 

dei Studi Orientali 10 (1992): 75-92 (noting generic indeterminacy); Bauer and Neuwirth, Intro-


ing “multivalency” which I have made of early ʿAbbasid prose texts, that 

“any one text, or any one version [of the text] can have a multiplicity of 

purposes” cannot be applied indiscriminately, I would argue, to early 

ʿAbbasid poetic production, where the dynamics of occasion and genre can 

occasionally preclude it as a genuinely meaningful possibility. Bauer and 

Neuwirth note that when a ghazal is situated in 

a triangular relationship between the poet, who embodies the lover, the 

addressee, who embodies the beloved (and who can perfectly well be fictive), 

and the reading or performative audience, who bestow on the poem their own 

meanings and who connect their own emotional reactions to the poem, 

polysemity naturally ensues; while Gruendler has demonstrated how multivalent 

Ibn al-Rūmī’s praise poems for ʿUbayd Allāh b. ʿAbd Allāh the 

Ṭahirid can be. 

In view of these four notions, we might be forgiven for wondering how this 

body of verse can be said to be the Dīwān of the Arabs, their historical register, 

in any meaningful sense. 87 

Eavesdropping 

So, how can we attempt such contextualisations? Can we recover lost contexts, 

ones which the tradition has not preserved for us? In his Presidential Address 

delivered to the American Oriental Society on the 19th of March, 1996, Richard 

Frank, the eminent scholar of the medieval Kalām tradition, and one of 

my intellectual heroes, delivered a status quaestionis lecture entitled Hearing 

and Saying What Was Said. 88 In it, he describes the perplexity he experienced 

when he moved from reading the works within the Falsafa tradition to works 

within the Kalām tradition: “I read several kalâm works, the meaning of which 

I didn’t get; I couldn’t see where they were coming from or exactly whereto 

duction, in: Ghazal as World Literature, 1, p. 29. The phenomenon of resistance is studied from 

a different perspective by Zoltan Szombathy, “Freedom of Expression and Censorship in Medieval 

Arabic Literature,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 5 (2007) [http://www.uib.no/jais/ 

content7.html]. 

87 See the erudite discussion in Heinrichs, Prosimetrum: “what the dīwān was to the Persians, 

poetry was to the Arabs, namely a preserver of historical records” (p. 251); Albert Arazi, “Al-Shiʿru 

ʿIlmu l-ʿArabi wa-Dīwānuhā (La poésie est la science des anciens Arabes et leurs archives),” in: 

Urkunden und Urkundenformulare im klassischen Altertum und in den orientalischen Kulturen, ed. 

R.G. Khoury, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999, pp. 203-220. 

88 Journal of the American Oriental Society 116 (1996): 611-618.


headed,” he says. 89 He notes that this was a problem of language, widely 

understood, and of vocabulary, in a stricter sense, for, as he notes, it is the element 

of continuity of intellectual tradition in which 

The falâsifa (those who cultivated falsafa) appear as participants in an ongoing 

philosophical dialogue in which certain basic questions and issues continued from 

antiquity, and continue yet, to be posed and discussed, often in much the same 

terms. 90 

Moreover, it is the element of continuity which renders this “a historically and 

theoretically appropriate context” in which to read “the Arabic texts (some of 

them at any rate, or certain parts of them).” However, as Frank intimates, even 

the appropriateness of this philosophical tradition as a sufficient account of 

Arabic Falsafa ought to be called into question (and has been so by such seminal 

works as Dimitri Gutas’s Greek Thought, Arabic Culture) 91 because it is 

“one which is nonetheless abstracted from their native Muslim context.” This 

problem of “anticipation,” in which such elements as “possible worlds” or 

“supervenience” theories or one (modern) school’s approach to “political philosophy” 

are discerned in Muslim writings, remains one of the stiffest challenges 

facing the study of Arabic Falsafa today. 

The Kalām, though, does not even offer us these meagre purchases on the 

textual material and while its “‘familiar’ words and expressions” seem to offer 

at least a minimal point of contact, in the end they have merely conspired to 

bring it about that scholars “were led by language unawares . . . by tacit assumptions 

about words and their meanings and by their various backgrounds in the 

history of philosophy, down the wrong path.” 92 In this regard, I think, scholars 

of poetry and Adab are, mutatis mutandis, little different from Frank’s scholars 

of the Kalām. 

What solution does Frank propose to lift us out of our methodological and 

intellectual impasse? Briefly, “what you have to do is to listen, to pay attention 

in the hope of hearing — of coming to understand — what is said,” for in the 

end we are eavesdroppers listening in on “a conversation at an adjacent table,” 

missing much of what is said and distracted by “the active discussion now 

going on or by the recollection of past talk.” 93 

The achievement of this may involve us in attempting a number of things: 

89 Hearing, p. 611. 


91 London: Routledge, 1997. 


93 Hearing, pp. 615 and 613 respectively.


1. To revivify and persist with philology, not as an end in itself, or as a way of 

writing narrative history, or accounting for the processes of cultural change, 

but as a prerequisite essential to highlighting the varieties, tergiversations, 

readings and interpretations which subsequent actors within the textual 

tradition brought to the works which they responded to, enjoyed, disliked, 

edited, read and misread. Thus, the aim of such a philology, might be, for 

example, upon identifying an apocryphon or pseudepigraphon, not to 

remove it from the canon, but rather to ask what there was in the text that 

led later readers to respond to it in this manner; or to cast into sharper 

focus those moments in the tradition when authorship was not viewed as 

ownership, when deception, occlusion, misleading and misattribution 

were the normative forms of textual (mis)communication and to develop 

hermeneutic and historical strategies sensitive to such a poetics of misdirection; 94 

or in reconstructing a stemma, to enable the appreciation of the divagations 

of the text through time, and thus to respond to each version of the 

text as an artefact in its own right, and not to label it as a corruption of a 

single, originary source, in search for the Holy Grail of restoring the autograph, 

which, as I have argued elsewhere, may in many instances never 

have existed; 95 

2. To embrace two of philology’s principal hermeneutic practices: close reading 

and wide reading. 96 We should endeavour to attain as close and as 

complete an understanding of the language of the texts we are reading, 

their lexica, their cultural idioms, their intellectual horizons. We also need 

to read widely, indiscriminately even, to acquaint ourselves, in the case of 

the third/ninth century for example, with the idioms of early legal epistemology, 

of the methodologies of exegesis and the development of the Prophetic 

Tradition and its entanglements with historiography, to come to 

94 Blackwood’s Magazine in early eighteenth century Edinburgh, to which James Hogg (see 

below p. 69) was a regular contributor, was the mouthpiece of one such cenacle: see Karl Miller, 

“Introduction,” in: James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. 

K. Miller, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. xiv-xv; P.D. Garside, “Introduction,” in: James Hogg, 

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. P.D. Garside, Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

University Press, 2001, pp. xxxiii-liv. Early ʿAbbasid writerly society seems to have been another: 

see, for example, the remarks in Risāla fī faṣl mā bayna l-ʿadāwa wa-l-ḥasad (An Epistle on Distinguishing 

the Difference between Enmity and Enviousness) in which al-Jāḥiẓ identifies himself 

as a pseudepigrapher discussed by Kilito, The Author and his Doubles, pp. 67-77 (“Confessions of 

a Forger”). 

95 See J.E. Montgomery, “Editor’s Introduction,” in: Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the 

Written in Early Islam, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006, pp. 1-5; see also Schoeler, Abū Nuwās’s 

Ghazal Muʾannathāt no. 25, pp. 181-195. 

96 On the tradition of close reading in critical theory, see Julian Wolfreys, Readings: Acts of 

Close Reading in Literary Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.


grips with the intricacies of grammar, to be fluent in the poetic tradition, 

and also to immerse ourselves in the productions of the Greek-Arabic Falsafa 

movement. And we will be unmindful of the importance of the dynamics 

of patronage, of local, social, or regional relevances, to our detriment. In 

other words, we have to inch towards recreating the intellectual universe of 

the authors of the texts we are reading — “seeing things their way,” in Skinner’s 

words. This is a tall order, or rather it is an impossible task, but it does 

mean that at the very least we must overcome the narrow confines of strictly 

delimited disciplines, and strive to frame our understanding and responses in 

terms which aspire (however unrealistically and imperfectly) to be holistic. 

3. To move away from the force of the author’s or the poet’s ‘personality’ 

(even one as prominent and as forceful as Abu Nuwās’s) and to ponder in 

a meaningful sense the occasional nature of ʿAbbasid writings; 

4. To be mindful that when we read the poems we are eavesdropping on a 

plethora of ephemeral conversations which are long since silent; 97 this practice 

of eavesdropping will in large part mimic the role of the audience 

of ʿAbbasid poems and prose works, often addressed by their enunciator to 

a specific recipient, with the reading/listening public cast in the role of 

listener, bystander, or, in love poetry, for example, eavesdropper. 98 

5. To seek to capitalise upon what I have described as the deracination of 

poetry by experimenting with intertexts, with the striking up of new conversations, 

and by uncovering forgotten conversations, in which a word, or 

verse, or poem, or text is enabled and/or made to communicate in a new 

context with another word, or verse, or poem, or text, and is read sometimes 

against, sometimes through, sometimes in terms of this new context. 

Classical Arabic poems seem to me to be, by and large, no different from 

contemporary fiction which, Eco argues, “must constitute a dialogue with 

other writers and other books.” 99 

97 Consider the following echo of a long-forgotten conversation: Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, ed. 

R. Tajaddud, Teheran: Maṭbaʿat Dānishgāh, 1971, p. 227.10-11 (and p. 226.24): “Ibn Isḥāq 

said: The majority of experts in ʿilm (ʿulamāʾ) among the muḥaddithūn were Zaydīs. The same 

holds for a group among the legal muḥaddithūn (al-fuqahāʾ al-muḥaddithūn) such as Sufyān b. 

ʿUyayna, Sufyān al-Thawrī and the bulk of the muḥaddithūn”; see Patricia Crone, Medieval 

Islamic Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 99, for a conjecture 

as to what the term Zaydī may mean here, though her conjecture does not really help us in 

understanding why the muḥaddithūn are singled out in this way. 

98 See Bauer and Neuwirth, “Introduction,” in: Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature, 

1, p. 10. 

99 Quoted by Bondanella, Umberto Eco, p. 183. I am only too well aware that my notion of 

ʿAbbasid texts as conversations is sorely underdeveloped. A fuller version of this article must 

consider Richard Rorty’s reading of the philosophical enterprise as conversation in Philosophy 

and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, and Ian Hacking’s 

response: “Language, Truth and Reason,” in: Rationality and Relativism, ed. R. Hollis and


6. To persist with a hermeneutic of “facticity,” which is the (mis)reading of 

figurative language as literal. This would impel us to read as “factitious” 

what we have been taught, as readers of poetry, to presume is metaphorical 

(or parodic or ironical) — here to proffer “factitious” interpretations of 

Abū Nuwās’s oenomaniacal cosmos and to read his antinomianism as a 

genuine engagement with the religious and theological values of his society, 

before (or, at the same time as) we read it as a “rhetorical” stance or jesterly 

mime of social buffoonery or a knowing pandering to the luxuries of a 

cosseted elite. I have appropriated the notion of “facticity” from Harold 

Bloom who proposes that we abandon the tyranny of facticity (i.e. that we 

do the opposite of what I am proposing): 

Freud is now so much himself a synecdoche for the facticity of our psychic 

containment that we must read his favorite synecdoche as a literalism 

(his “favourite synecdoche” being the representation of “health by neurosis”). 

100 One of my present contentions is that the apolaustic Abū Nuwās 

is now so much a synecdoche for a secularised ʿAbbasid society that we can 

do little else but read his wine songs as figurative. The best example of the 

encounter between the “factitious” and the figurative I can think of, one in 

which the phenomenon I am referring to is most readily apparent, is Preston 

Sturges’s 1941 movie The Lady Eve (Paramount Pictures), in which the 

protagonists, played by Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwick, are unable to 

understand each other because each is unable to distinguish the “factitious” 

from the figurative in what the other says. The audience entertains both 

levels simultaneously and the humour arises from the ensuing comedy of 

errors, as the protagonists learn how to recognise the “facititious” and the 

figurative and so communicate with one another (by falling in love). 

Such eavesdropping is, of course, effectively the recreation of a context through 

the imposition of a metacontext (in other words, it is epistemologically no 

more authentic or irrefragable than, say, a narrative historical approach), but I 

think it is capable of the generation of different strategies of reading and interpreting. 

It does not, in my opinion, signal the death of the author, but is an 

experimental hermeneutic, one which tries to take seriously Joseph Brodsky’s 

S. Lukes, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982, pp. 185-203, as well as the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory of 

speech as dialogic and thus a response, explicit or implicit, to an earlier utterance, as well as an 

anticipation of a future utterance. 

100 Harold Bloom, “Criticism, Canon-Formation, and Prophecy: The Sorrows of Facticity,” 

in: Poetics of Influence, pp. 405-424 (p. 406).


observation concerning the verbal presentness of a poet’s biography, by signalling 

a valorisation of word over persona. 

What we might eschew, in this rejuvenated philology, are a naïve dependency 

on patterns of evolution or narrative history that will lead us to account 

for a phenomenon solely in terms of its sources (the paradigm of influence) or 

embroil us in retrospectivity, i.e., the attempt to discern in an earlier stage of a 

tradition posterior developments within that tradition and in so doing to read 

an early tradition in terms of its later descendants (the paradigm of prolepsis). 

Such an eschewal will also involve us in an embrace of contingency, of a hesitancy 

of reading, for many of our texts (poems and prose) were designed to be 

heard and read in a multiplicity of ways. Thus we may be able to resist criticism’s 

deterministic silencing of polyphony and so approach the texts in the 

spirit of Charles Ives, as described by the musicologist Alex Ross: 

Ives’s whole method was to plan accidents. He was incapable of asserting a monolithic 

point of view; instead, he created a kind of open-ended listening room, a 

space of limitless echoes. 101 

Throughout, it behooves us to be all too aware of the distance which separates 

us from the text, respectfully mindful of our limitations, and determined to 

allow the texts to engender within us sufficient space to encourage us to participate 

in their “way of seeing things” (p. 615). And finally, we must realise in 

Frank’s words that 

A truly “complete” grasp of what they meant would be a squared circle; understanding 

lies always at some point on an asymptote (p. 616). 

Let me illustrate this with a couple of instances of eavesdropping: “Alchemical 

Transformation” and “Mosaic Whisperings.” 

Alchemical Transformation 

In a khamriyya considered by many to be one of Abū Nuwās’s finest, the following 

verse occurs: 

It advanced in the cup shining as brightly as the sun at day-break, poured from 

, bleeding at the waist, upturned. 102 

101 The Rest is Noise, p. 146. 

102 WD3.62.13 = §40.16; see J.E. Montgomery et al., “Revelry and Remorse: A Poem of Abū 

Nuwās,” Journal of Arabic Literature 25 (1994): 116-134 (p. 118).


This is a familiar concatenation of images: the luminescent wine, shining 

brightly as it is poured into the goblets and is brought to the eager drinkers. 

The metaphor, dāmī l-khaṣr, is comparatively rare but initially seems obvious. 

The self-reflexivity of the metaphor is brought out by the following verses: 

with slender waist (mudmaju l-khaṣrayni) and slim tummy, wearing garments 

of wool over ones of hair-cloth, gives you it to drink (WD3.92.7 = 

§63.7). 

. . . 

May God give drink to a fawn, brazenly and coquettishly mincing as he walks, 

swaying, like the Bān twig, so meagre is his waist (WD3.145.3 = §110.1). 103 

The amphora is a paradox: it boasts the slender waist of the Ganymede, yet it 

is a half-woman, misshapen, merely one half of the conventional ideal of 

beauty, as in many later poems. 104 Moreover, the amphora, gynaecomorphized, 

is bleeding. Is the wine her menstrual blood, is it the rupture of her hymen, 105 

or is this the blood of childbirth? 

Before we can attempt an answer, we must reflect a little bit longer on the 

gynaecological metaphor, for it may not be as straightforward as I have presented 

it. In her study of female physiology according to Greek medical writers, 

particularly the Hippocratics 106 , Ann Hanson notes, in considering 

whether in Hippocratic and popular anatomy, the womb of a virgin was 

thought to be sealed off or not, that the image of the uterus as “an upsidedown 

jug” was a “potent image in the popular imagination and in medical 

writing,” that “unsealing the wine jug” is “expressed in the same terms as ‘vio- 

103 The waist of the saqi: WD3.92.7 = §67.7 (mudmaju l-khaṣrayni); WD3.421.7 = §401.11 

(mundamiju l-khaṣrī); WD3.140.7 = §107.8; WD3.145.3 = §110.1 (riqqati l-khaṣrī); the 

waist of the amphora: WD3.147.8 = §111.8; on wine as the blood of the amphora: WD3.95.9- 

11 = §69. 

104 See, e.g., Abū Firās: Yā kathīban min taḥti ghuṣnin raṭībin // yatathannā min taḥti badrin 

munīrī, Sandhill, under a tender, pliant branch swaying to and fro, under a beaming moon: 

Dīwān Abī Firās, ed. S. al-Dahhān, Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1944, p. 172 (§122) 

and J.E. Montgomery, “Convention and Invention: Abū Firās’s Poetic Correspondence with 

Abū Zuhayr,” Occasional Papers of the School of Abbasid Studies 2 (1998), p. 16; J.E. Montgomery, 

“Convention as Cognition: On the Cultivation of Emotion,” in: Takhyīl: The Imaginary 

in Classical Arabic Poetics, ed. M. Hammond and G.J. van Gelder, Oxford: Gibb Trust, 2008, 

pp. 15-46. 

105 The physician Soranos denied the existence of the hymen: see Giulia Sissa, “Maidenhood 

without Maidenhead: the Female Body in Ancient Greece,” in: Before Sexuality: The Construction 

of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David Halperin, J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, 

Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990, pp. 339-364 (p. 355). I do not know whether the 

hymen was discussed in Arabic medical texts or what theories were developed concerning it. 

106 The Medical Writers’ Woman, in: Before Sexuality, pp. 309-337.


lating the young girl’.” 107 Her summary of the Hippocratic conceptualisation 

shows an intriguing similarity with Abū Nuwās’s verse: 

Both Hippokratics and sophisticated anatomists . . . position the uterus in women 

as an upside-down jug: stathmos or pythmēn, fundus, “bottom,” is on top; stoma, 

os, “mouth,” lies at the bottom; auḫēn, cervix, “neck,” opens in a downward 

direction. 108 

Like the uterus, the dann, the amphora, lies concealed from view: 

She was concealed in the amphora and has grown to be an old spinster 

buried inside a coffin in the earth (WD3.63.2 = §40.18). 

In the following verse, the image is spelled out as the dann, the jar, becomes 

the raḥim, the womb: 

Give me to drink the virgin, with the head dress of grey hair, which has been 

matured in the womb (WD3.269.14 = §232.2). 

The wine is thus the daughter of not only the grapes or the vine (WD3.52.2 = 

§30.1; WD3.58.13 = §36.2) but also the amphora (ibnat al-dann): 

Cure Yaḥyā of his hangover with the daughter of the amphora and its pitch! 

(WD3.138.5 = §106.1) 109 

Am I suggesting that Abū Nuwās has drawn his metaphor from the early 

translations of Hippocratic medical works into Arabic? I would not want to 

rule out the possibility (some of the texts which Hanson uses were available in 

Arabic, though I have not looked into the matter at all), 110 but would imagine 

that this may rather be an instance of polygenesis. I am more intrigued by the 

realisation that, in accordance with Hippocratic hysteriology, the amphora’s 

bleeding waist is not properly a metaphor, but is a synecdoche, the waist being 

part of the whole, but incomplete, female that is the amphora. 

Within the Arabic alchemical tradition, these scientists developed the analogy 

apparently first imagined by the mysterious figure of Maria the Jewess 

between the very alchemical process itself and conception and birth. Accordingly, 

“the womb was associated with the alchemical vessel and the union of 

107 Medical Writers’ Woman, p. 325: see p. 317. 

108 Medical Writers’ Woman, p. 317. 

109 See WD3.25.1 = §16.2 (the amphora has raised the wine); WD3.142.1 = §108.12 (baṭna 

musnadin). 

