Abu Nuwas

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Abu Nuwas (Template:Langx)Template:Efn (756-8Template:SndTemplate:Circa) was a classical Arabic poet, and the foremost representative of the modern (muhdath) poetry that developed during the first years of the Abbasid Caliphate. He also entered the folkloric tradition, appearing several times in One Thousand and One Nights.

Of mixed Arab and Persian heritage, he studied in Basra and al-Kufah, first under the poet Waliba ibn al-Hubab, and later under Khalaf al-Ahmar. He also studied the Qur'an, Hadith, and grammar. He earned the favour of the Abbasid caliphs Harun ar-Rashid and al-Amin.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He is best known for his wine poetry, and Diwan, his collected volume of poetry that explored religion, pleasure, and homoeroticism.

Early life

Abu Nuwas was born in the province of Ahvaz (modern Khuzestan Province in Iran) of the Abbasid Caliphate, either in the city of Ahvaz or one of its adjacent districts. His date of birth is uncertain, he was born sometime between 756 and 758. His father was Hani, an Arab (likely from Damascus) who had served in the army of the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II (Template:Reign). His mother was a Persian named Gulban, whom Hani had met whilst serving in the police force of Ahvaz. When Abu Nuwas was 10 years old, his father died.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Harvnb; His mother was a Persian seamstress from Ahwāz, called Gulbān or Gulnāz (Abū Hiffān, 108; Ibn al-Muʿtazz, 194; Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiʿr, 2/692; Ibn ʿAsākir, 4/279). His father Hānī was either Persian (according to al-Aṣmaʿī) or from al-Shām, and had served in the army of the last Umayyad caliph, Marwān II</ref>

In his early childhood Abu Nuwas followed his mother to Basra in lower Iraq where he attended Qur’an school and became a Hafiz at a young age. His youthful good looks and innate charisma attracted the attention of the Kufan poet, Abu Usama Waliba ibn al-Hubab al-Asadi, who took Abu Nuwas to Kufa as a young apprentice. Waliba recognized in Abu Nuwas his talent as a poet and encouraged him toward this vocation, but was also attracted sexually to the young man and may have had erotic relations with him. Abu Nuwas's relationships with adolescent boys when he had matured as a man seem to mirror his own experience with Waliba.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite book</ref>

Work

Abu Nuwas wrote poetry in multiple genres; his great talent was most recognized in his wine poems and in his hunting poems.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Abu Nuwas’s diwan, his poetry collection, was divided by genre: panegyric poems, elegies, invective, courtly love poems on men and women, poems of penitence, hunting poems, and wine poems.<ref name=":13">Template:Cite web</ref> His erotic lyric poetry, which is mostly homoerotic, is known from over 500 poems and fragments.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He also participated in the well-established Arabic tradition of satirical poetry, which included duels between poets involving vicious exchanges of poetic lampoons and insults.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Ismail bin Nubakht, one of Nuwas's contemporaries, said:

"I never saw a man of more extensive learning than Abu Nuwas, nor one who, with a memory so richly furnished, possessed so few books. After his death we searched his house, and could only find one book-cover containing a quire of paper, in which was a collection of rare expressions and grammatical observations."Template:Sfn

Khamriyyat (Wine Poems)

The spirit of a new age was reflected in wine poetry after the change in dynasties to the Abbasids.<ref name=":02">Template:Cite book</ref> Abu Nuwas was a major influence on the development of wine poetry. His poems were likely written to entertain the Baghdad elite.<ref name=":13"/> The centerpiece of wine poetry lays the vivid description of the wine, exalted descriptions of its taste, appearance, fragrance, and effects on the body and mind.<ref name=":3">Template:Cite book</ref> Abu Nuwas draws on many philosophical ideas and imagery in his poetry that glorify the Persians and mock Arab classicism.<ref name=":02" /> He used wine poetry as a medium to echo the themes of Abbasid relevance in the Islamic world. An example of this is shown through a piece he wrote in his Khamriyyat:

“Wine is passed round among us in a silver jug, adorned by a Persian craftsman with a variety of designs, Chosroes on its base, and round its side oryxes which horsemen hunt with bows. Wine’s place is where tunics are buttoned; water’s place is where the Persian cap (qalansuwah) is worn.”<ref name=":02" />

This passage has a prevalence of Persian imagery corresponding to the Persian language used in this period. Abu Nuwas was known to have both a poetic and political tone in his poetry. Along with other Abbasid poets, Abu Nuwas atones for his openness to drinking wine and disregarding religion.<ref name=":02" /> He wrote satirical strikes at Islam using wine as both an excuse and liberator.<ref name=":3" /> A specific line of poetry in his Khamriyyat exemplifies his facetious relationship with religion; this line compares the religious prohibition of wine to God’s forgiveness.<ref name=":4">Template:Cite book</ref> Abu Nuwas wrote his literature as if his sins were vindicated within a religious framework. Abu Nuwas’s poetry also reflected his love for wine and sexuality. The poems were written to celebrate both the physical and metaphysical experience of drinking wine that did not conform to the norms of poetry in the Islamic world.<ref name=":13" /> A continuing theme in Abbasid wine poetry was its affiliation with pederasty due to the fact that wine shops usually employed boys as servers.<ref name=":02" /> These poems were often salacious and rebellious. In the erotic section of his Diwan, his poems describe young servant girls dressed up as young boys drinking wine.<ref name=":22">Template:Cite book</ref> His affection for young boys was displayed through his poetry and social life. Abu Nuwas explores an intriguing prejudice: that homosexuality was imported to Abbasid Iraq from the province in which the revolution originated.<ref name=":22" /> He states in his writing that during the Umayyad caliphate, poets only indulged in female lovers.<ref name=":22" /> Nuwas' seductive poems use wine as a central theme for blame and scapegoat.<ref name=":02" /> This is shown through an excerpt from his al-Muharramah:

"Boasting myriad colors when it spreads out in glass, silencing all tongues,

Showing off her body, golden, like a peal on a tailor's strong, in the hand of a lithe young man who speaks beautifully in response to a lover's request,

With a curl on each temple and a look in his eye that spells disaster.

He is a Christian, he wears clothes from Khurasan and his tunic bares his upper chest and neck.

Were you to speak to this elegant beauty, you would fling Islam from the top of a tall mountain.

If I were not afraid of the depredation of He who leads all sinners into transgression,

I would convert to his religion, entering it knowingly with love,

For I know that the Lord would not have distinguished this youth so unless his was the true religion."<ref name=":13" />

This poem accounts for various sins of Abu Nuwas: being served by a Christian, glorifying a boy's beauty, and finding testimony in Christianity. Abu Nuwas's writing ridicules heterosexual propriety, the condemnation of homosexuality, the alcohol ban, and Islam itself.<ref name=":13" /> He uses his literature to testify against the religious and cultural norms during the Abbasid caliphate. Though many of his poems describe his affection for boys, relating the taste and pleasure of wine to women is a signature technique of Abu Nuwas.<ref name=":22" /> Abu Nuwas's preference was not uncommon among men of his time as homoerotic lyrics and poetry were popular among Muslim mystics.<ref name=":13" />

The earliest anthologies of his poetry and his biography were produced by:Template:Sfn

Imprisonment and death

He died during the Great Abbasid Civil War before al-Ma’mūn advanced from Khurāsān in either 199 or 200 AH (814–816 AD).Template:Sfn Because he frequently indulged in drunken exploits, Nuwas was imprisoned during the reign of Al-Amin, shortly before his death.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The cause of his death is disputed:<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> four different accounts of Abu Nuwas’s death survive: 1. He was poisoned by the Nawbakht family, having been framed with a poem satirizing them; 2. He died in a tavern drinking right up to his death; 3. He was beaten by the Nawbakht for the satire falsely attributed to him; wine appears to have had a role in the flailing emotions of his final hours—this seems to be a combination of accounts one and two; 4. He died in prison, a version which contradicts the many anecdotes stating that in the advent of his death he suffered illness and was visited by friends (though not in prison). He most probably died of ill health, and equally probably in the house of the Nawbakht family, whence came the myth that they poisoned him.<ref name=":1" /> Nuwas was buried in Shunizi cemetery in Baghdad.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Legacy

File:Verses of Abu Nawas, copied by Mirza Kuchik Visal, Qajar Iran, 10 May 1824.jpg
Manuscript of Abu Nawas's verses. Copied by Mirza Kuchik Visal, Qajar Iran, dated 10 May 1824

Influences

Nuwas is one of a number of writers credited with inventing the literary form of the mu‘ammā (literally "blinded" or "obscured"), a riddle which is solved "by combining the constituent letters of the word or name to be found".<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref><ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> He also perfected two Arabic genres: Khamriyya (wine poetry) and Tardiyya (hunting poetry). Ibn Quzman, who was writing in Al-Andalus in the 12th century, admired him deeply and has been compared to him.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Commemoration

The city of Baghdad has several places named for the poet. Abū Nuwās Street runs along the east bank of the Tigris River, in a neighbourhood that was once the city's showpiece.<ref>Template:Britannica</ref> Abu Nuwas Park is located on the 2.5-kilometer stretch between the Jumhouriya Bridge and a park that extends out to the river in Karada near the 14th of July Bridge.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in honor of Abu Nuwas.Template:Sfn

The Abu Nawas Association, founded in 2007 in Algeria, was named after the poet. The primary aim of the organisation is to decriminalise homosexuality in Algeria, seeking the abolition of article 333 and 338 of the Algerian penal code which still considers homosexuality a crime punishable by imprisonment and accompanied by a fine.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Censorship

While his works were in circulation freely until the early years of the twentieth century, the first modern censored edition of his works was published in Cairo in 1932. In January 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture ordered the burning of some 6,000 copies of books of Nuwas's homoerotic poetry.<ref>Al-Hayat, 13 January 2001</ref><ref>Middle East Report, 219 Summer 2001</ref> In the Saudi Global Arabic Encyclopedia entry for Abu Nuwas, all mentions of pederasty were omitted.<ref name="bearman">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref>

He features as a character in a number of stories in One Thousand and One Nights, where he is cast as a boon companion of Harun al-Rashid.

A heavily fictionalised Abu Nuwas is the protagonist of the novels The Father of Locks (Dedalus Books, 2009)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and The Khalifah's Mirror (2012) by Andrew Killeen,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> in which he is depicted as a spy working for Ja'far al-Barmaki.Template:Sfn

In the Sudanese novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) by Tayeb Salih, Abu Nuwas's love poetry is cited extensively by one of the novel's protagonists, the Sudanese Mustafa Sa'eed, as a means of seducing a young English woman in London: "Does it not please you that the earth is awaking,/ That old virgin wine is there for the taking?"Template:Sfn

The Tanzanian artist Godfrey Mwampembwa (Gado) created a Swahili comic book called Abunuwasi which was published in 1996.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> It features a trickster figure named Abunuwasi as the protagonist in three stories draw inspiration from East African folklore as well as the fictional Abu Nuwasi of One Thousand and One Nights.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

In Pasolini's Arabian Nights, the Sium story is based on Abu Nuwas' erotic poetry. The original poems are used throughout the scene.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In Indonesia, Abu Nuwas, called Abunawas, is a character of various folk stories, similar to Nasreddin Hoca.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The stories often highlight relations between ordinary people and the higher class.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Editions and translations

  • Der Dīwān des Abū Nuwās, ed. by Ewald Wagner. 5 vols. (1958-2003).
  • Dīwān Abū Nu’ās, khamriyyāt Abū Nu’ās, ed. by ‘Alī Najīb ‘Aṭwi (Beirut 1986).
  • O Tribe That Loves Boys. Hakim Bey (Entimos Press / Abu Nuwas Society, 1993). With a scholarly biographical essay on Abu Nuwas, largely taken from Ewald Wagner's biographical entry in The Encyclopedia of Islam.
  • Carousing with Gazelles, Homoerotic Songs of Old Baghdad. Seventeen poems by Abu Nuwas translated by Jaafar Abu Tarab. (iUniverse, Inc., 2005).
  • Jim Colville. Poems of Wine and Revelry: The Khamriyyat of Abu Nuwas. (Kegan Paul, 2005).
  • The Khamriyyāt of Abū Nuwās: Medieval Bacchic Poetry, trans. by Fuad Matthew Caswell (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2015). Trans. from ‘Aṭwi 1986.

Notes

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References

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Sources

Further reading

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