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Mulayh Ibn Al-Hakam: The Man through His Poetical Output
Abstract
Title: Mulayh Ibn al-Hakam: The Man Through His Poetical Output" In this presentation, I shall study the biography of Mulayh b. al-Hakam as reflected through his poems. Mulayh is a Hudhali poet, lived in the pre-Islamic era, and died in the Umayyad period, about whom we do not have much data. Among the large numbers of Old Arabic diwans that the Kufi scholar, Abu Amr ash-Shaybani, once gathered, were the poems of the Hudhali poet Mulayh b. al-Hakam. A Basri scholar, as-Sukkari, transmitted them among the other poems that he had transmitted of the Hudhayl tribe and Abd as-Sattar Ahmad Farraj, depending on a manuscript of the year 539/1145, published them at the beginning of the third volume of as-Sukkari’s compilation Kitab Sharh ashar al-hudhaliyyin. There were 11 poems by Mulayh, most of them long texts. Decades later, Ibn Jinni composed a treatise in which he made supplementary notes on the commentary of as-Sukkari on the poetry of the Hudhayl tribe; Ibn Jinni dedicated the last chapter of his book to the poetry of Mulayh. Unfortunately, modern scholars were not interested in studying either the biography or the poetical output of this poet. The reason is not known, but one may assume that this was due to the difficult vocabulary and vague images that the poet uses. It may be due to the fact that MulayH was almost totally ignored by classical scholars. Classical authors do not often quote his poetry, nor do they provide any important data about his biography, except to mention his full name according to a certain authority, and the fact that he was an Islamic poet according to another one. Thanks to the efforts of Hans Hermann Bräu, the poems of Mulayh were translated into German. In order to shed more light on both Mulayh’s biography and Mulayh’s poetry, there is a great need for two further studies. The first should be a detailed study on the biography of this poet and the second should be a textual analysis of Mulayh’s poems. I discussed these two issues in two separate articles: The first article will be published in WZKM and it deals with the first issue mentioned above: the biography of Mulayh. The second, which deals with the love poetry by Mulayh, will be published in MEL. In this presentation, I will deal with the biography of Mulayh as reflected through his poems.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Islamic World
Sub Area
7th-13th Centuries