110 See Ullmann, Medizin, p. 30 (Epidemia), pp. 29-30 (Gynaikeia), p. 27 (Peri gonēs); and 

pp. 76-78 (Soranos).


substances as a chemical wedding.” The spout of Maria’s still was figured as a 

penis, and “the narrow opening of the receiver vessel as a vagina.” 111 In the 

later, Latin, tradition, the birth of the filius philosophorum was known as the 

process of regressus ad uterum, according to which the vas mirabile was imaged 

as a uterus. 112 The work of the vas or the bain marie was “akin to the work of 

God in the vase of divine germination.” 113 

The alchemical development of notions concerning the reproductive amphora/ 

uterus (into which again I have not inquired too closely at this stage) alerts us 

to the cosmogonic possibilities of the Nuwasian figure. 

Consider the following as Nuwasian inflections of the alchemical axiom of 

union of male and female, conjoined with the autoptic authority of the initiate 

who can distinguish the ẓāhir (visible) from the bāṭin (invisible): 

Served from the hand of a girl with a pussy dressed as a man with a penis; she 

has two lovers: one who takes her as a boy and one who takes her as a girl 

(WD3.3.1 = §1.3). 

. . . 

A maid-servant, like a youth, right for both ways, like a twig in her suppleness 

(WD3.342.8 = §299.4). 

. . . 

Served from the hand of a coquet with sweet characteristics, like a virginal girl 

when viewed with the eye (WD3.7.1 = §3.8). 114 

Or the Ganymede’s facial admixture of silver and gold: 

Served from the hand of a coquet, his forehead like a moon, the rest of his face 

like a dīnār (WD3.173.2 = §141.5) 

Or the solar wine taken round the assembled company by the lunar youth: 

We pass round ourselves the sun encircled by the full moon — Oh, who has ever 

seen a sun taken through its revolutions by a full moon! (WD3.171.2 = 

§138.5) 115 

111 Peter Marshall, The Philosopher’s Stone. A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy, London: Macmillan, 

2001, p. 203; R. Patai, The Jewish Alchemists, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, 

pp. 63-64. A fuller version of this study should investigate the Arabic alchemists more thoroughly 

for this and similar notions. I have considered the books of Marshall and Patai, while not 

beyond criticism, sufficient for present purposes. 

112 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge and Kegan 

Paul, 1980, pp. 236-238. 

113 M. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible. The Origins and Structures of Alchemy, trans. S. Corrin, 

Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978, pp. 154-155. 

114 WD3.23.3 = §14.12. 

115 See also WD3.175.2 = §143.5 ka-anna-hā fī kaffi-hī // shamsun wa-rāḥātu-hu qamarū.


In the following piece, the Christian Ganymede becomes as one with the 

wine, solar by day and lunar by night: 

8. The sun of the wine is in his hand, while in his face is the sun of beauty, so 

we had two suns in our midst . . . 

13. I encountered in him a full moon with a full moon in his hand, which I 

joined for the gaze of the delighted admirer (WD3.326.13 and 3.327.5 = 

§280.8 and 13). 

On occasion, even the poet, an initiate, becomes confused between golden 

bright wine and silver chalice: 

20. Drinking was now possible for the boon-companions and silver and gold 

made the wine flow over us. 

21. I declared, as they so resembled each other in similarity, “Which of the two 

is the gold, for they are so alike? 

22. They are the same though the difference between them is that one is solid and 

the other is liquid” (WD3.33.16-34.16 = §21.20-22). 

For all the alchemical notions subtending these comparisons, at their very 

heart stands a Qurʾanic sign of the End Time: 

When the sun and the moon are joined (Q. 75 [al-Qiyāma]: 9); 

This is a cataclysmic irruption into what God has set in order for man, for 

“these both cannot come into contact” (Q. 36 [Yāʾ Sīn]: 40). 116 The poet’s 

drinking-session is, thus, apocalyptic, a temporal moment when the barrier 

between the terrestrial and the celestial is removed. 

Mosaic Whisperings 

Animation of the inanimate is the burden of the following short piece: 

1. An aged wine, sparks which ignite and glitter in the cup, 

2. Like a shining planet and the full moon illuminating the longest night of the 

year: 

3. If it were to be brought into conjunction with night in the darkness, night’s 

gloom would be dispelled; 

116 See further Q. 81 (al-Takwīr): 1, idhā kuwwirati l-shamsu; P. Kunitzsch, “Sun,” Encyclopedia 

of the Qurʾān, V, pp. 162-163. WD3.132.17-135.11 = §103 is a vital example of the importance 

of alchemy in Abū Nuwas’s khamriyyāt.


4. Enabling its imbibers to acquire joys (tuksibu . . . surūran) so that they are 

affrighted by no anxiety 

5. Laughingly revealing pearls, set wide-apart , which the water had 

composed (allafa) in a order: 

6. I did not taste it without first confiding whispered secrets (unājī), in its presence, 

some words to the goblet (WD3.283.4-10 = §241). 

The key phrase for me here is unājī al-kaʾsa, confiding whispered secrets to the 

goblet, which is obscure and for which I know of no other exact parallels. 117 

What could it mean to confide in a goblet? Hamori discerns the possible presence 

of Christian celebration, deeming it “mischievous” (p. 66). I am reminded 

of the Christian and Muslim tradition of Munājāt Mūsā, The Colloquies of 

Moses with God, in which “God explains to the astonished prophet Moses 

that another prophet called Muḥammad will appear in the future and eclipse 

him in fame and importance.” Mūsā then testifies to the “light” of Muḥammad. 118 

Traces of this tradition are to be discerned in “the ḥadīth literature as well as in 

religious treatises going back to the early ʿAbbāsid period.” According to Joseph 

Sadan, who has pioneered the study of these texts, 

In certain Christian versions as well as in some Muslim ones, God lets Moses hold 

a cup, or one or more carafes, but Moses falls asleep while holding them, proving 

117 The closest parallels I can find in Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt are WD3.344.13 = §301.1 

(khalawtu bi-l-rāḥi unājī-hā), where the poet whispers to the wine not the goblet. Cf. WD3.323.9- 

11 = §278.1-3: You with the bewitching glance, you who are ever drowsily listless,// Under your 

eyes, the secrets in men’s hearts are declared openly; 2. When you examine, with the glance of 

your eye, one who is secretive, //A clear enunciation (tibyān), in the form of his glance, whispers 

to you (nājā-ka) — 3. If your eyes look intently , his secrets are out 

in the open, //As if you have a power (sulṭān) over their minds (awhām); WD3.73.8-9 = §47.3- 

4: He said, “I have in my keeping a ten-year old girl,” and I said to him, like one who whispers 

(man yanājī), // “Let me taste her that I may know this of her!” So he brought out a 

sharp wine which shuddered and quaked; WD3.72.2 = §45.9, his (i.e. the saqi’s) person is far 

away from me, while his desire is as the one who whispers ; WD3.17.9 = 

§10.5; WD3.22.11-12 = §14.6-7; WD3.72.2 = §45.9; WD3.73.8-9 = §47.3-4; WD3.402.16 = 

§381.5 ( yā najiyya l-diyāri kayfa yunājī-ka diyārun mina l-anīsi khalāʾū); the anonymous verse 

quoted by al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Bayān, 1.79.1 (bi-l-najwā al-ḥadītha l-munʿammasā); Ibn al-Shajarī, 

al-Ḥ amāsa al-shajariyya, ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿīn al-Mallūḥī and Asmāʾ al-Ḥimṣī, II, Damascus: 

Wizārat al-Thaqāfa, p. 774, §710, verse 3, of a poem by a woman of the Banū Asad who describes 

how the heads of the acacia trees cry to their lord in the heaven, whispering secrets (tunājī 

l-sirārā); Wajīha bint Aws in Abū Tammām’s Ḥ amāsa: al-Marzūqī, Sharḥ dīwān al-Ḥ amāsa, ed. 

Aḥmad Amīn and ʿAbd al-Salām Hārūn, III, p. 1407, §580, verse 3, la-nājaytu l-janūba ʿalā 

l-naqbī. 

118 On this notion, see the studies of Uri Rubin, “Pre-Existence and Light: Aspects of the 

Concept of Nūr Muḥammad,” Israel Oriental Studies 5 (1978): 62-119; “Prophets and Caliphs: 

The Biblical Foundations of Umayyad Authority,” in: Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic 

Origins, ed. Herbert Berg, Leiden: Brill, 2003, pp. 73-99.


that while human beings may fall asleep, God cannot afford such physical weaknesses. 

For if His “sitting” were to be interrupted the entire universe would 

collapse. 119 

If, then, Abū Nuwās is alluding to Mūsā’s audiences with God, we must remark 

that our poet does not commune with the deity but with one of her vassals: 

the drinking goblet. The goblet does not reply: like the amphora, its process of 

animation is partial. In both of these instances, the amphora and the goblet, it 

is the wine which seems to animate the inanimate. 

2. Abū Nuwās and the Transgressive Paradox 120 

I have said much about what others say about Abū Nuwās’s poetry and life. 

Let me begin by offering my own (belated) characterization of his khamriyyāt. 

These poems are the poetry of ambiguity and ambivalence, of paradox and 

antinomianism; of transgression and violation; of obsession and perversion 

(and note that I do not mean “deviancy”) by this; of chaste and pious devotion 

and profane obscenity. I also read the khamriyyāt as the poetry of cultic awe 

and divine immanence. It hovers unsettlingly and yet with certainty between 

innumerable opposites, among them the poles of zuhd and mujūn. It is the 

certainty of its unsettledness that makes it so subversive. In other words, the 

poetry of Abū Nuwās is like the very wine which is central to so much of it. 

Let me add two provisos. In the exposition which follows, I flit between 

considering Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt synchronically and phenomenologically, 

as a single composition, as a poem or a treatise, and not as the collected prod- 

119 “Ants, Miracles and Mythological Monsters: A Literary Study of Ant Narratives between a 

Jāḥiẓian Atmosphere and Munājāt Mūsā,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 30 (2005): 403- 

449 (pp. 423-424 and p. 437 respectively). See, for example, the discussion of the seventeenth 

century al-Nābulsī’s composition Munājāt al-ḥakīm wa-munāghāt al-qadīm, his secret conversations 

with God, by Andrew Lane, “ʿAbd al-Ghanī ibn Ismāʿīl al-Nābulsī (1641-1731): Experiences 

of a Sufi Shaykh on the Margins of Society,” in: Ostle, Marginal Voices, pp. 89-116 

(pp. 105-108). 

120 My understanding of paradox has benefited from W.V. Quine, “The Ways of Paradox,” 

in: The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976, 

pp. 1-18; Borges, The Total Library, pp. 43-48 (“The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise”); 

Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 261-295 

(“Zeno: Paradox and Progression”); and the various relevant articles (e.g., “paradox,” “semantic 

paradox”) in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2006. Noorani, Heterotopia, describes the Nuwasian khamriyya in a similar 

manner: for him it is transgressive, subversive and paradoxical; it aspires to the divine. His focus 

is on the discursive unfolding of normative selfhood. My materialism impels me to ponder the 

social loci of such unfoldings.


uct of some forty years of versification; and between focusing on individual 

poems, as if bereft of their occasion and context (in the manner of the New 

Criticism). This is, of course, quite paradoxical in view of my declaration that 

it behoves us to endeavour to create contexts for poems, and to recognise 

profoundly their occasionality. It is my contention, however, that the hypostatic 

khamriyya which this approach will produce, is a necessary first step 

towards the contextualisations (however conjectural they may be) which are 

my ambition. 

I have also, in the following survey, intentionally been quite relaxed about 

the question of attribution. A fuller version of the article might address the 

issue more closely, though I may note that I am unable completely to side with 

those who place so much faith in al-Ṣūlī’s cautious recension of the poet’s 

dīwān. Al-Ṣūlī “probably . . . judges on the basis of his literary feeling,” and 

there are discrepancies between this literary feeling and the transmission of 

Abū Hiffān, for example. 121 So even al-Ṣūlī’s scrupulosity is limited, probably 

also potentially unreliable. This is perhaps because of the magnetism of the 

poet’s persona, if we concede which, “the question of the authenticity of the 

poems referred to can largely be disregarded.” 122 

This does not mean, of course, that we should ignore the historical vagaries 

of the textual tradition. It is, rather, simply to recognise that, although al-Ṣūlī 

is an uncommonly adept reader of his tradition, his recension is still an act of 

selection, ordering and exclusion: in other words, an act of reading. 123 

After all, the khamriyya is an invented name devised to account for what the 

later critics and recensors considered a genre — I find it most improbable that 

Abū Nuwās would have referred to one of his poems on wine as a khamriyya. 

The critics were, I think, aware of the porosity and contingency of their divisions. 

Thus, Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī: 

This is the last of such bacchanals (khamriyyāt) as this chapter (bāb) contains: the 

sound (saḥīḥ) and the attributed (manḥūl ), the sturdily (matīn) and 

the weak (ḍaʿīf ), which I have copied (naqala) from the contents of books (buṭūn 

al-kutub), without either auditing (samāʿ) or reading them with a teacher 

(qirāʾa). Abū Nuwās has seventy verses on the description of wine (naʿt al-khamr), 

in addition to what is in this chapter. They have been included in the chapter of 

121 As Schoeler, Abū Nuwās’s Ghazal, p. 183, note 5, notes, invoking Wagner’s authority. 

122 As Schoeler puts it in his article “Iblīs in the Poetry of Abū Nuwās,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen 

Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 151 (2001): 43-62 (p. 43, note 1); see further Hämeen- 

Anttila, Abū Nuwās and Ghazal, pp. 91-97. 

123 See Ewald Wagner, “Warum haben Ḥamza al-Iṣbahānī und Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī mehrere 

Weingedichte aus ihren Rezensionen der Abū Nuwās-Dīwān ausgeschieden?,” Asiatische Studien 

62 (2008): 1085-1096. (I would like to thank Professor Dr Wagner for sending me an offprint 

of his article).


panegyric, scattered among the descriptions (tashbīb) of fourteen odes 

(WD3.268.5-8). 

And when he says that long study will remove for the diligent reader the 

“dross” (shawb) from Abū Nuwās’s poetry (WD3.1.8-11), we can discern that 

the classical critics’ assessments of authenticity were essentially impressionistic: 

personal and suasory in nature, no matter what sources or authorities they 

had to hand. 

Wine as Paradox 

Of all the dramatis personae of Abū Nuwās’s vinous verses, none is more paradoxical, 

more violent and awe-inspiring and yet seductively alluring, more 

amphibologous than the wine herself. 124 The acquisition and serving of the 

wine is often described in terms of a (sacred) wedding, though as this is anything 

but a normal wedding, its contours shift and change, and the wedding 

customs are subjected to an often bewildering variety of paradoxes and contradictions. 

125 

The Desirable Virgin Spinster 126 

This paradoxicality is most succinctly captured in her desirable virginality 

despite being a grey-haired hag: 

He arose with the awl and slowly poured out a virgin (bikr), a crone (ʿajūz) who 

was majestic beyond eulogy: 

124 See Kathryn Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety Wine in Early Islam, Albany: SUNY, 2001, 

pp. xiv-xvi; I have been deeply influenced by Walter F. Otto, Dionysus. Myth and Cult, trans. 

Robert B. Palmer, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1965. Throughout, I have been 

mindful that I am quoting verses out of their poetic context, a practice which is of common 

occurrence in discussions of Abū Nuwās’s religiosity (or lack of it). 

125 Abū Nuwās’s wine poems as a genre are the subject of the following fundamental studies, 

in which various aspects of the features I discuss are explored: J. Bencheikh, “Poésies bachiques 

d’Abū Nuwās. Thèmes et personnages,” Bulletin des Etudes Orientales 18 (1963-1964): 7-84; 

Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 290-307; Hamori, On the Art, pp. 31-77; Īliyyā Ḥāwī, Fann al-shiʿr 

al-khamrī wa-taṭawwuru-hu ʿinda l-ʿArab, Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1981, pp. 209-306; Philip F. 

Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry. Abū Nuwās and the Literary Tradition, Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1997; Meisami, Structure and Meaning, pp. 31-43; Noorani, Heterotopia. 

126 Abū Nuwās reveres the wine as the love poet reveres his beloved; cf. J. Christoph Bürgel, 

“The Mighty Beloved: Images and Structures of Power in the Ghazal from Arabic to Urdu,” in: 

Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature, 1, pp. 283-310; Wagner, Abū Nuwās, p. 302 

(wine would help to seduce victims) and p. 305 (the wine dispels the pains of love); Meisami, 

Structure and Meaning, pp. 32 and 35.


She had seen Nūḥ, when she was already old and grey, and had witnessed aeons 

before Nūḥ (WD3.98.6-7 = §74.6-7). 127 

Hamori has pointed out that Abū Nuwās has adapted to wine a pre- and early 

Islamic idea concerning war, which at first seems pleasant as a young girl but 

soon turns into a vicious old hag. In al-Kumayt’s verse which he adduces, and 

that by Imruʾ al-Qays provided by Meisami, the emphasis is on the deceptive 

appearance of war. In Abū Nuwās’s oenomaniacal cosmos there is no difference 

between what the wine really is and what it appears to be: the wine is both, 

and as such is truly paradoxical. 128 

As befits a chaste Muslim girl, she has been kept safe and is veiled: 

5. I said to him, “Go easy! This is the lightning burst of the golden from 

beneath her veil (niqāb), 

6. So pour it forth and you will see a delight, for the pelt of the night is pitchblack.” 

7. And he gazed in starts that he might get a glimpse even though his 

gaze remained shaded by her headdress (ḥijāb) (WD3.48.11-13 = §27.5-7). 

. . . 

8. So he went off quite merrily with his awl and drew forth a virgin who had not 

been brought out for any husband, 

9. Well-protected: they had kept her secluded and veiled in her apartment, 

away from eyes, for Kisrā, wearer of the crown (WD3.72.12-13 = 

§46.8-9). 129 

127 Virgin: WD3.189.1 = §160.4 (ʿadhrāʾ); WD3.88.8 = §58.3 (bikr); crone: WD3.173.5 = 

§141.8 (shamṭāʾ); WD3.94.7 = §67.6 (bikran ʿajūzan zāna-hā kibarun / fī ziyyi jāriyatin fī l-lahwi 

milḥāḥū); Bencheikh, Poésies bachiques d’Abū Nuwās, p. 78. Age: WD3.32.18 = §21.16; 

WD3.63.1-2 = §40.16-17; WD3.78.1 = §50.12; WD3.172.3 = §145.2; WD3.235.10 = 

§206.10 (Stored away for Ādam before his creation — it preceded him with the footsteps of 

priority: see al-Iṣfahānī’s comment ad loc. that this relates to a ḥadīth concerning the construction 

of the Kaʿba; in this the wine resembles the separately created, pre-existing, blazing light of 

Muḥammad’s prophethood given to Ādam as his primogenitor: Rubin, Pre-Existence and Light, 

pp. 96-98); WD3.324.5-6 = §278.10-11. Abū Nuwās’s use of the Prophets in his wine poems 

would repay a comparison with their roles in the Ḥadīth on wine. Thus, a pre-diluvian wine 

must be one which was taken on board the ark by Nūḥ, and one the alcohol of which Iblīs had 

constrained Nūḥ to yield to him. See Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 59-64 on Nūḥ and Iblīs in 

the ḥadīths on wine; Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 304-305; Schoeler, Iblīs, pp. 50-52. The notion 

recurs in the Nuwasian panegyric: WD1.153.3 (1958, p. 143.13-145.8: verse 3, p. 144.3) = 

(al-māḍāʾiḥ) §11.3. 

128 Hamori, On the Art, p. 49; Meisami, Structure and Meaning, p. 32, who notes the transformative 

consequence of the transference of a motif from a gnomic context to a bacchic and 

erotic one. I would argue that the transformation is the principal means at the poet’s disposal to 

capture the profound ambivalence and anomaly of wine. 

