Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī’s (d. 297/910) Kitāb al-Zahra stands apart from other poetic anthologies made in the third Islamic century for two reasons: more than half its contents are love poems, and the compiler offers comments on the moral value of the poems. Ibn Dāwūd, a Ẓāhirite judge, allegedly included his own poems in the collection under the pseudonym ba`ḍ ahl hādhā al-`aṣr (“a Man of Our Times”); these poems accord closely with the sentiments expressed by Ibn Dāwūd the compiler in the introduction to the book and in his commentary on individual poems. Both Kitāb al-Zahra and the biographical tradition present Ibn Dāwūd as someone who cares about justice and reason and shuns frivolity. The biographical tradition even makes him a martyr of love, and it identifies his beloved and the addressee of Kitāb al-Zahra as Muḥammad (or Wahb) ibn Jāmi` al-Ṣaydalānī. Chapter 81 of Kitāb al-Zahra deals with descriptions of wine. The chapter opens with Ibn Dāwūd’s brief summary of the religious proscription on wine drinking and a discussion of the physical properties of wine and its effects on behavior. He quotes six poems about drinkers behaving in a way contrary to their own nature because of their drunken state. The rest of the chapter deals with poets who originated oft-repeated motifs about wine and drinking. The poets quoted include notable ancients, as well as ʿAbbāsid era personalities commonly associated with drinking and worldly pleasures; these poets include Abū Nuwās, Isḥāq al-Mawṣilī, and al-Ḥusayn ibn al-Ḍaḥḥāk. In his own poetry, all of which appears in the ghazal chapters, Ibn Dāwūd portrays wine negatively or shows his narrator avoiding it. Of the 115 Man of Our Times poems in Kitāb al-Zahra, three directly mention wine and four allude to it. They include one instance each of the cliché comparing the beloved’s eyes and love, respectively, to wine. Poem [52] shows the Man of Our Times avoiding the pleasures of a drinking party, namely wine (mudām), singing maidens (qiyān), and drinking companions (fityān ṣidq), because he only desires the beloved’s companionship, and nothing can distract him from this. Elsewhere, drunkenness stands in for the sleep that eludes the Man of Our Times and for the torments he feels. Even Karkh, famous for its taverns, warrants a mention as the place where he “drank a cup of Muḥammad’s rejection.”