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.

The diwan of the seventh-century Arab poet Jamil Buthaynah is known to have circulated widely in the ninth century, but thereafter was lost. Roughly 800 lines can be reconstructed today, primarily with reference to the eleventh century anthology of poetry set to music, the Kitab al-Aghani. As a result, in Jamil’s surviving poetry, the traditional tripartite structure of the qasidah has been reduced to a nearly claustrophobic focus on the nasib, or erotic prelude, in the individual reassembled poems of his collection. In addition, although there are some signs that Jamil Buthaynah treated a greater range of topics in his poetry, the tradition has reduced him to a poet of frustrated love who returned obsessively to the topic his cousin Buthaynah, who was married off to another man. It is also likely that at least some of the lines that have been ascribed to Jamil were composed by his imitators, or were written by other poets, whose identities were long ago lost, but whose treatment of similar tales of amorous woe have caused them to be assigned to Jamil as well. Keeping these pecularities of Jamil’s text in mind, this paper examines the way in which the poet has recalibrated evocations of the journey (which we would otherwise find in the absent rahil), and has emphasized Buthaynah’s absence with his compulsive address to her (all the more remarkable since the address implied in the madih/hija’ has disappeared). Coupled with Jamil’s recourse to qur’anic language and Islamic references to express the hyperbole of his affections, the anthologist’s scrambling, truncating and re-mixing of the poems makes them seem oddly modern, if not indeed postmodern, and thereby more accessible to the twenty-first century reader.

The Maqama of Saymara (al-Maqama al-Saymariyya) is often regarded as a maqama of “anomaly.” In this particular maqama, Badi' al-zaman al-Hamadhani did not summon his fictitious hero Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari. Even the usual isnad ('Isa ibn Hisham related to us and said) is awkwardly followed by a second one (Said Abu al-'Anbas al-Saymari). Therefore both the narrator and the hero are the same al-Saymari (213-75/828-88), the court jester of the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil and also a renowned faqih, astrologer, oneiromancer, poet, and belle-lettrist. Another “anomaly” of this maqama is the combination of saj' (rhymed prose) and prose, rather than the saj'-poetry alternation that is attested in the majority of the Hamadhanian maqamat. As Julia Bray notes in an article published in 1998, the Maqama of Saymara contains seven consecutive plots enclosed in a moralizing frame. The stylistic feature, i.e., the mixture of saj' and prose, echoes the coexistence of simple and complicated plots, and could betray al-Hamadhani’s technique of “working up a prose sketch into saj'.” In this paper, we will provide some justifications on the Saymara maqama’s “anomalies.” It is known that a usual Hamadhanian maqama consists of a single episode in the beggar hero’s life. If we gather together these snapshots, a fuller image of al-Iskandari appears and the audience/reader can find an array of virtues (sg. fadl) that are hidden in the maqama’s theme of beggary. With his eloquence and ruses, al-Saymari bears a strong resemblance to al-Iskandari. The seven episodes of the Saymara maqama also contain the virtues that can be located in the usual Hamadhanian maqamat. The length of the Saymara maqama, as well as the “the lapse from saj' into prose,” suggests that we can divide this particular maqama into several stories that are united by an identical isnad. Our analysis of this maqama also reminds us to reexamine the maqama’s connections to biography, picaresque novel, and even the qasida genre.

Pre-Islamic naqa’id (flytings) were used to attack and dishonor competing poets’ tribes and clans, but these attacks became increasingly out of place in the first Islamic century, not only because they were contrary to new urban sensibilities against injuring another’s reputation, but also because ties to tribe had waned in favor of other ties. People began to identify with their city, their region or their profession more than with their tribe. Whereas lineage had been the primary marker of identity in the pagan era, the new civilization encouraged migration to new Islamic cities and an ethos that valued ideas over blood ties, which brought about changes in how many people approached old customs, rituals and aesthetic systems, including poetry. Given this new social context, what were the new functions of naqa’id poetry? Why did audiences enjoy it? This paper will investigate a sampling of naqa’id poetry from the corpus of Umayyad-era poets Jarir (d. 728) and al-Farazdaq (d. 730). It will showcase facetious elements in this poetry by drawing analogies to the modern practice of the “Dozens.” I will argue that Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s performance of the naqa’id was geared more toward entertainment of an audience than to defense of a tribe. Using comparative methods I will demonstrate how Jarir and al-Farazdaq deployed the genre of naqa’id as an entertainment tool in a way similar to that found in the “Dozens,” a poetic exhibition between two performers in which each tries to “win” by making insulting—and untrue—remarks about his or her rival. This interpretation of Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqa’id will shed light on the societal changes that had occurred from pre-Islamic times through the Umayyad era. By employing contemporary scholarship on the “Dozens” I will note similarities between it and the naqa’id of Jarir and al-Farazdaq, both of which use insults to elicit a reaction from the audience by besting one’s opponent. I will conclude that Jarir and al-Farazdaq performed insult poetry as an entertaining spectacle to the increasingly urbanizing audience of early eighth-century Basra.