129 Cf. WD3.32.18 = §21.16 (= Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 297-298).


The Suit 130 

When the poet and his companions arrive for the wedding ceremony, he has 

to settle the bride-price (mahr): 

Or 

8. He asked, pleasantly, “Well hello, who are you?” and I replied, “One of the 

noblemen, I go by many names; 

9. I have come to ask for the hand of the wine in marriage,” said I. “Dirhams,” 

said he, “Can you delay paying the bride-price?” (WD3.5.11-12 = §2.8-9) 

6. A charming suitor came to her, wearing a girdle and clothed in an izār, 

7. He paid the bride-price and she was conducted to him in her raiment (sarāwīl ) 

and her zunnār (WD3.150.5-6 = §113.6-7). 

On one occasion, the suitor has to avoid offending the bride: 

1. Suitor of the sharp, golden (qahwa), setting her bride-price at a kilo 

(raṭl ), providing for her her full weight in gold, 

2. You have undervalued the restful, scented (rāḥ)! Beware lest she hears 

you and the vine swears to bear grapes no more. 

3. I lavished upon her, when I saw her, a ton of unpierced pearls and rubies, 

4. And still she was shy and tearfully said in the amphora, “O my mother, shame 

upon you, I fear fire and flame!” 131 

5. And I replied, “You need never fear this from us.” “What about the sun?” “The 

heat has passed,” said I 132 

6. “Who is this who asks for my hand?” “Tis I,” “My lord and master?” “Water, 

provided it is sweet.” 

7. “How will I be inseminated?” “With the coldest ice there is.” “My abode — 

I do not like wood?” 

8. “Glass tumblers and beakers which Pharaoh had produced.” “You have aroused 

excitement (ṭarab) in me,” she said. 

9. “Do not allow a boor to drink me nor a base creature who will frown, when he 

smells me, 

130 Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 300-301; Schoeler, Eine Weingedicht, p. 749; Meisami, Structure 

and Meaning, p. 37. 

131 I presume this to be an allusion to those ḥadīths which permit the consumption of wine 

and other intoxicating beverages provided that two-thirds of the liquid have been boiled off: see 

Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 59, 61 and 77. The wine is often said to be afraid of fire: e.g. 

WD3.14.10-11 = §8.9-10. 

132 The wine is the daughter of the night: WD3.5.3 = §2.2 (al-laylu wālidu-hā wa-l-ummu 

khaḍrāʾū) (= Wagner, Abū Nuwās, p. 293); time is her father (WD3.18.1 = §10.8), though she is 

older than time (WD3.133.8-11 = §103.4-5) and they are siblings (WD3.102.1 = §80.3; 

WD3.155.7 = §88.6); water is also her father: WD3.14.7 = §8.6.


10. Nor a Majūs for the fire is his lord, nor a Jew, nor him who worships the 

Cross 

11. Nor the vile whose generosity does not recover from the insult (?), 

nor him who has no learning, 

12. Nor rude dolts, those who will not protect me from fools! Give me instead to 

the Arabs to drink!” 

13. “O wine, forbidden to all but a man who has amassed wealth and has lavished 

property and land on you” (WD3.49.6-50.11 = §28). 

The Parturition of the Wine 

When the amphora/uterus is pierced, it is a violent violation of the wine’s 

mother: 

Then I ruptured her waist with the point of the awl and she came like a flame 

(WD3.33.12 = §21.19); 

It is not always the poet who disembowels the amphora, but the cellar master 

or mistress: 

She slashed open, at the jugular (waddaja), the waist of an amphora which had 

been veiled and brought out a sharp (qahwa), the colour of rubies 

(WD3.65.5 = §41.10); 

. . . 

The punch pierced her heart and it was as if, with her scent, she gave us apples 

(WD3.77.12 = §50.10) 

. . . 

I punctured her bung-hole, as the night sank in darkness, and she flowed with 

milk from the severed jugular (WD3.303.3 = §266.3) 

The milk is probably a transgressive metaphor for the wine, as Muḥammad 

had, according to the Ḥadīth, been tested by the Angel Jibrīl with a choice 

between milk and wine. 133 

The Bridal Procession 

The wine, often married against her wishes, is dangerous and difficult to 

control: 

133 See Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 55 and 57 on milk and wine in the Ḥadīth; for dirra 

as “milk” and not simply any flowing substance, see WD3.31.15 = §21.11 (the vine suckles the 

poet with her milk) (see below p. 88); WD3.431.9 = §415.13 (naḥlubu darra l-surūri); Kunitzsch, 

Zeus in Bagdad, p. 100, referring to WD1.162.8 (1958, p. 151.12) = (al-madāʾiḥ) §14.5, darr 

al-ḥilāb.


A dark as if it were nothing but perfume, which they gave away in marriage 

though she did not desire to be wed (WD3.74.3 = §48.2); 

. . . 

I was insane for a virgin, inexperienced, strong, with a mighty assault in the glass, 

a restive (WD3.189.1 = §160.4) 134 

The bride is led out in all her finery to her husband: 

She was conducted to the most magnanimous of her suitors, her girdle roses and 

eglantines (WD3.339.7 = §295.4). 

The Ceremony 

The water, in the mixing process, provides the wine with her wedding finery: 135 

A sharp which came to you, before her mixing, unadorned and the mixing 

clothed her in a girdle (WD3.77.9 = §50.9) 

. . . 

Upon mixing in her goblet you would think that you had scattered over her a 

bride’s headdress (WD3.189.2 = §160.5) 

When the marriage ceremony takes place, the wine may be wedded to the 

water: 

11. So take her, if you will drink the lightning bolts of wine, with water from the 

clouds, made up of rain drops from heavy clouds, 

12. To make her his bride, for rain is the husband of the vines (WD3.286.11- 

12 = §245.3-4). 136 

Equally, though, and paradoxically, the water can also be a virginal bride, and 

in this instance the poet is the groom: 

So I passed the night in his premises as a groom to two virgins, water and wine 

(WD3.91.5 = §62.11). 

134 WD3.80.15 = §51.11; WD3.93.5-6 = §65.3-4; WD3.99.7 = §76.6. 

135 On mixing, see Bencheikh, Poésies bachiques d’Abū Nuwās, pp. 41-47. 

136 See also Bencheikh, Poésies bachiques d’Abū Nuwās, pp. 39-40.

Consummation 


This transgressive wedding can only be consummated by the poet, for sometimes 

the wine is drunk neat or for some reason the mix will not take: 

Too subtle for the water such that the mix will not take: water is too coarse for the 

body (shakl ) of the wine (WD3.3.6 = §1.6); 

Wine’s Contrarieties 

Just as the cellar master and the poet deflower the wine, so too the wine exacts 

its vengeance by deflowering the poet of his best kept secrets: 

She shreds the veils of the inner mind (ḍamīr), tearing them from his guts and 

brings out into the open every imprisoned secret (WD3.189.3 = §160.6). 137 

It has also deprived him of all his possessions: 

I spend upon her generously and lavishly, and I hoard her stingily and miserly 

(WD3.85.6 = §53.4); 

. . . 

Relaxing, scented : I desire her, even if she deprives me of my livelihood 

and reduces my surplus (WD3.234.13 = §206.8); 

Therefore, this wine is both illness and cure: 

Leave off criticizing me for to criticize is but to incite; cure me instead with that 

which is the disease — (WD2.4 = §1.1) 138 

. . . 

Do not be duped about her who has been made the sickness of the sound and the 

cure of sickness (WD3.266.5 = §231.2) 139 

. . . 

A sharp that leaves the sound sick and lends the sick the cloak of the 

sound (WD3.85.4 = §53.3); 

137 See Kennedy, Genius, p. 61. 

138 On the origin of the topos: see below, note 257. See also WD3.71.10 = §45.5; WD3.96.10 

= §71.3; WD3.271.1 = §232.9 (= Wāliba’s poem translated below, pp. 60-61). The poem is 

discussed by Ḥāwī, Fann, pp. 217-228. 

139 Note: khudʿa (lā tukhdaʿanna) is a term connected with debates about the deceptiveness of 

a false prophet: see, e.g., al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥ ujaj al-nubuwwa, in: Rasāʾil, ed. Hārūn, III, p. 227.3 (wa-lā 

mutaṭarrif mājin wa-lā ḍaʿīf makhdūʿ).


The wine is deadly: 

Golden which hunts and kills souls, though sleep (subāt) is the 

only visible wound she inflicts on them (WD3.77.13 = §50.11). 140 

Even the bold man of high ambition loses his will to succeed: 

When she reaches the uvula of the brave warrior, his ambition signals a departure 

from his breast (WD3.230.18 = §205.7); 141 

Thus, the drinking-session is a funeral: 

The doves there pass the night at a wake, just as mothers bereft and despoiled of 

their children chant their funereal threnodies (WD3.32.6 = §21.13); 

Therefore the poet desires her and fears her (WD3.22.5 = §14.1). 

This wine is the ultimate paradox, bringing life to the spirit through wreaking 

death, as it revivifies the almost dead body of the imbiber: 

She took me into a cellar where I waited for a long time, like a body (jasad ) in the 

belly of a coffin (tābūt) (WD3.65.4 = §41.9); 

Immured in this cellar-tomb, the body of the imbiber is buried as the wine is: 

It was concealed in the amphora and has grown to be an old spinster buried inside 

a coffin ( fī jawf tābūt) in the earth (WD3.63.2 = §40.17) 142 

While this signals death for the drinker, this is a death which is not a physical 

dying but is both a rather obvious metaphor for the stupor of intoxication and a 

statement of the soul’s separation from the body in drunken unconsciousness: 

Give it to him to drink until he dies from drunkenness, but is not immured — by 

your life! — in a grave (WD3.98.8 = §74.8). 143 

140 In this the wine suborns God who gives man sleep (subāt) in the Qurʾān: Q. 25 (al-Furqān): 

47; Q. 78 (al-Nabaʾ): 9. 

141 See WD3.26.5 = §18.4. 

142 Montgomery et al., Revelry and Remorse, p. 118. 

143 For the belief that the spirit (rūḥ) left the body during sleep, see the verse by Ibn al-Muʿtazz 

quoted and translated by Thomas Bauer, “The Arabic Ghazal: Formal and Thematic Aspects of 

a Problematic Genre,” in: Ghazal as World Literature II. From a Literary Genre to a Great Tradition: 

The Ottoman Gazel in Context, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Hess, Judith Pfeiffer, Börte 

Sagaster, Würzburg: Egon Vorlag, 2006, pp. 9-10.


Thus the wine effects the resurrection of the soul: 

She was passed around and blamelessly resurrected (aḥyat) the souls of those 

whom she had laid low and exhausted (WD3.16.10 = §9.5); 

. . . 

He passed her round three full times and their souls were made compliant by her, 

and there was none who stayed thirsty (WD3.114.11 = §87.10); 144 

Just as the wine brings life through taking it away, so the grapes give life, nursing 

the poet as a mother does her infant: 

10. Quṭrabbul was my vernal residence; in the villages of al-Karkh did I pass the 

summer: my mother was the grapes 

11. Suckling me with her milk and cloaking me in her shade when the noontide’s 

heat was ablaze. . . . 

15. So I arose and crawled to her breasts just as the infant in thirst’s grip struggles 

to walk (WD3.31.12-15 & 32.13 = §21.10-11 & 15). 

Yet, although as old as Methuselah, the wine is not immortal: 

A Karkhī vintage, matured for an aeon until most of its atoms (ajzāʾ) 145 have gone 

(WD3.16.6 = §9.3); 

. . . 

I said to her, when I saw the wine rise dispelling the darkness, 

“Alā, Wine! May you be granted a long life (ḥuyyītī)!” (WD3.65.7 = §41.12); 146 

. . . 

13. As (Time) bad her farewell he released some of her secrets, and had he not 

wearied of her, it would not have been to declare permissible 

(yubāḥā) 

14. So she came to you in/amid image-forms (ṣuwar) consumed by corruption 

(bilā) which had destroyed them and left but the outlines (ashbāḥ) behind 

(WD3.78.2-3 = §50.13-14); 147 

144 For the significance of inthanat: see WD3.95.5 = §68.2; WD3.418.11 = §399.8; 

WD3.118.9 = §90.22; in WD3.11.3 = §6.10, the saqi “doubles up” or “yields” (i.e. sways) when 

he sings. In a private communication, Professor van Gelder suggests “perhaps a metaphorical 

‘doubling up’ of the soul, as if it were imitating the body under the influence of the wine.” 

145 An apolaustic translation would render ajzāʾ as “parts.” 

146 See also WD3.20.6 = §11.6; WD3.86.2 = §54.2; WD3.370.13; WD3.411.14 = §388.9; 

WD3.413.11 = §392.2; WD3.432.12 = §417.12. 

147 For the use of ashbāḥ, see also WD3.92.2 = §63.2. See Rubin, Pre-Existence and Light, 

pp. 98-102, for the Shīʿī notion of ashbāḥ nūr referring to the “primordial luminous reflections 

of the[ir] corporeal bodies” of ʿAlī and his family (“shadows of light, lucent bodies without 

souls”). According to one account, Adam and Eve were permitted by God to see an “image (ṣūra) 

of Fāṭima . . . with a crown on its head, which stood for ʿAlī; its two ear-rings symbolised al-Ḥasan 

and al-Ḥusayn” (p. 99).


The topos at the heart of this conceit is the chalice decorated with images 

of long-dead heroes and kings but the poet gives it a metaphysical twist by 

the ambiguity of the preposition fī, and by the deployment of the philosophical 

language of form (ṣūra) and decay (bilā = fanāʾ), of continued existence 

(thubūt) and appearance (shibḥ). The image is rendered more phantasmagoric 

by the fact that the true essence of the wine is, as will become clear, the spirit/ 

pneuma (rūḥ) as light (nūr), 148 which is the only perduring reality (ḥaqīqa 

thābita), the jawhar to the ṣūra, i.e. the corporeal form of the wine which the 

spirit, its essence, assumes. 

Luminescence 

Perhaps the most striking and frequently noted feature of Abū Nuwās’s wine 

is its luminescence. 149 While critics have often drawn attention to this luminosity, 

few, apart from Hamori, have stressed the centrality of the Light Verse 

of the Qurʾān (Q. 24 [Al-Nūr]: 35): 

God is the light (nūr) of the heavens and the earth: the similitude of His light is 

as an alcove in which is a lamp (miṣbāḥ); the lamp is in a glass (zujāja); the glass 

is like a brilliant planet, ignited (yūqad ), from a blessed olive tree, neither eastern 

nor western; its oil is almost luminiferous, though untouched by fire: a light upon 

a light; God guides to His light those whom He wishes and God strikes similitudes 

for the people, for God knows all things. 

148 A fuller version of this study should investigate more systematically the semantic range of 

rūḥ in early ʿAbbasid texts, in particular its function as pneuma: see further the section below 

entitled, “The Myth of Aristophanes,” which is a tentative foray into the study of this important 

concept; al-Ashʿarī, Kitāb Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn wa-khtilāf al-muṣallīn, ed. Hellmut Ritter, Beirut-Berlin: 

Klaus Schwarz, 2005 4 , p. 333.13-p. 337.12; Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 

III, Berlin: de Guyter, 1992, pp. 245-246 (rūḥ in Abū l-Hudhayl) and 350-352 (rūḥ in 

al-Naẓẓām’s thought); R.M. Frank, “Al-Maʿná: Some Reflections on the Technical Meanings of 

the Term in the Kalâm and its Use in the Physics of Muʿammar,” Journal of the American Oriental 

Society 87 (1967): 248-259 (pp. 250-251). For present purposes, I have left the matter as 

open as possible, with my rendering “spirit/pneuma”: Hamori, On the Art, p. 66 notes that 

according to al-Shahrastānī, for the Manichaeans, “rūḥ is the subtlest of the ajnās an-nūr”; cf. 

Peter E. Pormann and Emily Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

University Press, 2006, p. 45 (for the physicians’ three types of rūḥ: ṭabīʿī, ḥayawānī and nafsānī); 

WD3.86.2 = §54.1; WD3.86.6 = §54.5; WD3.95.2-8 = §68; WD3.95.9-11 = §69; WD3.96.4 

= §70.3; WD3.96.10 = §71.3; WD3.105.11 = §81.11; WD3.144.10 = §109.23; WD3.146.2 = 

§110.14; WD3.370.13; WD3.416.2 = §395.7; WD3.416.7 = §396.4; WD3.416.2 = §397.2. 

149 Bencheikh, Poésies bachiques d’Abū Nuwās, pp. 28-31; Wagner, Abū Nuwās, p. 305; Schoeler, 

Eine Weingedicht, pp. 749-750; Hamori, On the Art, pp. 63-67.


All of the elements of the Light Verse are present in Abū Nuwās’s paeans to 

vinous luminosity: the light, the oil, the lamp, the glass. 150 Just as the oil of the 

olive-tree glows though not kindled, so too does the wine. And, of course, the 

wine acts as a guide in the darkness. Indeed, on one occasion, the cosmogonic 

powers of the wine are even heralded (WD3.6.10 = §3.4), as constructing the 

heavens and an earth, threatening even to oust the divine presence in the 

poet’s psyche. Thus the wine is an object to which prayers are directed by its 

guardian (WD3.172.8 = §140.6) and to which souls shout the labbay-ka 

(WD3.22.10 = §14.5). 

Each of the following instances, in varying degrees, refract the Light Verse: 

5. Pouring from the lip of the decanter a wine so pure in colour that to look at it 

is like blinking the eyes, . . . 

7. If you were to mix it with light, then the mix would take, and rays and beams 

of light would be generated (tawallada) (WD3.3.4 and 8 = §1.5 and 7); 151 

The wine in the glass is like a lightning storm, as it glows though not ignited: 

2. When I raised my hand, the lightning bolts of her light shone forth, upon 

being commoted, 

3. He (i.e my drinking companion) crept back and then stretched out his hands 

looking to warm them since she was being so generous with her flames 

4. And noticed that his fingers were turning red though he had not been burned 

by the heat of the meteor (shihāb) 

5. I said to him, “Go easy! This is the lightning burst of a golden from 

beneath her veil (niqāb) 

6. So pour it forth and you will see a delight, for the pelt of the night is pitchblack.” 

150 A fuller version of this article would postulate a conversation between light in the Nuwasian 

khamriyya and the ideas of Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896), his doctrine of nūr Muḥammad, his 

theory of death, sleep and ascent (raf ʿ) and his psychology of nafas (breath), nafs al-ṭabʿ (natural 

soul) and nafs al-rūḥ (spirit soul): see Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in 

Classical Islam, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980, pp. 149-153 and 244-246; Gerhard Böwering, “Early 

Sufism between Persecution and Heresy,” in: Islamic Mysticism Contested. Thirteen Centuries 

of Controversy and Polemics, ed. Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke, Leiden: Brill, 1999, 

pp. 45-67 (especially pp. 59-61). Many of the luminous characteristics (e.g. guidance, lamplikeness, 

and pre-eternity or priority in creation) of Abū Nuwās’s wine are typical of the nūr 

Muḥammad: Rubin, Pre-Existence and Light, pp. 63, 68, 69 and passim. 

151 Note the use of the term tawallada, a term popularised in scientific speculations by Bishr 

b. al-Muʿtamir (d. 210/835) by the start of the third/ninth century: see van Ess, Theologie, 

III, pp. 116-121; Abū Nuwās WD3.36.4 = §22.2 (ṣubḥan tawallada); WD3.86.12 (tawallada 

l-faraḥū).


7. And he gazed in starts that he might get a glimpse even though his 

gaze remained shaded by her headdress (ḥijāb) (WD3.48.8-13 = §27.2-7). 152 

Or it takes the place of lamps and the morning during the nocturnal drinking 

session: 

7. He said, “Bring me the lamp!” but I replied, “Steady on! Her light will do as a 

lamp for me and you.” 

8. So I poured a draught of her into the glass which served as a morning for him 

until the morning (WD3.77.3-7 = §50.7-8). 153 

In one of the poet’s most celebrated figures, the luminescence of the wine 

becomes the oil of the “Light Verse”: 

In her he brought a golden, oily , before whom we could not forbear prostrating 

ourselves (WD3.131.13 = §102.11) 154 

This light, then, has extraordinary, transformative powers. We have seen 

examples of how, in its vinous form, it can resurrect the souls of those who 

drink it (WD3.16.10 = §9.5). It is capable of rebirth like the ʿanqāʾ (WD3.6.9 = 

§3.3). So too, in what appears to be a rejection of al-Naẓẓām’s theory of latency 

(kumūn), even stones are brought to life: 

A golden where sorrows do not alight: even a stone would be touched 

with joy were she to touch it (WD.3.2.12 = §1.2); 155 

And because the wine is light it is too subtle to be mixed with water but only 

with its like, light: 

6. Too subtle for the water such that the mix will not take: water is too coarse for 

the substance of the wine; 156 

152 See also WD3.23.14 = §15.5; WD3.25.10 = §17.2. 

153 See also, e.g., WD3.15.8 = §8.17; WD3.22.14 = §14.9; WD3.41.12-13 = §24.4-5; 

WD3.71.12 = §45.7; WD3.73.7 = §47.2; WD3.74.2 = §48.1; WD3.74.12 = §49/1; 

WD3.77.3-7 = §50.7-8; WD3.88.2 = §57.5; WD3.93.8-12 = §66; WD3.114.10 = §87.9; 

WD3.115.8 = §88.7; WD3.174.4-9 = §142.7-12; WD3.186.11 = §158.5; WD3.271.4-5 = 

§232.10-11 (see the translation of Wāliba’s poem below, pp. 60-61); WD3.297.12 = §259.4; 

WD3.413.1-2 = §391.1-2; WD3.415.3 = §394.2. 

154 See Kennedy, Genius, p. 68-71; Kennedy, “Abū Nuwās, Samuel and Levi,” in: Medieval 

and Modern Perspectives of Muslim-Jewish Relations 2 (1995): 109-125. Cf. WD3.34.6 = §21.21, 

for the comparison with molten gold. 

155 On the theory of kumūn, see above note 66; WD3.54.1 = §33.7 (idhā jarā l-māʾu fī 

jawānibi-hā / hayyaja min-hā kawāmina l-shaghabī). 

156 Cf. WD3.134.4 = §103.8 (ālat ilā jawharin laṭīfin / ʿiyānu mawjūdi-hā ḍimārū).


7. If you were to mix it with light, then the mix would take, and rays and beams 

of light would be generated (WD3.3.6-8 = §1.6-7); 

. . . 

Too fine to be touched, she is like the moon rising in the water, too elusive for the 

onlookers (WD3.174.6 = §142.9) 

Abū Nuwās’s wine not only embodies light, it also has a soul: 

Her cellar master could scarcely draw any of her off except for the last dregs of her 

soul (ḥawbāʾ) (WD3.16.9 = §9.4) 

The wine is more subtle than the spirit/pneuma of the imbiber: 

2. A red who turns yellow when mixed, more subtle in the imbiber than 

his spirit, 

3. Whose breaths (arwāḥ) diffuse the scent of roses, whose scent has a more 

pleasant smell than their scent (WD3.98.11-12 = §75.2-3); 

That is because the wine is both a spirit/pneuma and not a spirit/pneuma: 

A spirit/pneuma (rūḥ), whose body (juthmān) is an amphora, whose raiment is 

pitch, whose veil (miʿjar) is palm-strands and cotton (WD3.324.4 = §278.9); 

. . . 

A Karkhī wine, like the spirit/pneuma (rūḥ) which creeps , 

mixed with forbearance intermingled (dākhala) with modesty and gravity 

(WD3.173.6 = §141.9) 157 

The nature of the wine-soul-spirit/pneuma can only be grasped by the intellect: 

So say to him who claims philosophy as his discipline (ʿilm); you know something 

but other things are hidden from you (WD3.4.3 = §1.11); 158 

. . . 

There came to you an entity (shayʾ) which you cannot grasp except with the beauty 

of an innate reasoning intellect (ḥusn gharīzat al-ʿaql) (WD3.235.10 = 

§206.11) 159 

157 The collocation of rūḥ and mudākhala in this verse may be an allusion to the theories 

of Hishām b. al-Ḥakam (d. 179/795-6): see W. Madelung, “Hishām b. al-Ḥakam,” EI 2 , III, 

pp. 496-498. 

158 A more apolaustic translation would render ʿilm as “knowledge.” I suspect that ʿilm, which 

in early ʿAbbasid texts often refers to religious knowledge, here implies “the body of sources and 

doctrines from which you draw your system,” i.e. as tantamount to a sunna. 

159 My ‘technical’ translation of shayʾ (see, e.g., WD3.89.1 = §59.2; WD3.89.7 = §60.3) has 

been suggested by the use of gharīzat al-ʿaql ( gharīza is a frequent synonym of fiṭna or ṭabīʿa in 

early ʿAbbasid texts). Reasoning apolaustically, we might render, “There came to you something 

which . . .”.


Yet, still it defies description: 

Is it a sun which you have lent (aʿarta) the goblet or is she a bolt of lightning or 

have you brought forth the felicitous planet? (WD3.115.6 = §88.5) 160 

And thus wine is beyond comprehension and definition: 

1. Between the perduring (mudām) and water a bitter antipathy obtains, 

which erupts into rage when the water touches her, 

2. So that you see her eyes white around the rim of the goblet, though she 

does not suffer the effects of any disease; 161 

3. When she pulls against her reins, because she is so subtle, she seems in the 

imagination to be a ʿanqāʾ, 162 

4. Building a heaven upon an earth suspended , like a clot of blood 

(ʿalaq), while the earth is white: 

5. Its stars are brilliant white ( yafaq) while its surface is a clot of blood, which the 

air raises above the stars of the goblet; 163 

6. She is too august for the imagination, so that when the imagination goes in 

quest of her, and, in the description, names take her place (yukhlifū-hā), 

7. Reflections and conjectures (ẓunūnu l-fikr) define her through division (taqassamat) 

and she has become split up into parts, just as individual opinions (arāʾ) 

have divided religions, 164 

8. Served from the hand of a coquet with sweet characteristics, like a virginal girl 

when viewed with the eye; 

9. It is for her that I weep, and no man, weeping perpetually over cairn-stones 

and traces, has yet made me weep (WD3.6.6-7.3 = §3). 165 

160 The pun on aʿāra (lending) in an istiʿāra (metaphor) is interesting. 

161 See Q. 12 (Yūsuf): 84. 

162 See al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-l-tadwīr, ed. Ch. Pellat, Damascus: Institut Français de 

Damas, 1955, §50, §72.2 and pp. 174-176; according to al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥ ayawān, ed. ʿAbd 

al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn, VII, Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabi, 1938-1945, pp. 121.7- 

122.3, the Shumayṭiyya worship the ʿanqāʾ with Zurāra b. Aʿyān as the head of the sect: see van 

Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, I, Berlin: de Guyter, 1991, pp. 321-323 (“Zurāra b. Aʿyān und 

sein Kreis”), especially p. 326; Ch. Pellat, “Essai de reconstitution d’un poème de Maʿdan 

aš-Šumayṭī,” Oriens 16 (1963): 99-109 (especially pp. 104-105); Heinz Halm, “Shumayṭiyya,” 

EI 2 , IX, p. 501. 

163 I take ahwāʾ to be a poetic plural for ahwiya; see Ibn Rusta, Kitāb al-Aʿlāq al-nafīsa, ed. 

M.J. de Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1967, p. 23.1-24.13, for a fascinating digest of “the diversity of the 

peoples of the belief-based communities (milal ) concerning the shape of the earth.” 

164 Definition by division (al-ḥadd bi-ṭarīq al-qisma) was contrasted with its agnate, definition 

by composition (al-ḥadd bi-ṭarīq al-tarkīb); as a method of considering the relationship between 

jins (genus) and fuṣūl (differentiae) it proved very popular with ʿAbbasid thinkers. 

165 Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 296-297 (for verses 6-9).


Thus the wine is apotheosized in a moment of supreme apophasis: words and 

verse, for all their precision and their technicality in this poem, cannot capture 

her unique oneness. 166 

Wine’s Company 

And yet, perplexingly, for all this indivisible uniqueness, the wine is somehow 

incomplete: 

The relaxing, scented is delicious and sweet and yet her perfection is nothing 

without the delicacy of the innate dispositions (khalāʾiq) of the companions 

(WD3.187.3 = §158.7). 167 

Of course, this must surely mean that wine drunk alone is not as pleasant as 

wine consumed in good company. And yet we learn from many khamriyyāt 

that Abū Nuwās is prepared to drink on his own, without the blessings of 

good cheer, so is there another sense in which the tamām, the perfection, of 

wine is dependent on the carousing company? 

The luminescent wine transmogrifies, it animates the inanimate, and it 

renders translucent those who, like the sāqī, come into contact with it. If 

there is, in the khamriyyāt, an entity as luminescent as the wine, it is the company 

of braves, with whom the poet penetrates the gloom of night, on a raid 

amid the taverns and fleshpots of Basra and Baghdad in search of wine. 168 In 

this parodic (i.e. counter-generic, though not always — to my ear at least — 

mocking), redefining of the Jāhilī ethos, these warrior braves have no peer 

(WD3.16.13 = §9.6; WD3.131.15 = §102.13), are men improved by education, 

in the full bloom of youth (WD3.30.8 = §21.4) and of perfect and 

immaculate appearance (WD3.256.5 = §223.4), are men of truthfulness 

(WD3.130.2 = §102.1) and do not dissemble, for dissembling is to be avoided 

(al-murāʾīn and mirāʾ: WD3.126.13 = §101.2; cf. WD3.385.11 = §329.10). 

166 A more complete version of this article should investigate the centrality of God as light 

in the system of Hishām b. al-Ḥakam and in the Theology of Aristotle and the philosophical tradition’s 

identification of this light with the rūḥ or the ʿaql: see Tj. de Boer, “Nūr,” EI 2 , VIII, 

pp. 122-123 (p. 123). 

167 Khalāʾiq I take to be a poetic equivalent of akhlāq, plural of khuluq, on which see Montgomery, 

Speech and Nature, Part 4. 

168 For the importance in the Shīʿī tradition of the ideal of futuwwa, see Sara Sviri, “The Early 

Mystical Schools of Baghdad and Nīshāpūr: In Search of Ibn Munāzil,” Jerusalem Studies in 

Arabic and Islam 30 (2005): 450-482, especially pp. 459-462, where she notes that ʿAlī and the 

Imāms were idealised as fityān and refers to the pronouncement of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in rejection of 

al-futuwwa bi-l-fisq wa-l-fujūr (p. 459, note 35), which could easily be a characterization of 

prominent features of the khamriyyāt of Abū Nuwās.


They are, then, a futuwwa, and no matter how they may invert the bellicose 

dictates of the Jihad in their carousals, they remain a martial troop: 

1. When the Father of War deploys the cavalry for war 

2. And the banner of death has passed before the Sheikh as a signal 169 

3. And its battle reaches maturity and is ignited, setting fires ablaze, 

4. And we ignite our combat as dalliance with those whom we love and who 

love us, 

5. And the heat of the engagement bares its teeth in a snarl 

6. We make our hands into bows and lilies into arrows 

7. And send ahead, in place of standard and spear, sweet basil. 

8. Then our battle reverts to friendship and we become comrades once again 

9. Of braves who deem dying in pleasure a sacrifice: 170 

10. When they beat the drum we strum lutes 

11. And draw up squadrons of gillyflowers, all colours: 

12. The stones of our mangonels are the apples of Lebanon 

13. And the cause of our war is a sāqī who has taken a wine captive and gives us 

it to drink, 

14. Urging on the goblet so that the next can overtake the first — 

15. You can see this one felled, laid low, and that one flaccid, drunk. 

16. This war is not a war which engulfs people in enmity 

17. In it we kill them and then resurrect our victims (WD5.168.16-169.16 = 

§167). 171 

We might easily be seduced into mistaking this as effete sybariticism (although 

we should note the correspondence between sexual conquest and militarism), 

but the task at hand in drinking sessions is dangerous: the confrontation with 

the deadly and life-affirming substance of the wine which leads to the death 

and rebirth of the drinkers through their ingestion of the divine light. Moreover, 

there are resonances for Nuwasian priapism in what Bloom, in a discus- 

169 I presume the “Sheikh” to be Iblīs: see Schoeler, Iblīs, pp. 45-46 (for references to Iblīs as 

“the Sheikh”) and p. 46, note 6, poem §5 on p. 48, with note 9, and §11 on p. 50, for parodies 

of militarism similar to that obtaining in the present poem. 

170 Cf. the use of qātala in the ghazal poem by Ibn al-Muʿtazz quoted by Bauer, The Arabic 

Ghazal, p. 9; Bürgel, The Mighty Beloved, p. 291 offers a literal explanation for the prevalence of 

the notion of killing in love poetry. 

171 When considered in this context, I must confess that in my earlier reading of the poem, 

that it “cocks a snook at the imperial cult of war” (in The Marginal Voice, p. 31), my apolaustic 

reading of Abū Nuwās had trivialized the nature of his transgression of the Jāhilī heroic paradigm. 

Meisami, Structure and Meaning, pp. 42-43 and p. 472, note 41, sees in this and similar 

poems a rejection of war in favour of wine; Schoeler, Ein Weingedicht, p. 753, makes the brilliant 

suggestion that the bāʾiyya (WD3 §26) which is the object of his study is a muʿāraḍa of the 

paradigmatic (i.e. Bedouin, tribal) Qaṣīda. On Jāhilī battle imagery in Abū Nuwās’s tavernraiding 

poems, see Mattock, Description and Genre, pp. 531-532 (on p. 535, he speaks of 

Abū Nuwās’s “quasi-sexual conquest of wine”); WD3.54.4-9 = §33.10-15; WD3.59.6 = §37.3; 

WD3.89.6 = §60.2 (niʿma silāḥu l-fatā l-mudāmu).


sion of the serpent’s sexual violation of both Adam and Eve in the Book of 

Baruch by Justin the Gnostic, refers to as “the priapic function of the serpent” 

which is “to purify consciousness by a kind of sexual scourging.” 172 Therefore, 

the companions are the true men of valour: 

There was many a group of companions, white, noble, chieftains, predators, 

morning-raiders (WD3.90.13 = §62.3) 173 

Their tribal vaunting is in indecency: 

We passed the night in God’s eyes as the worst of troops, trailing behind us the 

skirt-hems of debauchery ( fusūq) — and that is no vaunt! (WD3.129.2 = 

§101.16) 

They are agnates, through being the sons of the vine: 

I said, “Wine!” He said, “Yes, for I am a man magnanimous with it to the sons of 

the vines!” (WD3.91.2 = §62.8) 

And thus, as warriors, they are as sharp (and as burnished) as swords (WD3.30.8 

= §21.4). However, in this cosmic drama, these brave warriors are luminous 

before coming into contact with the wine: 

Splendid young blades, like lamps in the darkness, proud-nosed, stiff-necked 

keen — (WD3.61.10 = §40.1) 174 

The company then are inflections of the divine lamp of the Light Verse, in 

allusion to both this āya and an image coined by Imruʾ al-Qays. 175 They too 

172 For a slightly different rendering, see Montgomery, The Marginal Voice, pp. 30-31; on 

priapism, see Bloom, Criticism, pp. 412-413; see Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety, p. 147, note 32 

(on the seduction of Eve by the serpent in the Ḥ adīth); Gedaliahu A.G. Stroumsa, Another 

Seed. Studies in Gnostic Mythology, Leiden: Brill, 1994, p. 41, note 20 and his Chapter 2, “The 

Archons as Seducers,” pp. 35-70; generally; Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the 

Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, p. 191, note 25. 

173 See further ʿiṣābat sūʾ: WD3.131.15 = §102.13. The brothers of Yūsuf boast that they are 

a ʿuṣba: Q. 12 (Yūsuf): 8; cf. WD3.256.6 = §223.5, “this one is for that as that and this are for 

this, so the bond is compact, and the rope of union is unbroken.” 

174 Montgomery et al., Revelry and Remorse, p. 117. 

175 See Montgomery et al., Revelry and Remorse, p. 119. Compare this with the verse recorded 

by al-Balādhurī on the authority of ʿAwāna b. al-Ḥakam (d. 147-8/764-5) said to have been 

uttered by ʿAbd Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās against the caliph Yazīd (d. 64/683-4) for killing Ḥusayn and 

his companions: qatla-ka ḥusaynan wa-l-fityān banī ʿabd al-muṭṭalib maṣābīḥ al-dujā: Rubin, 

Pre-Existence and Light, p. 94, note 65a.


embody the pneumatic-spiritous light which the wine embodies. As her sons, 

they share the same essence with the wine, being generated from the same 

spark of divine light. So it is that the poet, his comrades and the wine are soulsiblings: 

You who rail at me concerning the perduring , whose advice is insincere, 

do not upbraid me for her who is the sister of my spirit/pneuma (shaqīqati rūḥī)! 

(WD3.85.2 = §53.1) 

. . . 

The sister of the soul (shaqīqati l-nafsi), who has been veiled and concealed from 

your eyes, and the structure of the body (qayyimi l-jismī) (WD3.266.8 = 

§231.3) 176 

Their souls share the same substance and the poet’s body is supported by this 

substance which is the pneuma/spirit. 

Thus, the wine needs the company to achieve perfection, for this death and 

resurrection is in effect a reuniting of the one (luminous) substance which had 

been separated upon birth. 

That others are fortunate to share this special nature is obvious from the 

apostrophe of the first verse of the following mīmiyya, even though there is 

some disagreement over its authorship (and occasion). The following poem is 

a jewel of a composition. Ibn Qutayba is quite clear that the poem is by Abū 

Nuwās’s Kufan mentor, Wāliba, whereas according to other authorities, it was 

extemporised by Abū Nuwās while in Egypt, just before collapsing in a 

drunken stupor in a puddle of his own pee. Here is Ibn Qutayba’s khabar: 

Wāliba b. al-Ḥubāb said about him: 

1. Soul-brother from Ḥakam ( yā shaqīqa l-nafsi), you passed the night asleep, 

though I did not, 

2. So give me to drink a virgin who has donned the scarf of grey hair in the womb 

(al-raḥimī); 

3. To whom youth returned anew, after she had passed the age of senectitude: 

4. Who exists for the day when she is broached, though in antiquity she is Time’s 

child, 

5. Aged and matured so that if she were to be fitted with a tongue that could 

speak and a mouth, 

6. She would sit prominently among the people and then tell them the story of 

the nations. 

7. A hand, created for the cup 177 and the stylus, pierced her for the mixing, 

176 See also WD3.86.2 = §54.1 ( yā ṣāḥi rūḥī) and WD3.25.2 = §16.3 (the poet’s companions 

are the wine’s in-laws). 

177 Al-Iṣfahānī (WD3.270.7) reads li-l-sayfi, for the sword.


8. Among boon-companions, noble chieftains who take their pleasures openly 

and head-on (min amamī). 

9. So she walks through their joints as a cure moves through an illness 

10. And when mixed produced on the house like that produced by 

the dawn on the darkness, 

11. And the night-traveller in the gloom was guided by her just as voyagers are 

guided by the way-mark. 

This is what al-Daʿlajī informed me, a man who kept company with Abū Nuwās 

and transmitted on his authority, although most people accredit the poetry to 

Abū Nuwās, whereas it is actually Wāliba’s, who uttered it about him. 178 

Note once again the echo of the Light Verse in the last two bayts. 179 Irrespective 

of the composer of the poem, be it Wāliba, be it Abū Nuwās, the poem is 

addressed to a pneumatic-spiritual brother. In the following poem, the poet’s 

agnatic relationship to the wine is striking: 

1. A critic once criticised me so that he could bring about a heresy (bidʿa). Now 

that, by my life!, is a course of action I am not capable of. 

2. He criticised me that I would not drink the relaxing, scented , because 

her legacy is a crushing debt on those who taste her. 

3. But critics have only succeeded in making me more persistent, because for as 

long as I live, I am her fellow — 

4. Am I to reject (arfuḍu) her when God has not rejected her name, and here is 

the Emir of the Believers who is her friend? 

5. She is the sun, except the sun is ablaze, whereas our sharp surpasses it 

at all times 

6. So, although we may not dwell in eternity here on earth, our companion for 

all time is her sweet — 

7. So, my critic, give me it to drink and then sing, for I am her brother (shaqīq) 

until the time of my death, 

178 Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb al-shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ, ed. Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir, Cairo: Dār 

al-Maʿārif, 1966-1967, p. 797.1-14 (§1449); Abū Nuwās = WD3.269.10-271.10 = §232; Ḥāwī, 

Fann, pp. 228-233; Kennedy, Genius, pp. 71-73. 

