The poet Bashsh?r ibn Burd lived in a time of major political uncertainty when the Umayyad rule (7th-8th C.) was in decline and the ‘Abbasids (8th-13th C.) were gaining ascendancy. While he is presumably from Persian descent (as most classical sources indicate), he has written Arabic poetry and boasted about his Persian ancestors at a time of Arabo-Islamic rule. For that reason Bashsh?r holds a peculiar position in the Arabic literary tradition not only as one of the major Arabic poets of his time, but also as a very controversial figure. Most Arab critics and biographers of the ‘Abb?sid empire, read his insistence on mentioning his Persian origins in his poetry as a clear rejection of Arabo-Islamic rule. But Bashsh?r’s story does not quite end there. The image constructed for him to reflect Arabo-Islamic hegemony became part of the European colonial project now directed against Arabs and Muslims. My argument, which draws on both post-colonial theory and translation theory, has many sides. First of all, the hostility of the Arab biographers of the ‘Abb?sid empire toward Bashsh?r is what European scholars, biographers and translators construed to be representative of the intolerance of Arab and Muslim society in general. Moreover, Bashsh?r’s controversial status in the Arabic literary tradition lies in his choice of identifying with both Arab and Persian cultures at the same time. And finally, by attempting to trace the construction of Bashsh?r’s image and its ideological and political implications through a thorough study of selections from Bashsh?r’s poetry, English translations of his poetry, and the historical and bibliographical material about him, I would like to argue that the failure to understand Bashsh?r’s position in both “West” and “East” is due to an essentialist view of identity that cannot attach him to one without assuming him to reject the other, and that this conception of identity is characteristic of any imperial conquest.