Abu Nuwas

(Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami)

(ca. 756–ca. 814)

   Abu Nuwas is the most famous love poet of the Islamic Abbasid dynasty (758–1258). He was called the father of locks, apparently because of his curly hair. Though he wrote in Arabic, he rejected traditional forms and explored new and unconventional subjects for poetry, some of which were considered disreputable or inappropriate by his contemporaries.While he wrote some love poems to women, he is better known for his homoerotic lyrics, and his own preferred practice seems to have been pederasty.

   Abu Nuwas was born in Ahwaz in Persia sometime around the year 756. Tradition says his father served in the army of the last Umayyad caliph,Marwan II, while his mother was a Persian who worked as a washerwoman.He was educated at Kufa and in Basra, where he came under the influence of the well-known poet Waliba ibn al-Hubab, from whom he learned the craft of poetry and with whom he is said to have become intimate. After this education, Abu Nuwas followed the conventional route for poets by going to the desert to spend time with the Bedouin tribes and improve his Arabic. Though he learned his Arabic from the Bedouin, Abu Nuwas refused to accept traditional Bedouin values, and spurned the conventional literary form of the QASÍDA, a genre of poem in which the poet customarily lamented an abandoned campsite and, perhaps, a love he had enjoyed there. Abu Nuwas parodied this theme in a famous poem in which he laments abandoned taverns and the loss of good places to drink.

   Abu Nuwas wrote in virtually every genre of Arabic poetry. Another of his more unusual and popular forms was the hunting poem, in which he seems to have emulated the ancient desert hunters. He was the first Arabic poet whose published works include a special section devoted specifically to poems about hunting.

   Aside from his hunting and his erotic poems, Abu Nuwas is best known for his bacchic drinking poems. Critics have speculated that his celebration of drunkenness is a symbol in his poetry of the total liberation of the mind and body from the tyranny of logic and of convention. Others have suggested that his focus on the poetry of wine is in fact related to his Persian roots, in that here he continues the hard-drinking tradition of the older Sassanian court of Persia. In any case the Abbasid caliphs, whose relocation of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad helped to bring about a fusion of Semitic Arabic and Persian cultures, were sympathetic to Abu Nuwas’s poetry, and he became a favorite of the caliphs al-Amin and Harun ar-Rashid.

   Abu Nuwas is said to have even been employed as tutor for the caliph Harun’s son, and to have become the boy’s lover as well. Most of his life was spent as a courtier in Baghdad, and for his readers across the centuries he has embodied the extravagance and excesses of life as a favored courtier. His life, as celebrated in his poetry, became the stuff of legend for later Arabic writers. In a 13th-century joke book, it is stated that Abu Nuwas claimed he never saw anybody drunk—this was because wherever he was, he was always the first to become intoxicated, and therefore was unable to judge whether anybody else was. Abu Nuwas even appears as a character in the THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS several hundred years after his death. Despite the fame he experienced in his life,Abu Nuwas ended in obscurity. Some say he became deeply religious in his old age and abjured his former sins. Some say he died in prison. Some say that he went too far in satirizing a member of a certain clan and that members of the clan beat him to death. Whatever the truth is, Abu Nuwas died sometime around the year 814. He left a body of work remarkable for its variety, its innovation, and its controversial themes. He was sometimes criticized for borrowing too much from other poets (a practice not uncommon in his time), but is praised for his powerful language, his memorable imagery, and his exquisite poetic style. Yet in many ways he remains at least as well known for the legend of his life as for his literary production: His motto was purported to be a line from one of his poems that reads “Accumulate all the sins that you can.”

   Bibliography

   ■ Abu Nuwas. Selections from the Diwan of Abu Nuwas ibn Hani al-Hakami. Edited and translated by Arthur Wormhoudt. Oskaloosa, Iowa: William Penn College, 1998.

   ■ Kennedy, Philip F. The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.