179 Compare the following mīmiyya and Ḥamza’s khabar: A caravan which erred from the 

right direction (ḍallat ʿani l-qaṣdi) when the horizon darkened with the night and overtook 

them: // They hearkened to a voice, while we were a troop (ʿiṣāba) with a brave among us trilling 

in his drunkenness // And a sharp shone forth to them from us, despite the distance, 

its gleaming like the light of a blazing fire — // When we sipped her they stood still where 

they were, and if she was mixed, they urged on the beasts and headed in direction 

(WD3.301.1-4 = §264). The khabar on the authority of al-Ḥusayn b. al-Ḍaḥḥāk recounts how 

Abū Nuwās composed this while on pilgrimage in Mecca, having overhead a boy reciting Q. 2 

(al-Baqara): 20. Ḥamza consults Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn on this khabar who rejects the 

Qurʾanic provenance, alleging that he plagiarised it (sariqa) from a poetic lāmiyya.


8. “When I die, bury me beside a vine where the roots will water my bones after 

my death!” (WD3.222.7-223.4 = §199) 180 

The wine enjoys divine and caliphal sanction, suggesting that the carper, whose 

sentiment in verse two chimes with the Ḥ adīth, 181 has misunderstood the very 

essence of Islam, whence his bidʿa. 

The poet and his crew are the sons of the vine. 182 As such they are, like the 

wine, children of the vine, because their souls are typified with the inherence 

of the spark of divine light. It is this divine spark which illuminates another 

feature of the company: their apparent imperviousness to and domination of 

time: 

It was passed from mouth to mouth among nobles who had humiliated time for 

time could only touch them as they wished (WD3.3.8 = §1.8). 

. . . 

2. Who assaulted Fate with dalliance to which they clung assiduously, so that 

their attachment to it could not be severed, 

3. For whom Time brought round its felicitous spheres and halted, bending its 

tender neck over them (WD3.61.11-12 = §40.2-3). 

Time is to be attacked with pleasure and this can only be done without threat 

of retribution because the carousers understand the true meaning of the transience 

of this mortal coil. Intoxication, i.e., communion with the divine light 

through wine, shortens time’s span (and so brings Paradise ever closer): 

The life of the brave is in intoxication after intoxication, for if he does 

this long, time will become short (WD3.127.1 = §101.3); 

And yet, even such a choice company must needs part, whether in life or 

death: 

Then Time wrought disturbance and they were dispersed and scattered throughout 

the lands, like al-Sabaʾ (WD3.30.10 = §21.5). 

Even the certitude of an eternity’s delight is little consolation for the poet’s 

solitude. On the contrary, as will become apparent, this solitude can engender 

the most unsettling doubts about the believer’s certainty of salvation. 

180 Once again, note the inflection of the Light Verse in the fifth bayt. The final taḍmīn is a 

quotation from Abū Miḥjan al-Thaqafī. 

181 Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 41-52. 

182 They are also the sons of the wine: WD3.434.6 = §419.8.

The Myth of Aristophanes 


In the concept of psychic fraternity and sorority, Abū Nuwās’s poetry resembles, 

at first sight, several explorations, during the first ʿAbbasid century, of the 

myth of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposion, brilliantly studied by Dimitri 

Gutas, 183 who shows that the spiritualised, as opposed to the corporal, version 

of the Aristophanes myth “gained great currency because it was interpreted 

from the very beginning in the light of a native Arab conception about the 

nature of love” (p. 54). Here is Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq’s version (Gutas Frg. B1.1) of 

a dictum ascribed to Ptolemy: 

Ptolemy was asked about love and he said: God created every spirit round in the 

form of a sphere, which he then cut into [two] halves and put one half in every 

body. So every body which encounters the body containing the half [of the spirit] 

which was cut from its own half, love arises between the two on account of the 

original relationship. People’s experiences in this regard vary in intensity according 

to their natural dispositions. 184 

A variety of ninth century texts investigate the notions of mushākala, mujānasa 

and taqārub al-arwāḥ, including, as Gutas notes, al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Qiyān and 

Ibn Dāwūd’s Kitāb al-Zahra. 185 Indeed, the Ṣūfī al-Daylamī (fl. ca 392/1000) 

even attempts, in this context, an ishtiqāq (an etymology) of shawq (yearning) 

from the root shaqqa, to cleave (Gutas Frg. B1.6). Thus, on the basis of Gutas’s 

investigation, we might conclude that the pneuma-spirit of the wine and the 

pneuma-spirit of Abū Nuwās, created by God as one, are now reunited in their 

love and mutual attraction, having been sundered in creation. 

Yet, what of the disputed poem, that composed either by Abū Nuwās or by 

Wāliba b. al-Ḥubāb, which begins with the apostrophe, “Soul-brother from 

Ḥakam” ( yā shaqīqa l-nafsi)? And what of my argument that the poet, the 

183 Dimitri Gutas, “Plato’s Symposion in the Arabic Tradition,” in: Greek Philosophers in the 

Arabic Tradition, Ashgate: Aldershot, 2000, pp. 36-60. 

184 Gutas, Plato’s Symposion, pp. 48 and 58. Add to his references the line by al-ʿAbbās b. 

al-Aḥnaf, quoted by Simon Kuntze, “Love and God. The Influence of Ghazal on Mystic Poetry,” 

in: Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature, 1, p. 162; Renate Jacobi, “Abbasidische 

Dichtung,” in: Grundriß der arabischen Philologie, p. 47 refers to the poetry of al-Ḥallāj, who 

describes two souls mingling as wine and water mingle; see further Kuntze, Love and God, 

pp. 174-175; the exchange between al-Mubarrad and Sahl al-Tustarī on whether the nafs and the 

rūḥ are connected: Böwering, Mystical Vision, pp. 245-246. 

185 On mushākala see further Montgomery, Speech and Nature, Part 4. That the rūḥ is mudawwara 

is central to the credal system rebutted in the Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ wa-l-Tadwīr: see J.E. Montgomery, 

“Al-G ̌ āḥiẓ and Hellenizing Philosophy,” in: The Libraries of the Neoplatonists, ed. Cristina 

D’Ancona, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 443-456 (p. 444) for the other possible senses of tadwīr in 

al-Jāḥiẓ’s attack on Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb.


wine and the companions all share the same pneuma-spirit? All of Gutas’s 

evidence stresses that spirits were created individually and then sundered in 

twain, although there is an intriguing passage, again from al-Daylamī: 

Plato said: God Almighty created the spirits as a whole in the form of a sphere 

(khalaqa l-arwāḥ jumlatan ka-hayʾat al-kura). He then divided them among all 

His creatures and lodged them in those bodies of His creation that He wished. 186 

Al-Daylamī seems to be combining the spiritualised Aristophanes myth with 

another tradition, the one which I think informs Abū Nuwās’s invocation 

“soul brother.” That tradition is Qurʾanic, according to which God infused 

Ādam, the first human being, with His own spirit: 

And when your Lord said to the angels, “I am creating a human out of a clay paste 

of fetid filth; And when I have fashioned him and have blown into him of My 

spirit (rūḥ), then fall down in homage before him!” (Q. 15 [al-Ḥijr]: 28-29) 187 

. . . 

He who rendered beautiful every thing which He created — He first created man 

out of mud; then He made his progeny of the substance of lowly water ; then He 

fashioned him and blew into him of His spirit (rūḥ) and made for you hearing, 

eyes and hearts — how little grateful you are! (Q. 32 [al-Sajda]: 7-9) 188 

186 Gutas, Plato’s Symposion, p. 52; al-Daylamī, Kitāb ʿAṭf al-alif al-maʾlūf, ed. J.-C. Vadet, as 

Livre de l’inclinaison, Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿhad al-ʿIlmī al-Faransī li-l-Āthār al-Sharqiyya, 1962, 

p. 40.5-6, §144; al-Daylamī, Traité de l’amour mystique, trans. J.-C. Vadet, Geneva: Droz, 1980, 

p. 83, §144; F. Rosenthal, “On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World,” 

Islamic Culture 14 (1940): 420, n. 9; Cristina D’Ancona, La Circolazione diretta e indiretta del 

testo di Platone in arabo. Traduzione dei Dialoghi, Compendi, Raccolte di ‘Sentenze’: http://www. 

gral.unipi.it.doc/ attiv_sett_2007/Dancona_Circolazione.pdf. 

187 See also Q. 38 (Ṣād): 70-71. 

188 See the ḥadīth of Imām al-Bāqir on the authority of Bukayr b. Aʿyan: Dakake, The Charismatic 

Community, p. 148 (and pp. 149 and 281, n. 46); Rubin, Pre-Existence and Light, pp. 

97-98; generally, Cornelia Schöck, “Adam and Eve,” Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, I, pp. 22-26 

(with useful references); Angelika Neuwirth, “Negotiating Justice: A Pre-Canonical Reading of 

the Qurʾanic Creation Account,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 2/1 (2000): 25-41 and 2/2 (2000): 

1-18; Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 31 and 59-61 (on the ḥadīths concerning Ādam’s struggle 

with Iblīs over the vine); E.E. Calverley/I.R. Netton, “Nafs,” EI 2 , VII, pp. 880-884; Th. Emil 

Homerin, “Soul,” Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, V, pp. 80-84; Michael Sells, “Spirit,” Encyclopaedia 

of the Qurʾān, V, pp. 114-115; Brannon M. Wheeler, Prophets in the Quran, London: Continuum, 

2002, pp. 15-35. A fuller version of this article would consider the significance of Ādam 

and Nūḥ in Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt and in the Ḥ adīth on wine (bearing in mind that according 

to Ibn al-Muʿtazz, Ṭabaqāt, p. 201.11-16, Abū Nuwās was ṣāḥib ḥifẓ wa-naẓar wa-maʿrifa 

bi-ṭuruq al-ḥadīth), and the poet’s identification with Iblīs: Schoeler, Iblīs in the Poetry of Abū 

Nuwās, pp. 43-62 (useful references on p. 44, note 4, and p. 57, note 25); Michael Sells, Early 

Islamic Mysticism, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996, pp. 31-33. Madelung, Early Sunnī Doctrine, 

p. 246, describes an argument by which Abū ʿUbayd establishes that “his [Murjiʾite, JEM] 

opponents . . . would be forced by their doctrine to maintain that Iblīs . . . is a believer” because


The poet, the wine, and the companions seem, then, like Prophet Muḥammad, 

to share in this infusion of the divine spirit, to be divinely guided by its light, 

just as the wine as light leads to the straight and true path: 

As have We inspired in you a spirit of Our command — you did not know 

the Writing or the Belief but We made it a light by which We guide those of 

Our slaves whom We wish, for you guide to a straight path (Q. 42 

[al-Shūrā]: 52); 189 

Humans, when infused with the rūḥ, are harbingers of the Day of Judgement: 

Elevated all levels, the Lord of the Throne, who casts the spirit of His 

Command on those of His slaves whom He wishes that they give warning of the 

Day of Meeting (Q. 40 [Ghāfir]: 15). 

Thus, Abū Nuwās’s wine poems constitute a pious response to, appreciation 

and realisation of the guidance of the Qurʾān, as enucleated in these verses — 

they are expressions of his and his companions divinely mandated role as harbingers 

of the End Time. 190 

Consider two other defining notions celebrated and intoned in the 

khamriyyāt: that Abū Nuwās, the wine and the companions share in the divine 

light; and that despite (or in Abū Nuwās’s vision: because of ) their sins, they 

are confident, perhaps even certain, of entry into Paradise. That these notions 

are consonant with what Etan Kohlberg has identified as two of the ten credal 

nuclei of Rafiḍism (that “the Imams and their community were created of a 

according to the Qurʾān Iblīs professes that God is his lord. It would be foolish not to explore the 

possibility that Abū Nuwās might share such a vision of Iblīs as a believer in view of the relevance 

of doctrines held by the Murjiʾites and Shiʿites of Kufa for contextualising Abū Nuwās’s persistent 

declaration of his Muslim identity in his khamriyyāt. In a ḥadīth attributed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, 

Satan is said to have no power over the Shīʿa, which may well be why he has no choice but to 

assist Abū Nuwās in his designs: see Dakake, The Charismatic Community, p. 162. 

189 See further the discussion in Dakake, The Charismatic Community, pp. 170-172. 

190 See Halm’s discussion of the reliance on Qurʾanic verses among the Shīʿī groups he identifes 

as characterized by ghuluww: Courants et mouvements, pp. 136-137 (Qurʾān 5 [al-Māʾida]: 

93 and 4 [al-Nisāʾ]: 28). He notes that the Mukhammisa were said to have held that those who 

recognised God’s envoys on earth were completely exempted from the Sharīʿa and from all servitude 

(istiʿbād ) (p. 137). See also the passage in the Kitāb al-Aẓilla where Jaʿfar b. al-Ṣādiq is 

said to declare: fa-huwa ḥīnaʾidhīn ḥurr qad saqaṭat ʿan-hu l-ʿubūdiyya wa-kharaja ʿan ḥadd 

al-mamlūkiyya ilā ḥadd al-ḥurriyya (p. 138). Rubin, Pre-Existence and Light, p. 102 notes a tradition 

quoted from the Musnad of Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-ʿAdanī (d. 243/857-8) that “the collective 

subtsance of the Quraysh was placed as a light before Allāh two thousand years before the 

creation of Adam.” Rubin notes “that no later than the beginning of the third century A.H. the 

concept of the primordial prophetic substance (originally conceived as a part of human sperm), 

has a pure cosmogonic connotation, gaining wide currency in Muslim literature” (p. 102).


heavenly substance and are thus sharply distinguished from the outside world” 

and “that only members of this community are believers; they remain in this 

state of belief even when they sin, and are guaranteed entry into Paradise)” 

prompts me to suggest that, in this and in his response to these Qurʾanic 

verses, Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt are, in the context of what we know of the 

forms which early ʿAbbasid Islam could assume, recognisably and identifiably 

Islamic, though I do not wish to imply that Abū Nuwās was proclaiming a 

specifically Rāfiḍī identity in his wine poems. 191 

The Libertines of Kufa 

Abū Nuwās and his companions are then, I propose, the elect; they are beacons 

of light in the community, the chosen ones for whom salvation is predestined 

by virtue of their share in the luminous spirit of divinity, those charged 

with the divinely mandated mission of announcing the Revelation. 192 Can we 

hazard a guess at their identity? 

Let us consider the following lampoon of Abū Nuwās’s nemesis, Abān 

al-Lāḥiqī: 

He uttered as invective against Abān b. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Lāḥiqī, the mawlā of 

the Raqāshīs (in mujtathth) 

1. I witnessed Abān one day — what a bad lot Abān is! — 

2. While we were in attendance at the portico of the Emir in al-Nahrawān, 

3. Until, when the first prayer came at its time, 

4. And my Lord’s admonisher stood, piety and good, 

5. Summoning the people to it (i.e., the prayer), euphoniously and beautifully 

clear — 

6. Whenever he spoke, we answered, until the call to prayer was over, — 

7. He (Abān) said, “How can you bear witness to this without having seen it 

with your own eyes? 

8. I shall never bear witness until my eyes see for themselves!” 193 

9. I declared, “God have mercy!”, “Mānī have mercy!” said he; 

10. I declared, “ʿĪsā is a messenger!” “From Satan,” said he; 

191 2 Etan Kohlberg, “Al-Rāfiḍa,” EI , VIII, p. 387; Montgomery, Al-Ǧāḥiẓ and Hellenizing 

Philosophy, pp. 452-454; Dakake, The Charismatic Community. 

192 See Dakake, The Charismatic Community, pp. 144, 157 and 163 for the election of the 

Shiʿites in early Shīʿī Ḥadīth. 

193 This sentiment is not too dissimilar from Abū Nuwās’s infamous poetical witticism about 

the dead not returning from Paradise which Ibn al-Dāya urged him to conceal and which led 

to his imprisonment by Hārūn al-Rashīd: see above, pp. 49-52; Cook, Early Muslim Dogma, 

pp. 44-47, for a discussion of the epistemology predicated upon muʿāyana and tajriba among the 

Murjiʾa and the Dahriyya.


11. I declared, “Mūsā is the confidant (najī ) of the All-Generous Watcher,” 

12. “Does your Lord have an eye-ball and two ear?” said he, 

13. “Did he create himself or who did?” 194 I arose from my place 

14. an unbeliever quarrelling over his unbelief in the Merciful, 

15. I arose, proudly walking away from one who trivialised (hāzil) the Qurʾān 

16. Intending to equate with that wanton crew (ʿuṣba): 

17. ʿAjrad, ʿUbād, and al-Wālibī, the noble ones, 

18. Ibn al-Iyās who bewailed the twin palm trees of Ḥulwān, 

19. Qāsim and Muṭīʿ, the boon-companion’s bouquet. 

20. “You and I are fornicators, born of fornicators and fornicatresses!” (WD2. 

78.5-80.6) 195 

As Kennedy notes, the poem oscillates between hijāʾ and mujūn, so it is uncertain 

whether Abū Nuwās is attacking an enemy or jocundly engaging with a 

co-sectarian and al-Jāḥiẓ’s commentary is ambiguous, expressing genuine perplexity 

over some details of the attack, in amazement at Abū Nuwās’s association 

of Abān with the other individuals named, noting that “Abān, even when 

he was drunk, was of a sounder reasoning intellect than they were when 

sober.” 196 

The doctrine which Abū Nuwās attributes to Abān in verse 12 is typical of 

the Sumaniyya, 197 the empiricist’s shahāda of verses 7-8 is also attested of the 

poet Bashshār b. Burd, the createdness of God (verse 13) is a Dahrī expression 

of the eternity of the universe, while the poet’s pious invocation of Mūsā in 

verse 11 is an allusion to the Jahmite thesis upheld by Jaʿd b. Dirhām, that 

God did not address Moses, and for which he was executed. 198 

194 A theological rendering, as al-Jāḥiẓ prompts us to give it, of nafs would suggest “Did 

his soul create him or who did?” See also the instances where I would argue for a ‘technical’ use 

of nafs: WD3. 7.6 = §4.2; WD3.15.2 = §8.13; WD3.16.10 = §9.5; WD3.21.11 = §13.6; 

WD3.22.10 = §14.5; 77.13 = §50.11; WD3.86.8 = §54.7; WD3.94.3-4 = §67.2-3; WD3.139.5 = 

§106.8; WD3.403.7 = §381.12; WD3.410.13 = §387.7; WD3.413.11 = §392.2; WD3.423.8 = 

§404.4. 

195 See the version given by al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥ ayawān, 4.448.6-452.3; Ch. Pellat, Le milieu baṣrien 

et la formation de Ǧāḥiẓ, Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953, pp. 220-221; Chokr, Zandaqa, 

p. 246. 

196 Ḥ ayawān, 4.448.6-452.3; Kennedy, Genius, pp. 98-100: “the poem is so reckless that it 

contains a glaring grammatical mistake for which even a schoolboy would be severely reprimanded.” 

See verse 12 for the solecism. 

197 See van Ess, Theologie, II, pp. 20-22. 

198 Chokr, Zanadaqa, pp. 245, 246 and 247 respectively, for these three points. The twin 

palm trees of verse 18 were the subject of a charming poem by Muṭīʿ b. Iyās which enjoyed great 

popularity, but may possibly be concerned with those ḥadīths which deal with the origin of wine 

and mention the vine and the palm: Chokr, Zandaqa, pp. 273-274; Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, 

pp. 30-31.


