The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli
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She wins love because she is dyed black,
the color of the pupil and the inner heart.18
She captivates minds and eyes,
oh, how they gallop after her!
I cite Ibn al-Rūmī because he is someone I myself encountered. Among the good poets, he is our closest contemporary, having died the most recently. If I went as far back as Abū Tammām, Muslim, Abū l-ʿAtāhiyah, Abū Nuwās, and Bashshār, I would discover many verses like this, but I would be digressing.
17.1
We cite Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd, who cites ʿUmar ibn Shabbah, who cites al-Aṣmaʿī as authority for the following:
People considered these words of Abū l-Najm outstanding:
Beneath her torn shift,
When she shows what she hides,
There’s what looks like half a camel’s hump with the other half thrown on top.19
It bulges like the back of a head, has a fine straight line,
Like a nib cut on a penboard,20
Like a goatee on the face of a Yemeni shaykh,
Right where her belly is.
17.2
Then Bashshār said:
A heavy-bottomed woman, best of the clan of Mālik,
her pussy protrudes in front of her belly.
Its apex is graced by its elevation,
its watering hole tight and thin at the bottom.
Thus he consigned Abū l-Najm’s poem to oblivion, as people preferred his and memorized it.
18
In the days before Islam and in its early period, the Ancients often evoked old age.21 Those knowledgeable about poetry, experts of its lexicon, are in complete agreement that the best verses on the subject are by Manṣūr al-Namarī. This is their consensus. The fact that he lived recently did not prevent his rendition from being deemed the best. Here they are:
Pain and regret are endless,
when I recall a youth I will never regain.
Youth departed. Time’s evil treachery
stole its spark from me.
I had not lived my youth to its innocent full,
then it passed, and suddenly the world followed suit.
If you have not tasted the loss of youth
nor choked on its pain, you have no excuse.22
I weep, for I have been robbed of youth:
the world makes no restitution for its worth.
The sight of grey hair even on a loved one
is disgusting and repulsive.
19.1
It is a low and base person who uses a second type of critique of Abū Tammām to achieve prominence and attract notice by composing books defaming Abū Tammām and misleading others in order to gain notoriety through disagreement. He looks to earn a name through denigration, because he has nothing himself to contribute, and to profit from error because he has been barred from truth. It is said, “Disagree and you will become famous.” Perhaps he thought that this behavior resembled the verse of ʿAbd al-Aʿlā ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿĀmir, namely:
If you can do no good, do harm,
for man is expected to do both harm and good.
19.2
Someone said, “If good is beyond you, fly the flag of evil.” Another defended his bad poetry on the grounds that his only goal was fame. His are the lines:
I will satirize you for as long as I live, in poetry
not worth a penny when assessed.
Let them say, “This is bad!”
I am happy they call it bad, and yet it is transmitted.
19.3
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Madāʾinī said:
Wrongs are not all satisfied.
Oh no, only nobles receive satisfaction.
To mention the sins of a scoundrel boosts his rank,
even if he is guilty of wrong.
19.4
We cite al-Ḥusayn ibn al-Ḥasan al-Azdī, who cites Abū Ḥātim al-Sijistānī, who in turn cites al-Aṣmaʿī as his authority:
A Bedouin woman said to her son, “If in the company of others you can do well by going along with what they say, go ahead; if not, disagree and you will become famous, even if you have to hang a donkey’s cock around your neck.”
20.1
I will now discuss some unfounded criticism of Abū Tammām and explain it to you (God support you) before other instances that will follow in the relevant context of Abū Tammām’s Collected Poems, God willing.
20.2
They found fault (God support you) with the following motif in a poem that is absolutely superb, a eulogy of al-Muʿtaṣim on the conquest of Amorium that begins:
The sword is more truthful than books,
its edge marks the divide between earnestness and jest.
They faulted the following words in the poem:
Ninety thousand men like the lions of Mount Sharā
ripe for victory, before the figs and grapes ripened.23
20.3
If the fault is that figs and grapes are not serious enough for poetry, we can cite the verse of Ibn Qays al-Ruqayyāt:
May rain fall upon the vines of Ḥulwān
and the rows of fig trees and vines that grow there!
20.4
And al-Farrāʾ recited a verse on the subject of a variant word form of “grapes” (ʿinab) that ends in long āʾ (ʿinabāʾ):
It resembled orchard fruits:
Choice grapes and figs.
So if the fault was that these objects were distinct from the subject matter of poetry, then these critics should have done their homework before voicing their criticism.
20.5
I never met anyone more knowledgeable about Abū Tammām’s poetry than Abū Mālik ʿAwn ibn Muḥammad al-Kindī, the scribe of Ḥujr ibn Aḥmad. He had studied twenty of his poems with Abū Tammām himself, and I myself studied them with Abū Mālik in the year 285 [898]. I studied the Amorium poem with him and when I reached this verse, I asked him what it meant and why people found fault with it. He said that his father related to him the following:
I took part in the campaign at Amorium with al-Muʿtaṣim. He learned that the Byzantines who were under siege were saying, “By God, we have been told that our fortress will only fall to bastards! If this lot stay here until the figs and grapes are in season, none will escape.” When al-Muʿtaṣim heard this he said, “I hope Almighty God will aid us to victory before the figs and grapes are in season! Let them say, ‘Our fortress will only fall to bastards!’—I do not need more men than I have with me.”
Abū Mālik then said: I think that Abū Tammām was referring to this idea in this verse.
20.6
Al-Ṣūlī: