Abu Nuwas

Abu Nuwas was born in the province of Ahvaz (modern Khuzestan Province) of the Abbasid Caliphate, either in the city of Ahvaz or one of its adjacent districts. His date of birth is uncertain, he was born sometime between 756 and 758. His father was Hani, a Syrian or Persian who had served in the army of the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II (r. 744–750). His mother was a Persian named Gulban, whom Hani had met whilst serving in the police force of Ahvaz. When Abu Nuwas was 10 years old, his father died.[3][4]

In his early childhood Abu Nuwas followed his mother to Basra in lower Iraq where he attended Qur’an school and became a Hafiz at a young age. His youthful good looks and innate charisma attracted the attention of the Kufan poet, Abu Usama Waliba ibn al-Hubab al-Asadi, who took Abu Nuwas to Kufa as a young apprentice. Waliba recognized in Abu Nuwas his talent as a poet and encouraged him toward this vocation, but was also attracted sexually to the young man and may have had erotic relations with him. Abu Nuwas's relationships with adolescent boys when he had matured as a man seem to mirror his own experience with Waliba.[5]

Abu Nuwas wrote poetry in multiple genres; his great talent was most recognized in his wine poems and in his hunting poems.[6] His erotic lyric poetry, which is often homoerotic, is known from over 500 poems and fragments.[7] He also participated in the well-established Arabic tradition of satirical poetry, which included duels between poets involving vicious exchanges of poetic lampoons and insults.[8] Ismail bin Nubakht, one of Nuwas's contemporaries, said:

"I never saw a man of more extensive learning than Abu Nuwas, nor one who, with a memory so richly furnished, possessed so few books. After his death we searched his house, and could only find one book-cover containing a quire of paper, in which was a collection of rare expressions and grammatical observations."[9]

The earliest anthologies of his poetry and his biography were produced by:[10]

• Yaḥyā ibn al-Faḍl and Ya‘qūb ibn al-Sikkīt arranged his poetry under ten subject categories, rather than in alphabetical order. Al-Sikkīt wrote an 800-page commentary.[11]
• Abū Sa’īd al-Sukkarī[lower-alpha 1] edited his poetry, providing commentary and linguistic notes; he completed editing approximately two thirds of the corpus of one thousand folios. [12][13]
• Abū Bakr ibn Yaḥyā aI-Ṣūlī edited his work, organizing poems alphabetically, and corrected some false attributions.
• ‘Alī ibn Ḥamzah al-Iṣbahānī also edited his writings, compiling works alphabetically. [14]
• Yūsuf ibn al-Dāyah [15]
• Abū Hiffān [lower-alpha 2] [16]
• Ibn al-Washshā’ Abū Ṭayyib, scholar of Baghdād[17][18][19][20]
• Ibn ‘Ammār[lower-alpha 3] wrote a critique of Nuwas's work, including citing instances of alleged plagiarism.[21][22]
• Al-Munajjim family: Abū Manṣūr; Yaḥyā ibn Abī Manṣūr; Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā; ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā; Yaḥyā ibn ‘Alī; Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā; Hārūn ibn ‘Alī; ‘Alī ibn Hārūn; Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī; Hārūn ibn ‘Alī ibn Hārūn.[23][24][25][26][27]
• Abū al-Ḥasan al-Sumaysāṭī also wrote in praise of Nuwas. [28]

He died during the Great Abbasid Civil War before al-Ma’mūn advanced from Khurāsān in either 199 or 200 AH (814–816 AD).[29] Because he frequently indulged in drunken exploits, Nuwas was imprisoned during the reign of Al-Amin, shortly before his death.[30]

The cause of his death is disputed:[31] four different accounts of Abu Nuwas’s death survive. 1. He was poisoned by the Nawbakht family, having been framed with a poem satirizing them. 2. He died in a tavern drinking right up to his death. 3. He was beaten by the Nawbakht for the satire falsely attributed to him; wine appears to have had a role in the flailing emotions of his final hours - this seems to be a combination of accounts one and two. 4. He died in prison, a version which contradicts the many anecdotes stating that in the advent of his death he suffered illness and was visited by friends (though not in prison). He most probably died of ill health, and equally probably in the house of the Nawbakht family, whence came the myth that they poisoned him.[5] Nuwas was buried in Shunizi cemetery in Baghdad.[32]

While his works were in circulation freely until the early years of the twentieth century, the first modern censored edition of his works was published in Cairo in 1932. In January 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture ordered the burning of some 6,000 copies of books of Nuwas's homoerotic poetry.[42][43] In the Saudi Global Arabic Encyclopedia entry for Abu Nuwas, all mentions of pederasty were omitted.[44]

He features as a character in a number of stories in One Thousand and One Nights, where he is cast as a boon companion of Harun al-Rashid.