Attacks of this last sort, in which an individual identified in the sources for 

his zandaqa attacks another for his zandaqa, declaring all the while proper 

conformity with Muslim belief, are commonly attested in the sources. Thus, 

for example, a certain Musāwir al-Warrāq composed one such invective against 

Ḥammād ʿAjrad, 199 in which the ideas of tawḥīd, ʿibāda, and tazanduq are 

bandied about, as are the names of Mānī and Daysān, while the self-same 

Ḥammād ladles into a certain ʿUmāra b. Ḥarbiyya for his imputed zandaqa. 200 

Ḥammād himself is attacked by his name-sake, Ḥammād al-Zibriqān in a 

hijāʾ in which he is threatened with punishment on the Day of Judgement for 

his neglect of his prayers. 201 And I would suggest that the vituperative poems 

exchanged by Abū Nuwās and al-Faḍl al-Raqāshī are of the same stamp. 202 

Abān’s co-sectarians in the poem are, in Kennedy’s phrase, 

The (in)famous “dissolutes of Kufa” . . . it would have been transparent to Abu 

Nuwas’s audience that he was in fact much more connected with these “mujjan” 

than Aban. 203 

The Kufan libertines, into whose society Abū Nuwās was initiated by Wāliba 

b. al-Ḥubāb, are a shady company, notorious in the sources for their oenomania 

and their pederasty, and for what the sources deem their transgression of 

Muslim cultic practice and unacceptable religious beliefs, which earn them the 

label of zindīq. These sources are also unanimous in celebrating their ẓarf, 

their wit, in C.S. Lewis’s “old sense” of the term. 204 Although, as van Ess points 

out, we do not know what they did to earn their daily bread, many were poets, 

others were state amanuenses, and yet others were aristocrats. 205 

199 Chokr, Zandaqa, p. 268, refers to al-Murtaḍā, al-Amālī, ed. Muḥammad Abū l-Faḍl 

Ibrāhīm (Cairo, 1954), 1.134 (which I have been unable to consult). 

200 Al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥ ayawān, 4.443.10-444.11; Chokr, Zandaqa, p. 244. 

201 Al-Jāḥiẓ, Ḥ ayawān, 4.445.1-5; Chokr, Zanadaqa, p. 265. 

202 Van Gelder, Some Types of Ambiguity. Perhaps the poem discussed by Schoeler, Iblīs, p. 52 

(WD2.109.17-110.13) is another instance. 

203 Kennedy, Genius, p. 98, though I suspect that the poem was addressed to more than one 

audience. 

204 C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 86-110: 

“wit meaning mind, rationality, good sense” (p. 97); ẓarf as “wit” in Lewis’s “dangerous sense” 

(“that sort of mental agility or gymnastic which uses language as the principal equipment of its 

gymnasium”) is central to Chokr’s analysis of “le courant libertin et ses représentants zindiqs”: 

Zandaqa, pp. 247-250; Zoltan Szombathy, “On Wit and Elegance: The Arabic Concept of 

Ẓarf, ” in: Authority, Privacy and Public Order in Islam, ed. B. Michalak-Pikulska and A. Pikulski 

(Peeters: Leuven, 2006), pp. 101-120 (an essentialising treatment of ẓarf, which allows little to 

no room for development in the compass of the term over time). 

205 Theologie, I, p. 444.


The older generation successfully and safely managed the transition from 

Umayyad to ʿAbbasid and they were all notably well connected with members 

of the ruling ʿAbbasid elite. 206 Remarkably, perhaps (if we allow the zandaqa of 

all those descried as zindīq in this context to be a consistent designation of an 

ideological or a credal category — a big ‘if,’ I know), all of them survived 

al-Mahdī’s purge of zandaqa, which occurred while they were in Kufa. 207 And, 

while Ibn al-Nadīm makes a vital distinction between, on the one hand, them 

and their ilk (the composers of the poetry of zandaqa) and, on the other, those 

who produced treatises and engaged in dialectical combat with the Muslim 

mutakallimūn, 208 I am unable to content myself with Professor van Ess’s conclusion, 

that “poetry was a lingua franca in which only witticisms counted,” 

and that the poets therefore merely toyed with zandaqa, as part of a modish 

vogue, in a salon world full of the chattering classes, a sort of Fin-de-Siècle 

‘Fine Society.” 209 

The Kufan Libertines appear to have formed something of a closed society 

the features of which were not, for example, dissimilar, on the one hand, to 

what we know of the early eighteenth century Edinburgh authors who published 

in Blackwood’s Magazine (see note 94, above), or the London authors 

who formed the Scriblerian Club (among them Alexander Pope, John Gay 

and Jonathan Swift), publishing under the pseudonym Martinus Scriblerus; 210 

and, on the other, to the secret societies such as the Hell-Fire Clubs or the 

eighteenth century Medmenham Friars (under the aegis of Sir Francis Dashwood, 

d. 1781, Member of Parliament and Justice of the Peace), where radical, 

rationalist criticisms of the Church and the establishment were promoted 

along with a heady mixture of boozing and whoring and other antinomian 

practices. 211 In many ways, they also remind me of the male cenacles in late 

206 Chokr, Zandaqa, p. 249. 

207 van Ess, Theologie, I, p. 444. And even if we allow the obverse to obtain, that the remit of 

zandaqa as applied by al-Mahdī was sufficiently vague as to act as a catch-all, then the zandaqa 

of the libertines appears somehow not to have been amenable to inclusion in its remit. 

208 Fihrist, 401.19; Theologie, I, p. 444. 

209 Theologie, I, pp. 443-444. 

210 Martinus Scriblerus (Alexander Pope), Peri Bathous, Or: The Art of Sinking in Poetry, London: 

Oneworld Classics, 2009; Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters. The Construction of Charisma 

in Print, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, discerns similar tendencies in the 

international epistolary circle of Erasmus of Rotterdam as she teases out the orchestration of 

texts, the confection of correspondence, the exposure of forgeries and identification of impostors 

carefully stage-managed by Erasmus with his correspondents; Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is an 

Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspetive, New York: Columbia University 

Press, 2000, pp. 1-23, highlights Sir Thomas More’s Utopia as a text of this stamp. 

211 Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies, New Haven: Yale 

University Press, 2008.


nineteenth century Oxford which saw the emergence of “Uranian” poetry, in 

which homosexual desires were voiced in a language fraught with allusiveness 

(the term “Uranian” was understood to denote a type of love more “heavenly” 

than heterosexual desire) and devotees of the Uranian, who included Oscar 

Wilde, were drawn from the highest echelons of society. 212 

In other words, if the Kufan Libertines did form a closed society, we should 

endeavour at least to entertain the possibility of viewing their ideas, behaviours 

and obsessions not just as chatter or literary ephemera but as an expression 

of the religious and social norms which they wished to obtain within their 

society in early ʿAbbasid Iraq. 

Let us briefly return to the khamriyya with which I started, the one which 

begins “Time has become sweet, the trees have budded; winter has gone, and 

Ādhār (March) has come.” In the Kitāb al-Aghānī, al-Iṣfahānī recounts the 

following khabar: 

Aḥmad b. ʿUbayd Allāh b. ʿAmmār informed me: Abū Isḥāq al-Ṭalḥi told me: 

Abū Suhayl told me: Abū Nuwās told me: I used to imagine that Ḥammād ʿAjrad 

was accused of Manichaeism (zandaqa) simply because of his wantonness in his 

poetry (li-mujūni-hi fī shiʿri-hi) until I was imprisoned in the Gaol of the Manichaeans, 

and what do you know: Ḥammād ʿAjrad was one of their imams, and 

what’s more, he composed poetry in couplets (shiʿr muzāwaj), paired doublet by 

doublet, which they would recite in their prayers. 213 

Let me hazard an egregious conjecture: I would like to propose that we see in 

Ḥammād’s liturgical activity (the contents of his poems are not mentioned, of 

course, only their form) a possible analogue for this khamriyya and read the 

hypostatic Nuwasian khamriyya (insofar as I have reconstituted it in this study) 

as hymnodic, other examples of which may be found in his Dīwān. Of course, 

Ḥammād’s hymns were said to have been composed as arājīz muzdawija, as 

paired Rajaz poems. If Abū Nuwās composed any such hymns, then from 

the works extant in his Dīwān, he must have done so in the canonical metres. 

This is an important distinction and perhaps even catastrophic for my conjec- 

212 Thomas Wright, Oscar’s Books. A Journey around the Library of Oscar Wilde, London: Vintage, 

2009, pp. 199-207. 

213 Al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī, XIV, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, n.d. (1973?), p. 324.7-10; see van 

Ess, Theologie, I, p. 445; Ch. Pellat, “Ḥammād ʿAdjrad,” EI 2 , III, pp. 135-136; Fuat Sezgin, 

“Ḥammād ʿAǧrad,” in: Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, II, pp. 469-470; Vajda, Les zindīqs, 

pp. 203-206; Chokr, Zandaqa, p. 271; G.E. von Grunebaum, “On the Origin and Early Development 

of Arabic Muzdawij Poetry,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 3 (1944): 9-13 (p. 10); 

Manfred Ullman, Untersuchungen zur Ragǎzpoesie: Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1966, p. 49. I have not consulted A. Taheri Iraqi, 

Zandaqa in the Early ʿAbbāsid Period with Special References to the Poetry (Unpublished PhD 

Dissertation, Edinburgh, 1982).


ture. Yet there is one instance of an urjūza (admittedly not muzdawija), 

included by Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī in his recension of the Dīwān, and it seems to 

be, from the information available to me, the only khamriyya in rajaz attributed 

to Abū Nuwās extant in the three earliest recensions (by al-Ṣūlī, al-Iṣfahānī 

and Tuzūn). 

1. Carper, leave off criticizing me! 

2. And leave the remnants and the signs of the abode 

3. And describing the wasteland and the desert 

4. Effaced and not effaced, 

5. Drive away the soul’s anxieties with pleasures 

6. And meet them with the truest of intentions 

7. Until you meet the lord of inflated 

8. Swollen-bellied, not made slender, 

9. The daughters of Kisrā, the best of daughters!, 

10. Brought from Hīt and from ʿĀnāt, 

11. Veiled, and not to be produced on display, 

12. Except by being brought out in the beakers 

13. For the compliant suitor, who comes early in the morning, 

14. So name him the Sheikh not the girl (?) 

15. Then mount her early in the morning 

16. And pour from her the life’s blood 

17. Of bunches of grapes which paid in full at time 

18. Into decanters with covered spouts 

19. Which bow their heads, kneeling, to the goblets. 

20. They when mixed, in every case, 

21. With cold water from the Euphrates, 

22. Seem to the imagination to contain snakes’ tongues 

23. Or kindled fires on their lips. 

24. As is your custom, take it from my hand, and come — 

25. Love of boyish maids has tormented me, 

26. Lean of build, head shaven, 

27. Noble (muṣʿatirāt?) but made disagreeable (mukarrahāt?) 

28. With locks of hair twisted and curled, 

29. Walking in buttoned chemises, 

30. Good for sodomy and adultery, 

31. Through whose descriptions I allude (aknī) to my mistress 

32. The one in whose hand is my life! 

Ibrāhīm b. al-Sindī said: Abū Nuwās came to see me when I was heavy spirited 

and he said: I have composed a qaṣīda (sic!), which, if you commit it to memory, 

your complaint (ʿilla) will not return to you. Then he recited to me: “Carper, leave 

off criticizing me!” (WD3.69.1-70.8 = §43) 

The poem shares some of the features of the rāʾiyya (Wagner §141) with which 

this article has been concerned, in particular its timelessness and the urgency 

of its carpe diem! motif, while it differs in its inclusion of elements from the


ghazal tradition (in verses 13b-17a), although the almighty beloved (mawlātī ) 

of verse 16b could just as well be the wine as a mistress. 214 We have already 

seen examples of the crossfertilisation between ghazal and khamr in Abū 

Nuwās’s portrayal of the beloved wine. 

I would dearly like to suspect that behind this khabar and in this poem we 

discern some sort of a hymn in the manner of Ḥammād, however evasively 

these hymns are referred to in the khabar given by al-Iṣfahānī. Whether these 

hymnic poems would have been recited by Abū Nuwās’s co-religionists in 

their prayers is, of course, impossible to say (his exhortation to Ibrāhīm 

al-Sindī to commit it to memory, however, might allow that they were). 

I suspect, also, that we might infer, lurking behind Abū Nuwās’s much 

celebrated technique of final taḍmīn, in which the first lines of poems by himself 

and others are quoted and sung or chanted by a songstress at their symposia, 

an indication (of sorts) of the recital of such hymnic poems. 215 After all, 

I have sought to establish that the symposium was the venue at which God 

was worshipped and the divine light was celebrated in drinking and in songs. 

I would not contend that all of Abū Nuwās’s poems on wine are liturgical 

hymns. Perhaps, indeed, merely a minority of his extant verse may be of this 

type. I would also not contend that as liturgical hymns these poems are devoid 

of creative intention, parody, or any of the other artistic accomplishments so 

beloved of Abū Nuwās’s verse. I also admit that there are more holes in my 

argument than there are in a Swiss cheese. But maybe what could next be 

considered, among many other possibilities and problems, is how his other 

poems interact with this hypothesized situational or occasional dynamic and 

whether they continue to maintain traces of such a function throughout his 

life after leaving the confines of Kufa and Basra and plying his trade at the 

caliphal court in Baghdad or in the gubernatorial retinue in Egypt. 

And, of course, zandaqa, as van Ess’s brilliant study of it shows, is a short 

word for a very complex and manifold, at times even contradictory, set of 

positions, one easy to bandy about in accusations but difficult for us (as probably 

for its bandiers) to substantiate, one tantamount to an essentialising ethnonym. 

Ethnonyms are awkward substantives. They claim a direct referent, 

214 That wine cannot be named is a bacchic topos: see, e.g., WD.3.6.12 = §3.6; WD3.10.6 = 

§6.3. 

215 Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 428-430; Alan Jones, “Final Taḍmīn in the Poems of Abū 

Nuwās,” in: Arabicus Felix Luminosus Britannicus. Essays in Honour of A.F.L. Beeston on his Eightieth 

Birthday, ed. Alan Jones, Reading: Ithaca, 1991, pp. 61-73; Jones collects 36 verses containing 

final taḍmīn, adding that “roughly one in nine of the khamriyyāt ends with taḍmīn” and 

noting that Abū Nuwās “quotes his own poems more than any other poet” (p. 64 and 65); 

Hämeen-Anttila, Abū Nuwās and Ghazal, pp. 98-104 surveys what he refers to as the “kharjas” 

in the Nuwasian Ghazal.


though reveal effectively nothing about the referent in the process. Rather, 

they entice in us a desire to objectify, to identify the essence of Scottishness or 

Swedishness, for example. They embody the principle of “nomen est omen,” 

to name is to predict. 216 

Ethnonyms in ʿAbbasid texts, and Arabic sources generally, and by extension 

the Muslim tradition’s heresiographical mania for taxonomy through 

nomenclature, are perhaps best approached as contact zones, characterized by 

semantic slippage and instability. And I have argued elsewhere that zandaqa is 

a taxonomy often applied disparagingly to forms of hyperbolic Shiʿism known 

collectively as Ghuluww, associating it thereby with Manichaeism, systems in 

which “the doctrine of prophetic succession, a fascination with light, and presumably 

the paradoxical Manichean obsession with a materialist cosmos may 

have prompted the success of its application.” 217 

In the case of the Kufan libertines, and Abū Nuwās, their arrogations of the 

credal, intellectual and spiritual possibilities of zandaqa, their courting of the 

outrage of condemnation as a means of theological assertion and dogmatic 

disorientation, as both a programme for destabilising competing versions of 

Islam, and a celebration of the untouchableness of divine election, their use of 

poetry as a means of seeking to avoid chastisement, suggest, to me at least, that 

we can read these poems “factitiously,” as celebrations of tawḥīd, as trumpeting 

the true form of taʿṭīl, as intimations of divine ghufrān, forgiveness, and as 

contestatory recalibrations of ʿibāda proper to the elect; and they urge me to 

try to understand these poets as early ʿAbbasid Muslims rather than as simply 

frivolous and heretical roués. 

3. Confessions of a Justified Sinner 

In Edinburgh in 1824, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, published anonymously 

his masterpiece of early Gothic, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of 

a Justified Sinner. In this attack on the immoral excesses of a (perverted) ultra- 

Calvinism, Hogg tells the tale of Robert Wringhim, a boy whose identity is 

plagued by the uncertainty of duality, for he has two fathers, one a laird given 

over to excesses of the flesh, the other a Calvinist divine. In the course of his 

devout and forbidding life, the divine recognises him as one of the elect, one 

of the chosen few, protected by “the impossibility of those ever falling away, 

216 See J.E. Montgomery, “Vikings and Rus in Arabic Sources,” in: Living Islamic History. A 

Volume of Essays for Carole Hillenbrand, ed. Yasir Suleiman, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 

Press, 2010, pp. 151-165 (pp. 152-154). 

217 Montgomery, Al-Ǧāḥiẓ and Hellenizing Philosophy, p. 447, note 11.


who were once accepted and received into covenant with God.” 218 But this 

election is itself a state of duality, 

Seeing that God had from all eternity decided the fate of every individual that was 

to be born of woman, how vain was it in man to endeavour to save those whom 

their maker had, by an unchangeable decree, doomed to destruction . . . How 

much more wise would it be, thought I, to begin and cut sinners off with the 

sword! For till that is effected, the saints can never inherit the earth in peace. 219 

Absolute predestination divides the world into the saved and the doomed. 

And yet for all the certainty promised by election, Hogg’s novel explores how 

it is actually a state of utmost uncertainty, for while, on the one hand, there is 

no guarantee that one is actually among the elect, that one may not fall away, 

and so lose the reward of eternal salvation, on the other hand, the elect enjoy 

absolute “liberty” as “crimes and misdemeanours” demand that they be considered 

as a “temporary falling off.” 220 

Robert falls under the influence of a mysterious stranger, Gil-Martin, a 

persuasive shape-shifter who can assume many forms, including that of Robert 

himself. Gil-Martin brings out the second uncertainty of absolute predestination 

— its appropriate extent: 

Both you and he are carrying your ideas of absolute predestination, and its concomitant 

appendages, to an extent that overthrows all religion and revelation altogether; 

or at least jumbles them into a chaos, out of which human capacity can 

never select what is good. 221 

Robert commits a series of atrocities, including murder, and, through manipulation 

and persuasion, drawn on the full fund of his predestinarian arrogance, 

ultimately this justified sinner is led by the mysterious Gil-Martin 

(usually presumed to be Satan) to his doom. 222 

218 Private Memoirs, p. 98. 



221 Private Memoirs, p. 109. I have relied on Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei. A History of the 

Christian Doctrine of Justification, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, and the relevant 

articles in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, for my understanding of the contours 

of the Christian doctrines of justification. Garside, Introduction, pp. xxiii-xxxii, is invaluable 

for understanding Hogg’s presentation of the irregularities of the Wringhim family’s notion of 

justification. 

222 See the discussion of Ian D. Campbell, “Afterword. Literary Criticism and Confessions of a 

Justified Sinner,” in: Hogg, Private Memoirs, ed. Garside, pp. 177-194.


In his study of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas has identified a similar impulse, 

basing his investigation of “gnostic libertinism,” on Plotinus’s critique (see 

Enneads, II. 9. [33]. 15) which “implied moral indifference in the Gnostics, 

that is, not only the absence of a doctrine of virtue but also the disregard of 

moral restraint in real life.” 223 In his exposition of the spiritual and moral universe 

of Gnosticism, Jonas discerns, from the account given by the heresiographer 

Irenaeus, that: 

The idea that in sinning something like a program has to be completed, a due 

rendered as the price of ultimate freedom, is the strongest doctrinal reinforcement 

of the libertinistic tendency inherent in the gnostic rebellion as such and turns it 

into a positive prescription of immoralism. Sin as the way to salvation, the theological 

inversion of the idea of sin itself — here is one of the antecedents of medieval 

Satanism . . . Libertinism had its alternative in asceticism. Opposite as the two 

types of conduct are . . . the same basic argument supports them both. The one 

repudiates allegiance to nature through excess, the other, through abstention. 

Both are lives outside the mundane norms. 224 

Jonas also notes that “the libertinistic version of gnostic morality was represented 

by decidedly esoteric types,” whereas the ascetic was apparently considered 

more appropriate for communal versions “of a popular complexion,” 

such as Manichaeism. 225 

In reading Jonas’s analysis, for all its blindness to local specifities and its 

dependence on Irenaeus, a heresiographer, as dispassionate reporter, I am led 

to wonder if the notion of sinning as a programme to be completed, to be 

lived, may be discerned in the poetry of Abū Nuwās, that in his excesses he 

may not somehow have repudiated his “allegiance to nature.” 

Once again, paradox abounds: his libertinage is, as his poetry, transgressive, 

for his sin is not salvation but anticipation: 

So we lived, and this was how we ever were; when it passed, it was something 

borrowed (muʿārā) (WD3.175.14 = §144.8) 

His asceticism does not bring purity but delay and frustration; his gnosis does 

not consist in enlightenment but in drunken unconsciousness. 226 And his 

223 The Gnostic Religion, p. 270. See also Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism?, Cambridge, Mass.: 

Belknap Press, 2003, pp. 115-137, for a critique of Jonas’s over-reliance on the polemicists. 

224 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 274. 

225 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 276. 

226 See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 68-73: “the earthly existence . . . is described . . . as 

‘numbness,’ ‘sleep,’ ‘drunkenness,’ and ‘oblivion’” (p. 68). Abū Nuwās celebrates a literal realisation 

of this metaphorical eschewal of the terrestrial.


coterie is decidedly esoteric — so much so that, while promoting their identity, 

they seem to have revelled, for example, in the confounding of identifications 

through inter-sectarian hijāʾ. 

The extent of the Nuwasian transgression can perhaps be grasped by a comparison 

with Jonas’s outline of “ecstatic illumination”: 

The enlightenment by a ray of divine light . . . which transforms the psychic nature 

of man may be an article of faith, but it may also be an experience. Such superlative 

experience . . . involves an extinction of the natural faculties, filling the vacuum 

with a surpassingly positive and at the same time in its ineffability negative 

content. Annihilation and deification of the person are fused in the spiritual ecstasies 

which purport to experience the immediate presence of the acosmic essence . . . 

this transposition of eschatology into . . . inwardness . . . yields the concept of gnosis 

here discussed. 227 

Surprisingly perhaps, this extra-mundane aspiration of Hellenistic, Gnostic 

and early Arabic philosophy finds a most sublime poetic intonation in the 

drunken orgies of Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt. 

Mujūn, Ibāḥa and the Malāmatiyya 228 

Antinomianism of the type identified and descried as ibāḥa is a feature of 

some Khārijī, some early Shīʿī (predominantly “hyperbolic,” ghālī ) sects and 

of certain Ṣūfī ṭarīqas. 229 Thus an early controversy seems to have “centred 

round the question whether the consumption of foodstuffs which had not 

been explicitly forbidden in the revelation was considered lawful or not,” 230 a 

debate which was a response to Q. 6 (al-Nisāʾ): 145 and Q. 7 (al-Aʿrāf): 31, 

and which resulted in some Khārijī sects such as the Bayhasiyya permitting 

227 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 284-286. Contrast time in Abū Nuwās’s wine poems with 

the approach to time and existentialism outlined by Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, pp. 335-338. 

228 The following discussion is indebted to three fundamental studies of Abū Nuwās’s attitudes 

to religion: Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 110-133; Hamori, On the Art, pp. 50-60; Kennedy, 

The Wine Song, pp. 194-240. Hamori notes that he is “concerned with the attitudes explored in 

Abū Nuwās’s wine songs; whether the historical Abū Nuwās shuddered every time he thought of 

the Last Judgment, or, quite the opposite, entertained some form of Murjiʾite doctrine with 

particularly sanguine expectations of divine forgiveness, it is impossible to say” (p. 59, note 61). 

The point for me is not simply whether the khamriyyāt express these attitudes but whether these 

attitudes are either opposites or complements, to say nothing of the observation that the most 

glaring and outrageous contradictions are often entertained quite seamlessly by many human 

beings (myself included). 

229 See J. Schacht, W. Madelung and M.G.S. Hodgson, “Ibāḥa,” EI 2 , III, pp. 660-662; 

Böwering, Early Sufism, p. 51. 

230 Schacht, Ibāḥa, p. 661.


not only the consumption of wine but also drunkenness. 231 One authority 

alleges that Abū Nuwās was a Khārijī, and this may require some further 

investigation. 

I have occasionally in the course of my discussion linked the complex of 

ideas which I discern in the Nuwasian khamriyya with the complex of ideas 

I associated with the proto-Rāfiḍa and discerned in al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Tarbīʿ 

wa-l-tadwīr and which are often identified as ‘gnostic’ elements in proto- 

Rāfiḍī thought, although Tamima Bayhom-Daou has questioned any connection 

in the second/eighth century between the Ghulāt and Gnosticism. 232 The 

early history of Islamic antinomianism and ibāḥa, to the study of which this 

article is in some small part intended to contribute, is still very unclear to me. 

What is not unclear to me is that the Kufan ghazal, sometimes referred to as 

ibāḥī 233 ought not to be studied in isolation from the debates surrounding 

ibāḥa. 234 

Libertinage and asceticism (however fuelled they may have been in his life 

by his alcoholism) are the defining paradoxes of Abū Nuwās’s dīwān, the two 

apparent polarities of mujūn and tawba. As Kennedy, has remarked, however, 

abstinence is usually inverted, and tawba and ghufrān enhance rather than 

defuse what he identifies as the spirit of rebellion as the poet proposes “the 

acceptance of a religious scenario which accommodates bacchic indulgence.” 235 

Mujūn and its cognate fusūq are slogans. 236 They are the celebratory incantations 

of what was condemned by their disapprovers as ibāḥa: 

231 See al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn, 1.113.5-118.6 and 1.126.11-13; van Ess, Theologie, 

II, pp. 594-598. 

232 The Second-Century Šīʿite Ġulāt: Were They Really Gnostic?, in: Journal of Arabic and Islamic 

Studies 5 (2003-2004) [http://www.uib.no/jais/content5.htm]. 

233 On it, see Schoeler, Bashshār b. Burd, pp. 281-282. 

234 See generally Christopher Melchert, “The Transition from Asceticism to Mysticism at the 

Middle of the Ninth Century C.E.,” Studia Islamica 83 (1996): 51-70, who, among many other 

very valuable observations, points to the stress in the thought of al-Junayd “on outwardly acceptable 

behaviour and self-description” (p. 67); de Jong and Radtke, Islamic Mysticism Contested, 

especially the article by Josef van Ess, “Sufism and its Opponents: Reflections on Topoi, Tribulations 

and Transformations,” pp. 22-44. 

235 The Wine Song, pp. 209-240 (p. 224). A fuller version of this study might postulate a 

conversation between Abū Nuwās’s inflections of tawba and the discourse of tawba articulated 

by early Ṣūfīs such as Dhū l-Nūn al-Miṣrī (d. 245/859) and Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Nūrī (d. 295/907- 

8): see Böwering, Early Sufism, pp. 49-54 and 64-67. 

236 For fāsiq meaning “sinner” (i.e. any Muslim “who neglects any of the duties imposed by 

God without repudiating them” while retaining the “legal status of the Muslims”) according to 

ʿAlī b. Mithām, an Imāmī scholar during the time of al-Riḍā, see Madelung, Early Sunnī Doctrine, 

p. 253, who also notes that “the designation of the sinner as fāsiq is specifically Muʿtazilī 

doctrine”; on this use of fāsiq see further Zimmermann and Crone, The Epistle of Sālim, p. 233. 

This is a further indication of how important the debates about faith and action among the 

Kufan Shīʿa, the Murjiʾa and the traditionists were for the Muslim identity projected by Abū


So deflect probity (waqār) from wantonness (mujūn) with a sharp, red in 

the colour of which moonlight is mingled (WD3.172.13 = §141.3) 237 

According to Meisami, “Abū Nuwās’s parody centers around his persona of 

māgǐn” 238 (p. 248), an observation with which I can take no issue. I also agree 

that it is “a literary pose,” but behind my present argument lie one observation 

(that for us to read it as a literary pose, we must also offer a “factitious” reading 

of the pose and the transgressive parody) and one hunch (that in a society such 

as what I imagine that of the first ʿAbbasid century to have been, the distinction 

between a literary pose and what I take to be its antonym, a non-literary 

[a historical or a political or a veridical?] pose was imperceptible if not nonexistent). 

Therefore I am unable to agree with the implications of her statement 

that the nūniyya she discusses “reveals, finally, not a philosophy of life so 

much as a literary joke” (p. 257). It offers both and we must, I think, train 

ourselves to entertain both readings at once when we read the poem. 

The saqi too is celebrated as 

The ride of debauchees (fussāq) and the qibla of a wanton (mājin), companionable 

in song (?), neither fickle, nor niggardly (WD3.115.11 = §88.10). 239 

Such immoralism is conducted in the full gaze of God: 

So we passed the night, as God watched us, the wickedest troop (ʿiṣāba), swaggering 

in the robes of debauchery ( fusūq) — there can be no other boast! (WD3. 

129.2 = §101.16) 240 

The poet’s oenomania is attributed to the Compassionate God: 

Nuwās in his khamriyyāt. Dakake, The Charismatic Community, pp. 101-71, brings out the community 

of position in early Shiʿite Ḥadīth and Murjiʾite doctrine. Even the traditionist Abū 

ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām (d. 224/839) can argue that “the ḥadīths in which the Prophet dissociates 

himself from certain sinners . . . do not entail a complete severing of the bonds between 

them and the Prophet and his community” (Madelung, Early Sunnī Doctrine, p. 251). They do 

not lose the “name and status of a believer” but are not believers “in the full meaning of the term” 

(Madelung, Early Sunnī Doctrine, p. 248). Ibn Ḥanbal, however, was not so conciliatory: see p. 

235 and 243; Zimmermann and Crone, The Epistle of Sālim, pp. 225-236. 

237 See also Kennedy, Wine Song, p. 211. 

238 Julie Scott Meisami, “Abū Nuwās and the Rhetoric of Parody,” in: Heinrichs and Schoeler, 

Festschrift Ewald Wagner, pp. 246-257 (p. 248). See further her “Arabic Mujūn Poetry: The 

Literary Dimension,” in: Verse and the Fair Sex. Studies in Arabic Poetry and the Representation 

of Women in Arabic Literature, ed. Frederick de Jong, Utrecht: Houtsma Stichting, 1993, 

pp. 8-30. 

239 See also WD3.175.7 = §144.1, aṭaʿtu l-hawā wa-khalaʿtu l-ʿidhārā. 

240 See further WD3.49.12 = §112.14; Kennedy, Wine Song, pp. 225-226.


The Compassionate has graciously bestowed on me my love for her 

and for a folk sitting in my company (WD3.188.14 = §160.2). 

Thus the injunction to reject what others hold to be punishable and contrary 

to Islam, the poet deems a religious innovation (bidʿa), in a poem which we 

have already met (above, pp. 135-136): 

1. A critic once criticised me so that he could bring about a heresy (bidʿa). Now 

that, by my life!, is a course of action I am not capable of. 

2. He criticised me that I would not drink the relaxing , because her legacy 

is a crushing debt on those who taste her. 

3. But critics have only succeeded in making me more persistent, because for as 

long as I live, I am her fellow — 

4. Am I to reject (arfuḍu) her when God has not rejected her name, and here is 

the Emir of the Believers who is her friend? (WD3.222.8-11 = §199.1-4) 

Thus diverse opinions are possible and those who foreswear wine can be 

brought, through the persuasion of the poet’s description, to repent of their 

abstinence and regain God’s approval: 

7. There was one who swore an oath concerning wine to whom I said, “Steady 

on! You do not take an oath about wine such as this.” 

. . . 

14. So when he saw what I had described, he repented and asked me to repeat it 

and I said, “A friend who was mighty and then was humbled, 

15. Confirmed my thoughts (ẓann): May God confirm his thoughts, when his 

thoughts are good — for there are types of thought” (WD.3.306.10 

& 308.4-9 = §267.7 & 14-15). 

The poet’s vinous description, which is the declaration of the ʿaqīda of this 

system, is given assent by his companion, just as God will approve of the 

friend’s system for as long as it agrees with the poet’s. What one drinks, then, 

represents one’s belief system, and thus too God will punish all those who 

punish the wine: 

1. When they brought me a cup of their drink, allegedly an inspissated , 

hard as stone, not soft and full, 241 

2. I made a display of abstinence and said, “Wine is what I drink: God knows 

that wine is all I think about (iḍmārī).” 

241 On ṭilāʾ, see Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 59 and 85, for guidance on consuming this 

grape syrup produced by boiling off two thirds of the liquid.


3. At which their spokesman swore, “By God, she has been cooked,” meaning to 

praise her through deforming and shaming her, 242 

4. But I replied, “May God not lighten the grievous fire for 

him who has punished her with the fire!” (WD3.167.6-10 = §132) 

The effect of wine, the divine paradox, on the poet, her seductiveness, demands 

a wholesale revision of moral categories: 

Do not blame me for that which has seduced me and has made me see that the 

morally repugnant is not repugnant (WD3.58.3 = §53.2). 243 

This immoralism is also touched by paradox, for despite being countenanced 

by God, it is tantamount to (what is erroneously held by other Muslims to be) 

unbelief (kufr): 

4. So broadcast (buḥ) the name of the one you desire and give me no more nicknames 

(al-kunā), for there is no goodness in pleasures which are concealed 244 

5. And there is no goodness in rashness without libertinage (majāna) nor in 

wantonness (mujūn) unless followed by unbelief (kufr) (WD3.127.4-5 = 

§101.5-6). 245 

Abū Nuwās’s much intoned rebelliousness, his vaunting of the violation of 

prohibitions, is thus directed not at what he identifies as Islam or at God but 

at what others deem to be fitting behaviour of the pious Muslim. 246 His rejection 

is of what is identified as ḥalāl and ḥarām (WD3.242.12 = §211.10; 

WD3.280.7 = §237.16; WD3.293.14 = §254.1). Thus the poet boasts of how 

he has violated the taboos surrounding wine as proscribed in the Ḥ adīth: 

drinking wine more than three times (WD3.172.9 = §140.7; WD3.175.3 = 

§143.6; WD3.258.10 = §225.12); and neglecting his prayers or performing 

242 On the significance of cooking the wine, see above note 131 and 241. 

243 See also WD3.242.10-12 = §211.9-10. 

244 On concealing and revealing the name of the beloved wine, see above note 214; on drinking 

wine openly, compare the stance of the Ḥadīth on hypocrisy when a Muslim drinks wine, as 

expounded by Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, p. 79: by drinking openly, and arguing that his drinking 

is in accordance with Qurʾanic pronouncements on wine, Abū Nuwās is not guilty of the 

hypocrisy described in Q 63 (al-Munāfiqūn). 

245 Cf. the bayt quoted by Schoeler, Iblīs, p. 56 (=WD5.212.7 = §207.8). 

246 Rebellion is central to Hamori’s seminal reading of the dīwān: see, e.g., On the Art, pp. 51, 

52, 53; Schoeler, Ein Weingedicht, shows how it can inform a whole khamriyya. What the “ritual 

clown” pits against the wāʿiẓ, the “religious warner,” is not rebelliousness directed at Islam per se 

but at the type of Islam declared and dictated by the wāʿiẓ who is not one of the elect: Hamori, 

On the Art, p. 55-56. Zimmermann and Crone, The Epistle of Sālim, p. 232 discuss “the intense 

hostility with which the tradionalists greeted the proposition” “that faith should be internal 

conviction (as the Jahmites said) or internal conviction plus verbal declaration (as the majority 

of the Murjiʾites held).”


his own dyspraxic version of them (WD3.179.2 = §148.11) or of the Ḥajj 

(WD 3.123.9-124.6 = §98). In the light of this ‘transgressive’ Islam, these 

prayer times and pilgrimages must in fact be drinking sessions, the qibla 

(WD3. 253.1 = §220.5) must be the comely face. 247 

Zimmermann and Crone discuss the “seemingly antinomian concept of 

communal membership and salvation by faith to the evident exclusion of 

works” upheld by the Murjiʾa. 248 And when we come across Shīʿī and Murjiʾī 

Ḥ adīth which countenance membership of the community by those who fornicate 

and steal, we are reminded that, once again, our constructions of Abū 

Nuwās’s religiosity or rejection thereof may in large part be determined by 

what we identify as the hegemonic version of Islam prevalent in the time of 

Abū Nuwās. 249 

Let me offer here briefly a subversive reading of the pietistic envoi of one of 

Abū Nuwās’s most celebrated wine songs, widely known as “Revelry and 

Remorse”: 

30. Dalliance did not turn me from coming to drink it and I was not silent about 

its urges 

31. Until when grey hair surprised me by it appearance — How hateful is the 

appearance of cursed grey hair 

32. In the eyes of beautiful women; when they see its appearance, they announce 

severance and separation from love. 

33. Thus I have come to regret the errors I have made and 

the neglect of the times prescribed for prayer: 

34. I call on You, Almighty, so pardon just as you have pardoned, Lord on 

High, the Man of the Fish! (WD3.64.1-4 = §40.30-34) 250 

247 Compare the tripartite explanation of the qibla pronounced by the third/ninth century 

Ṣūfī al-Shiblī: Sviri, The Early Mystical Schools of Baghdad and Nīshāpūr, p. 475 and the interrogation 

by al-Shiblī of Ibn al-Mubārak on the “true” performance of the Ḥajj (pp. 472-475). 

248 The Epistle of Sālim, pp. 231-236 (p. 236). 

249 See Dakake, The Charismatic Community, pp. 128-129; see also pp. 129-130, for the idea 

that fornication and theft are acts of enmity to non-Shiʿites; p. 129 that those who demonstrate 

“allegiance to the proper Imām” may act as they please with regard to prohibited and obligatory 

acts; p. 136 (and p. 162) for the observation that “Shiʿites were somehow more ‘forgiven’ for 

their sins,” being “considered to have access to a level of divine forgiveness . . . denied to non- 

Shīʿīte Muslims.” Her description of a tradition “found in other Murjiʾite and Sunnī sources, as 

well as Shiʿite sources, that a man who is marked for salvation may journey his whole life along 

the path of wickedness until he is within inches of death, and at the last moment he will change 

and become one of the saved” is a perfect encapsulation of Abū Nuwās’s celebrated death-bed 

repentance. Zimmermann and Crone, The Epistle of Sālim, p. 234 note that “Ibn Qutayba 

presents the Murjiʾites as invoking the tradition that whoever professes belief in one God will go 

to Paradise even if he commits zinā or steals.” 

250 An alternative translation in Montgomery et al., Revelry and Remorse, p. 119; Kennedy, 

Wine Song, pp. 232-236.


The poet declares that he had not been distracted by pleasure from the proper 

worship of God in his drink and his verses (line 30), as the poem has illustrated 

up to that point, but with the advent of old age, the consuetudinary 

clarion-call to enforced abstinence and repentance (as a result of being 

rejected from revels on account of one’s appearance), he has been unable to 

worship God properly, through worshipful carousing and revelling. Like 

Jonah, who obdurately resisted God’s summons until it was almost too late, 

he can do naught but ask for His mercy for these “lapses” (i.e. his failing to 

drink) (verse 34). 

Despite being guilty of what others deem to be unbelief, the poet is prepared 

for the Day of Reckoning: 

Upon you will be the burdens of those whom you have killed, have no 

doubt: so be ready for the Reckoning! (WD3.174.2 = §142.5) 

And in conformity with Q. 7 (al-Aʿrāf): 96-99, in which the pious believer is 

urged not to try to second-guess how God will judge, the poet declares 

By my life, if God does not forgive the fault her (the 

wine), then my chastisement, in the reckoning, will be grievous (WD3.286.2 = 

§243.20) 251 

If the poet were to abandon what others deem his errant actions, he will do so 

for God and not for man, echoing in his declaration (among other āyas) the 

Qurʾanic condemnation of the errant followers of the poets (Q. 26 [al-Shuʿarāʾ]: 

224): 252 

So when you abandon error ( ghawāya), let that abandonment be for God and not 

for man (WD3.187.5 = §158.8). 253 

On one occasion, according to Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, Abū Nuwās did indeed 

forsake wine at the behest of a man, none other than the caliph al-Amīn: 254 

251 Echoing the Qurʾanic topos, ʿadhāb alīm: e.g. Qurʾān 4 (al-Nisāʾ): 138; Hamori, On The 

Art, pp. 54 and 59. 

252 This is also an echo of the famous marthiya by Durayd b. al-Ṣimma: Kennedy, Wine Song, 

p. 212, note 54; Hamori, On The Art, p. 44 (on an allusion to it in a line by Jamīl Buthayna); 

Meisami, Structure and Meaning, p. 42. 

253 See also WD3.147.1 = §111.1 (wa-mā waṭarī illā l-ghawāyatu wa-l-khamrū); Schoeler, 

Iblīs, pp. 48 and 59 (WD5.133.2 = §143.6), fī sabīli l-ghayyi. See also WD3.88.4 = §57.7 (the 

combination of ghayy and iṣlāḥ in a case of final taḍmīn). 

