While providing a few insights from my forthcoming critical monograph, this paper investigates the interplay between literary creativity and craftsmanship within the Arabic pre-modern urbanized context (9th-10th c.) as an exemplary case study of osmosis between cultural and creative spaces. Engaging with the current discourse on cultural heritage, the global frame of my research aims to provide background knowledge to the timely reflection on the creative processes and the resulting built-environment as inter-reliant entities ensuring the role of culture in social cohesion and its relation to creative and artistic freedom and diversity. The paper argues how historical moments of urban development linked to cultural enlightenment could have inspired some authors to develop a craftsmanship-inspired approach to literary writing as the rhetorical study of 9-10th-centuries treatises shows. The intervention is centered on interwoven, broad considerations on two main issues of research, namely, the reconceptualization of the binary categories of maṭbūʿ and maṣnūʿ (visceral/artificial) and the global socio-political Abbasid context of the belles-lettres-craftsmanship’s encounter. A few examples will be provided. The paper argues how the interplay between talent, literary craft, and ability enabled the Abbasid authors not only to explore, analyze, and employ their own languages and literary traditions as powerful tools, but also to reflect on new literary styles, models and perspectives whilst harmonizing a secular, progress-driven mentality.

In his poignant maqamah penned for Baghdad, Ẓahīr al-Dīn Ibn al-Kāzarūnī (611 – 697/1214 - 1298) memorializes the urban culture of the Abbasid capital in the thirteenth-century before its loss to the Mongols. The city’s architectural ruins provide the skeleton that Ibn al-Kāzarūnī utilizes as a literary device to bring the city back to life. His poetic prose reminisces on the ways that public officials upheld the Abbasid bureaucracy and how the populace marked distinctive occasions, such as the annual pilgrimage, fasting, major holidays, death, and the arrival of spring. In this work, Ibn al-Kāzarūnī celebrates the cosmopolitanism and preeminence of the Abbasid caliphs in both worldly and religious terms. They are celebrated rulers, protectors of Islam, guardians of the Muslim community, political inheritors of the blessed Prophet, and his blood relatives. And he simultaneously highlights the moral dangers that laced the Abbasids’ power and wealth, leading to extravagance, decrepitude, and ultimately divine retribution. The path forward, that Ibn al-Kāzarūnī and his contemporaries envisioned, lay in sincere repentance and embodied acts of piety – even as they cast a longing glance back to the urban life and culture of thirteenth-century Bagdad now lost to them forever.

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.”