A heavily fictionalised Abu Nuwas is the protagonist of the novels The Father of Locks (Dedalus Books, 2009)[45] and The Khalifah's Mirror (2012) by Andrew Killeen,[46] in which he is depicted as a spy working for Ja'far al-Barmaki.[47]

In the Sudanese novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) by Tayeb Salih, Abu Nuwas's love poetry is cited extensively by one of the novel's protagonists, the Sudanese Mustafa Sa'eed, as a means of seducing a young English woman in London: "Does it not please you that the earth is awaking,/ That old virgin wine is there for the taking?"[48]

The Tanzanian artist Godfrey Mwampembwa (Gado) created a Swahili comic book called Abunuwasi which was published in 1996.[49] It features a trickster figure named Abunuwasi as the protagonist in three stories draw inspiration from East African folklore as well as the fictional Abu Nuwasi of One Thousand and One Nights.[50][51]

In Pasolini's Arabian Nights, the Sium story is based on Abu Nuwas' erotic poetry. The original poems are used throughout the scene.[52]

• Dīwān Abū Nu’ās, khamriyyāt Abū Nu’ās, ed. by ‘Alī Najīb ‘Aṭwi (Beirut 1986).
• O Tribe That Loves Boys. Hakim Bey (Entimos Press / Abu Nuwas Society, 1993). With a scholarly biographical essay on Abu Nuwas, largely taken from Ewald Wagner's biographical entry in The Encyclopedia of Islam.
• Carousing with Gazelles, Homoerotic Songs of Old Baghdad. Seventeen poems by Abu Nuwas translated by Jaafar Abu Tarab. (iUniverse, Inc., 2005).
• Jim Colville. Poems of Wine and Revelry: The Khamriyyat of Abu Nuwas. (Kegan Paul, 2005).
• The Khamriyyāt of Abū Nuwās: Medieval Bacchic Poetry, trans. by Fuad Matthew Caswell (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2015). Trans. from ‘Aṭwi 1986.

• Arbuthnot, F.F. (1890). Arabic Authors: A Manual of Arabian History and Literature. W. Heinemann. ISBN 978-1-4655-1080-8. LCCN 43050203.
• Fatehi-Nezhad, Enayatollah; Azarnoosh, Azartash; Negahban, Farzin (2008). "Abū Nuwās". In Madelung, Wilferd; Daftary, Farhad (eds.). Encyclopaedia Islamica Online. Brill Online. ISSN 1875-9831.
• Flügel, Gustav (1862). Die grammatischen Schulen der Araber [The Grammatical Schools of the Arabs] (in German). Leipzig: Brockhaus. OCLC 1042925515.
• Gado (1998). Abunuwasi. Sasa Sema Publications. ISBN 9966-9609-0-2. OCLC 475143542.
• Ibn-Hallikān, Aḥmad Ibn-Muḥammad (1961). Wafayat al-a'yan wa anbã' abna' al-zamãn [The Obituaries of Eminent Men] (in Arabic). Pakistan Historical Society. OCLC 633767474.
• Ibn al-Nadīm, Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (1970). Dodge, Bayard (ed.). The Fihrist of al-Nadīm : a tenth-century survey of Muslim culture. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-02925-X. OCLC 298105272.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Killeen, Andrew (2009). The Father of Locks. Dedalus. ISBN 978-1-903517-76-5.
• Mahoney, T.J. (2013). Mercury. Mercury. Springer New York. ISBN 978-1-4614-7951-2. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
• Pilcher, Tim (2005). The Essential Guide to World Comics. Collins & Brown. ISBN 1-84340-300-5. OCLC 61302672.
• Ṣāliḥ, al-Ṭayyib (1991). Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-435-90974-1.
• Straley, Dona S. (2004). The undergraduate's companion to Arab writers and their web sites. Libraries Unlimited. p. 30. ISBN 978-1-59158-118-5.
• Wagner, Ewald (2007). "Abū Nuwās". In Fleet, Kate; Krämer, Gudrun; Matringe, Denis; Nawas, John; Rowson, Everett (eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Brill Online. ISSN 1873-9830.

• Kennedy, Philip F. (1997). The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition. Open University Press. ISBN 0-19-826392-9.
• Kennedy, Philip F. (2005). Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry. OneWorld Press. ISBN 1-85168-360-7.
• Lacy, Norris J. (1989). "The Care and Feeding of Gazelles – Medieval Arabic and Hebrew love poetry". In Moshe Lazar (ed.). Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages. George Mason University Press. pp. 95–118. ISBN 0-913969-25-7.
• Frye, Richard N. (1975). The Golden Age of Persia. p. 123. ISBN 0-06-492288-X.
• Rowell, Alex (2017). Vintage Humour: The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu Nawas. C. Hurst & Co. ISBN 978-1-84904-897-2.
• Khallikān (Ibn), Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad (1843). Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (tr. Wafayāt al-A'yān wa-al-Anbā Abnā' al-Zamān). Vol. i. Translated by McGuckin de Slane, William. London: W.H. Allen. pp. 391–395.

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