JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

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Jocelyn Sharlet
have to give me something.” The poet said that he would. He bought a
lot of roses and wrote a poem to go with them that described the roses as
the cheeks of Greek slave girls drinking wine, a glass of wine like a
moon circulating in the hand of the wine pourer, and a general sense of
well-being. When he read the verses, the secretary was so pleased that he
gave all that he had received for Nowruz to the poet. 28
The Nowruz poem is intended to amplify the poet’s modest gift in
response to his patron’s pressure and the competition of his peers. It is so
successful in doing so that it ends up leading to the patron’s delight, a
surfeit of gifts, and a clear victory over the other companions. The poem
addresses the problem behind the gift exchange, the poet’s poverty and
the patron’s pressure on him to live up to his gift-giving obligations. The
characters in this Persian New Year story refer to the serious business of
uncertainty and risk in patronage, while implying a step back from this
serious business that validates refined manners as a less stressful
alternative.
In the third gift story that foregrounds the writer’s difficulties, al-
Buḥturī coveted a male slave who belongs to Muḥammad b. Ḥumayd b.
ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (d. 214/829), known as a son of the Abbasid general who
helped to defeat the rebel Bābak, and as a refined poet. Al-Buḥturī
composed a poem in which he requested the male slave as a gift and also
complained about his other male slaves. 29 Other elites who heard the
poem were so impressed that they sent slaves as well. The Khālidī
brothers cite a long section of the poem, which includes a description of
the slave. 30 Al-Buḥturī amplifies his request for his patron’s slave with
the poem, which in turn leads to a surfeit of gifts that far exceeds the
initial request. The refined rhetoric of the poem alludes to the problem
that offers a context for the request, al-Buḥturī’s acquisitiveness. The
link between the poem and the surfeit of gifts addresses the problem by
getting al-Buḥturī what he wants.
The acquisitiveness in this brief gift exchange story takes place in the
realm of manners and echoes al-Buḥturī’s acquisitiveness in the more
serious business of political panegyric. In his work as a highly successful
panegyrist and avid admirer of slave boys, al-Buḥturī (d. 284/897) was
sometimes described as excessively acquisitive. In terms of panegyric, he
28 Al-Khālidiyyān, Tuḥaf, p. 36.
29 Al-Buḥturī, Dīwān al-Buḥturī, 5 vols, ed. Ḥasan Kāmil al-Ṣīrafī (Cairo, n.d.),
1:39.
30 Al-Khālidiyyān, Tuḥaf, pp. 71–3.
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