254 See Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 87-88; Kennedy, Wine Song, pp. 214-217 for this group of 

poems.


1. You two who reproach me at night, go ahead and reproach me: I will not taste 

the perduring , only smell it! 

2. An Imam has blamed (malām) me for her and I cannot see that to disobey him 

is right for me, 

3. So turn it away for someone else, for I will only be a boon-companion in 

words ; 

4. The extent of my lot of her when she is passed round is that I should see her 

and smell her scent; 

5. So in my praise of her I resemble a quietist (qaʿadī) who praises the 

arbitration, 

6. Too weary to bear arms to war but who still exhorts the able to rise up 

(WD3.273.7-274.3 = §234). 

Even here the criticism is inverted, for the poet offers an apology for his inability 

to drink (and not for his drinking)! At the very base of this inversion of an 

orthopractic Islam, lies a courting of criticism: 255 

Leave off criticizing me for to criticize is but to incite; cure me instead with that 

which is the disease — (WD3.2.4 = §1.1) 256 

. . . 

How are we to abandon love and the goblet? — explain that to us, you critic, with 

a legal analogy (qiyās) (WD3.186.6 = §158.1)! 

. . . 

So excuse your brother, for he is a man whose ears have been habituated to criticism 

(WD3.236.9 = §206.16). 257 

Such criticism is necessary to validate what others consider to be the religious 

dyspraxy of the poet’s transgressive Islam. However, such criticism is also to no 

avail, because, at the same time as perpetuating the rebellion of the pre-Islamic 

poetic tradition in its flaunting of communal reproach, the poet’s actions are 

but a response to a Qurʾanic injunction: 

255 See also, e.g., WD3.85.2 = §53.1; WD3.90.11 = §62.1; WD3.256.2-3 = §223.1-2. 

256 See above note 138; Ibn al-Muʿtazz (see Meisami, Structure and Meaning, pp. 443-444, 

note 26) traces this notion back to al-Aʿshā; see the poem by ʿUrwa b. al-Mughīra on treating 

enmity with enmity, as one treats wine with wine, quoted by al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb Faṣl mā bayna 

l-ʿadāwa wa-l-ḥasad, in: Hārūn, Rasāʾil, 1.358.1-3; Ḥāwī, Fann, p. 219, quotes a verse by Majnūn 

Laylā to the same effect; there are also numerous ḥadīths on whether one is allowed to treat wine 

with wine, see Kueny, Rhetoric of Sobriety, pp. 75-77; against which the philosophical-medical 

tradition continued to recommend the use of wine: Hinrich Biesterfeld, “Ein Philosoph trinkt 

Wein,” in: Alltagsleben und materielle Kultur in der arabischen Sprache und Literatur. Festschrift für 

Heinz Grotzfeld zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Bauer and Ulrike Stehli-Werbeck (with Thorsten 

Gerald Schneiders), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005, pp. 89-103. 

257 See also the discussion of WD3.46.4 = §25.21 by Hamori, On The Art, p. 55.


O you who have belief: those who fall away from their religion, God will bring a 

people whom He loves and who love Him, meek to the believers, mighty against 

the unbelievers, who exert themselves in God’s path, and who do not fear the 

carping of a carper. This is the blessing of God which He brings to whom He 

wishes, for God is Mighty and Wise (Q. 5 [al-Māʾida]: 54). 

Abū Nuwās and his coterie are beloved of God, are His mujāhidūn, and fear 

no reproach in effecting His will. 

And yet, some of his wine poems also give voice to unsettling doubt: Hogg’s 

Confessions of a Justified Sinner encourages us to recall that the certainty of 

election is also a state of acute uncertainty. Thus Abū Nuwās, though guaranteed 

salvation, must needs beg God for forgiveness: 

That was our custom, before the descent of grey hair, but we hope for the forgiveness 

of the Forgiver (WD3.144.17 = §109.30). 

. . . 

Pour a morning drink of perduring even if she is illicit (muḥarrama), for 

with God is forgiveness for cardinal sins (kabāʾir) (WD3.324.1 = §278.6). 258 

. . . 

Do not deny God’s pardon, even if you are a man without blemish, for your 

denial of it is but a disparagement of religion (WD3.4.5 = §1.12). 259 

And let us recall that the extent of God’s all-encompassing forgiveness as well 

as the poet’s vision thereof is entirely consistent with some of the more extreme 

formulations of the Murjiʾa (such as those entertained by the mufassir Muqātil 

b. Sulaymān, d. 150/767) and with the Shīʿī Ḥadīth studied by Dakake on the 

subject. 260 

In his wine poems, then, I read Abū Nuwās as declaring himself to be a 

Muslim, one whose Islam is, viewed against the taboo on the consumption of 

wine expressed in the Ḥadīth, and from the later triumph of Sunnism, paradoxical 

for what appears to be its profoundly transgressive nature, but which 

(not least by virtue of its consonance with Qurʾanic precepts) remains Islam, 

nonetheless, and rejects Manichaeism: 

The Naybakhtīs relate that for all his absorption in dissoluteness and the frankness 

of his poetry, he was firm of belief and sound of conviction, convinced of the 

occurrence of all that the transmitted reports (āthār) declared. He was asked, in 

258 See Schoeler, Iblīs, p. 55. 

259 See Wagner, Abū Nuwās, p. 292, note 3. This uncertainty extends also to Iblīs as Schoeler, 

Iblīs, p. 53 points out that “matters between Abū Nuwās and Iblīs are not always what they should 

be”: see the bayt quoted in his note 16 and that on p. 56 (= WD1.346.5 [1958, p. 302.6] = 

[al-marāthī] §9.5). 

260 See Madelung, Murdjiʾa, p. 607; Dakake, The Charismatic Community.


his illness, “What is the most grievous pain you feel?” and he replied, “The pain 

of sins.” Our words concerning his devotion and his conviction in the divine law 

is confirmed by his words upon the arrival of the letter of Ibn Nuhbā, summoning 

him to the way of the Manichaeans: 

So he wrote back in reply (the metre is Khafīf ); 

1. Ibn al-Nuhbā, one Lord is heavy enough for me: that I should bear two 

lords is a grave affair, 

2. So summon someone else, not me, to the worship of two lords, for I am 

completely preoccupied with one. 

There are renunciant poems (zuhdiyyāt) by him in circulation indicating that they 

originated in a heart pure of doubt and deception (WD5.335.14-336.7 = 

§337). 261 

Compare this with the following ʿaqīda: 

1. I pray the five prayers at their ordained time and I obediently bear witness to 

the unicity of God; 

2. I perform my ablutions properly if I become impure, and if the pauper comes 

to me, I do not turn him away; 

3. Every year I keep to the month’s fast, and I cease not to disown God’s rivals 

and associates; 

4. And I see to it that if there comes a summons to pledge allegiance to the saqi, 

I answer with haste, 

5. And I drink her pure, along with haunch of goat and suckling kid, full of fat, 

6. With eggs, khāmīz, vinegar and vegetables: this has always been good for a 

drunk man; 

7. And if some game should hove into view, I leap and sink my teeth into his rear, 

secretly, hungry, like the wolf, 

8. And I leave all the motley Rafiḍites bowing in prayer in the Fire, at Bukhtīshūʿ’s 

anus. 

The reason for his declamation of this poem was al-Amīn’s asking him one day, 

“Some people say that you are a Manichaean (zindīq), so what is your madhhab?” 

As a reply he extemporised these verses. Al-Amīn, in wonder, was filled with 

laughter and asked, “Why ever did you single out Bukhtīshūʿ of all people?” 

“Because he made the rhyme work,” was the reply (WD5.36 = §48). 262 

It is my contention that the poems of renunciation and the poems of dissoluteness 

are but two aspects of living the doctrine of election: 

261 Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 113-114. Ibn al-Nuhbā is Ḥammād ʿAjrad: see Vajda, Les zindīqs, 

p. 205. 

262 Wagner, Abū Nuwās, p. 113. As a prime example of the “testament of Abū Nuwās” (waṣāt 

Abī Nuwās), see WD5.204.15-206.19 = §197, translated by Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 104-105.


I have fallen in love — and what a calamity love is! Nothing resembling passion 

has ever hit me on the head before. 

What’s with me and people? They bad mouth me so often. Pure folly. My religion 

is for my soul and people’s religion is for the people! 263 

Why is it that, whenever I visit my mistress, my enemies’ faces seem covered with 

ink? 

God knows that I have only left off visiting you through fear of enemies and 

guards. 

Were I able to, I would come to you crawling on my face or walking on my 

head, 

When I read in one of your letters, “God only shows mercy to people who are 

merciful.” 264 

Even if we were to take verse 2 out of context, as representative of the poet’s 

rejection of the religion of the people, there are various ways to understand 

dīn: as the rejection of normal religion in favour of the religion of love; as 

“religion” in the sense of Qurʾān 109 (al-Kāfirūn): 6, of which it is most decidedly 

an echo, consistent with the poet’s prophetic mission; as an expression of 

Horatian elitism (“Odi profanum vulgus et arceo”); but also, as synonymous 

with diyāna, in the sense of cultic worship: “I worship God in one way, people 

another!” 265 

Abū Nuwās and the Kufan libertines were not the last Muslims, however, to 

experiment with libertinism and sin as rebellion against the hegemony of the 

customary, against what others deem orthopraxis, and in this way to surrender 

to the deity. 

During the late third and early fourth century in Nīshāpūr an ascetic movement 

known as the Malāmatiyya appeared, one whose founding fathers 

eschewed any outward pretence or show of asceticism or piety, for such, they 

held, led the believer to vainglory and hypocrisy. The foundational aspirations 

of the Malāmatiyya were in the course of time enlarged and interpreted 

to encourage the active seeking of the blame of others. 266 Whether the Islam 

263 This is another factitious rendering which the apolaustic tradition would rather render as, 

“My religion is my own and people have theirs.” 

264 Dīwān Abī Nuwās al-Ḥ asan b. Hāniʾ, ed. Gregor Schoeler, IV, Beirut: Schwarz, 2003, 

pp. 73.15-74.5 = §99. 

265 Thus, what others rightly identify as “the pleasure Abū Nuwās takes in provoking and 

shocking people” (Wagner, Abū Nuwās, pp. 104-105; Schoeler, Iblīs, pp. 56-57), I take to be a 

fundamental feature of the poet’s apocalyptic mission mandated by the Qurʾān. (Of course Abū 

Nuwās may still derive great pleasure from his apocalyptic mission!). 

266 F. de Jong, “Malāmatiyya: In the Central Islamic Lands”; Hamid Algar, “Malāmtiyya: In 

Iran and the Eastern Lands,” EI 2 , VI, pp. 223-224 and 224-225; Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction 

to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. R. and A. Hamori, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1981, pp. 149-50 (tracing its roots back via Eastern Christianty to the Cynics, among whom it 

was held that “shamelessness [aisḫyntia] is a requirement of religion”); Alexander Knysh, Islamic


of Abū Nuwās and the Malāmatiyya are scions of the same root is a story 

for another occasion. 267 Let us simply remark on how apt a description of 

Abū Nuwās’s poetry of khamr and mujūn is a dictum by Ibn al-Munāzil 

(d. 331/942-3): 

The root of the Malāmatī is that he should not reveal any good and not conceal 

any bad. 268 

Conclusion 

Let me conclude with a few pointers and reminders. 

1. If Abū Nuwās were a pre-Socratic, an Empedocles say, or a late Antique 

Neoplatonist, such as Proclus 269 , his poetry would probably have been the 

subject of numerous studies by scholars interested in philosophy; 

2. Abū Nuwās may not seem to us today to ‘do’ philosophy or theology 

with a forthrightness or self-avowedness of purpose, of the kind that we 

encounter, for example, in the De rerum natura of Lucretius. Indeed, his 

obliquity is more in keeping with Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥ ayy b. Yaqẓān or his Qaṣīdat 

al-Nafs; 

3. As the poetry of Ṣafwān al-Anṣārī, Bashshār b. Burd 270 and Abū l-ʿAtāhiya 

demonstrates, to name but three, poetry was one of the major means available 

Mysticism. A Short History, Leiden: Brill, 2000, pp. 94-99; Jacqueline Chabbi, “Remarques sur le 

développement historique de mouvement ascétiques et mystiques en Khurasan,” Studia Islamica 

46 (1977): 5-72; Sara Sviri, “Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī and the Malāmatī Movemement in Early 

Ṣūfism,” in: Classical Persian Ṣūfism: From its Origins to Rūmī, ed. L. Lewisohn, London: Khaniqahi 

Nimatullahi Publications, 1993, pp. 583-613; Sara Sviri, The Early Mystical Schools of 

Baghdad and Nīshāpūr. 

267 Julian Baldick, Mystical Islam. An Introduction to Sufism, London: Tauris Parke, 2000, 

p. 17 notes that the Sufi practice of “deliberately incurring ‘blame’ . . . through apparently reprehensible 

conduct” is attested in early Syrian Christianity and “is repeated in the works of Isaac of 

Nineveh, the most important Christian mystical writer of seventh-century Iraq.” See Isaac of 

Nineveh, Mystic Treatises, trans. A.J. Wensinck, Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 

1923, p. 97: “the ancient Fathers could do such things, because of the signs and forces 

which were wrought through them and because of the great name and fame they possessed. 

These things they practised, each in order to be despised and blamed, and to obscure the fame of 

his behaviour, and to keep far from him the cause of haughtiness.” 

268 See Sviri, The Early Mystical Schools of Baghdad and Nīshāpūr, p. 466. 

269 R.M. van den Berg, Proclus’ Hymns. Essays, Translations, Commentary, Leiden: Brill 2001. 

270 Ch. Pellat, “Ṣafwān ibn Ṣafwān al-Anṣārī et Bashshār ibn Burd,” in: Logos Islamikos. Studia 

Islamica in Honorem Georgii Michaelis Wickens, ed. Roger Savory and Dionisius A. Agius, 

Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984, pp. 20-34.


for early ʿAbbasid intellectuals and thinkers to speculate upon, expound 

and explore the nature of Islamic beliefs; 271 

4. Early ʿAbbasid poetry can thus be read as radically implicated in coterminous 

contestations of what it meant to be a Muslim; 

5. If Abū Nuwās had been adopted by the Ṣūfī tradition, many of my pointers 

and reminders would have been unnecessary; 

6. Because such poetry was not grist for the polemical mill or did not pertain 

to the metier of the speculative tradition as developed by the 

mutakallimūn, it was not governed by the rules of Kalām as eristics and so 

its positions were neither reduced to, nor traduced as, basic postulates 

designed either for persuasion or refutation, such as we find in the Euclideanesque 

gobbets provided in the heresiographical tradition; 

7. As a consequence of the performative notion of poetry as truth, and as 

poetry was already, in consonance with the Qurʾanic ‘condemnation’ 

of poetry, held by some to be a potentially unsavoury enterprise, its putatively 

reprehensible contents were deemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

So poetry became, comparatively speaking and perhaps counter-intuitively 

to our way of looking at things, less vulnerable to obliteration and 

tampering; 

8. As with poetry, so too the Adab tradition, by virtue of its very indeterminacy, 

facilitated the survival of much that would otherwise have been 

deemed theologically suspect or morally uncomfortable. 

9. This reading of Abū Nuwās’s persona in the khamriyyāt is not necessarily 

at variance with, nor is it intended to oust, the apolaustic Abū Nuwās. In 

fact, I suspect that the latter cannot really function as a way of reading the 

poems without the former: apolausis itself is ambiguous, and reading in 

accordance with “facticity” merely throws this ambiguity into sharper 

relief. Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt, his apolaustic persona, and attendant 

akhbār are informed by, as it were, a spirit of tawriyya, the rhetorical trope 

in which “both interpretations” of a word, or phrase or poem “should 

make at least some sense.” 272 

10. It remains to be considered whether (and if so how) this persona is consonant 

with the persona of the panegyrical poems for al-Amīn and the 

nobles of his court and whether this persona can be studied as an instance 

271 Other poets, whose works could be read theologically and not just heresiographically, 

include Kuthayyir ʿAzza (d. 105/723) and al-Kumayt (d. 126/744), and of course, the Kufan 

libertines. Heresiographical studies of poetry include: W. Madelung, “The Hāshimiyyāt of 

al-Kumayt and Hāshimī Shiʿism,” in: Shīʿism, ed. Etan Kohlberg, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 

pp. 87-108; Josef van Ess, “The Kāmilīya: on the Genesis of a Heresiographical Tradition,” in: 

Kohlberg, Shīʿism, pp. 209-220; Pellat, Essai de reconstitution d’un poème de Maʿdan aš-Šumayṭī. 

272 Van Gelder, Some Types of Ambiguity, p. 86.


of political demeanour in the manner in which Julia Bray studies Ibn 

al-Muʿtazz’s Fuṣūl Qiṣār in Oriens 38 (2010). Bray argues that 

it is the production, not only by literary proxies, but by political actors themselves, 

of literary ‘gestures’ (for want of a better word) that serve to build a 

personal image which in the right circumstances can be activated as a loyalty 

base (p. 143). 

In other words, Abū Nuwās may have been promoting, and al-Amīn may 

have been the sponsor of, a charismatic brand of Islam that valorised a doctrine 

of God’s unlimited forgiveness, which permitted the consumption of 

wine, celebrated spiritual priapism, and which may have been built upon the 

theory of spiritual election, and, as an alternative to the incipient Ḥadīth 

movement and in contradistinction to the credal rigours of, for example, the 

Istithnāʾ controversy. Or, in other words, perhaps we should revisit al-Maʾmūn’s 

reviling of al-Amīn from the pulpit in Merv on account of his association with 

the poet. 

Therefore, I submit, scholars seriously interested in understanding the manifold 

contours of early ʿAbbasid Islam, might just as well be advised to pick up 

and read a dīwān (and concentrate on those poems which seem at first blush 

to have nothing to do with what we understand by Islam) as to rummage 

around in the heresiographies or investigate the Ḥ adīth. Equally, scholars 

interested in understanding the manifold contours of early ʿAbbasid poetry, 

would be well advised to rummage around in the heresiographies and investigate 

the Ḥ adīth. 

It will doubtlessly be objected that in adopting a (very loose) religious or 

heresiographcial approach to classical Arabic poetry that I am wilfully missing 

the point of it as poetry, that I am somehow thereby denigrating it as the 

supreme aesthetic and cultural achievement of Arabo-Islamic civilisation. 

Indeed, I have repeatedly in the course of promoting this reading of Abū 

Nuwās been reminded of numerous similarities between my interpretative 

activities and the biography of Branwell Brontë which Mr Mybug intends to 

write in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Mr Mybug’s argument is 

that the Brontë sisters passed off their brothers work as their own, in order to 

“sell it to buy more drink,” since the sisters “were all drunkards” whom their 

brother Branwell supported with his writings out of fraternal piety and 

devotion. 273 

273 London: Penguin, 1938, p. 162. It might also be objected that Abū Nuwās’s khamriyyāt 

emerge from my study much as the London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor do from the 

works of Iain Sinclair (Lud Heat, Uppingham: Goldmark, 1987), Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor, 

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985) and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (From Hell, London:


In my defence I would like to quote the words of the conductor Roger Norrington, 

one of the prime exponents of the period-instrument approach to 

European classical music. Discussing his application of this approach to late 

nineteenth century German Romanticism, he says of his recording of Bruckner, 

Symphonie 3: 

When all the historical information has been assembled, including any hints on 

tempo and rubato, we are still left with the major work of personal interpretation. 

My interest is to fuse the personal with the historical so that they can go hand in 

hand, just as, in a large work like a symphony, formal, musical and dramatic 

aspects have all to be balanced in a creative way. We pursue these aims, not for 

theoretical or cerebral reasons, but to allow the work to sound as exciting and 

fresh as possible for listeners of today. 274 

Knockabout Comics, 2006) or as the poetry of the Troubadours does from the Crypto-Cathar 

thesis of Denis de Rougemont: Passion and Society, trans. Montgomery Belgion, London: Faber, 

1940. In other words, that I am one of those nick-named by Eco, Interpretation, p. 54, as “followers 

of the veil.” 

274 “Sleeve-notes,” EMI 1996, p. 11.

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