The Life and Times of Abu Tammam. Abu Bakr al-Suli
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of the transmitters: those of literature and history were not given the same scrutiny as those of Hadith, which served as a basis of religious ritual and law. Authors wrote in this way because they wanted to authenticate their materials; thus, the lines of transmitters are akin to modern footnotes, except that they come at the beginning of an account in reverse chronological order, from the most recent to the earliest—“headnotes” so to speak. In the fourth/tenth century, writing from scratch would come to dominate, and chains of transmitters lost their original function, becoming instead a literary device authors played with or something they invented outright.
Compilation does not make for fluid reading—like a snapshot, each piece captures one situation from a specific angle and together with the others creates a kaleidoscope. While a compiler basically arranged preexisting texts, compiling was no less scholarly or creative than composing anew. Individual compilers differed in their degree of intervention in their material. It could be minimal, simply arranging snippets of text into thematic chapters, or it could be more extensive, clustering variant retellings of the same event, commenting on their differences and relative authenticity, and integrating them into a new overall narrative. Al-Ṣūlī is an “interfering” compiler who leaves his readers in no doubt about his interpretation of the material he collected. And because many of his texts were contemporary with his subject, Abū Tammām, they strengthened al-Ṣūlī’s case of showing the poet’s acclaim historically.
Al-Ṣūlī’s own writings, many of which are extant, treat history and poetry.9 His Book of Folios (Kitāb al-Awrāq) chronicles literary aspects of the court during the reigns of caliphs he knew personally, and The Scribe’s Vademecum (Adab al-kuttāb) imparts technical advice and epistolary etiquette to secretaries. But al-Ṣūlī’s main concern was modern poetry. He collected the work of nearly every major Abbasid poet and of numerous minor ones, and his list of edited dīwāns10 reads like a who’s who of early Abbasid literature. But al-Ṣūlī also treated poetry in its social context, as he deemed audience appreciation important in a proper evaluation of the art of the word. To this end he collected narratives about poets’ verses recited in public, their occasions of delivery, and their critical reception. His book on Abū Tammām is a fine demonstration of this. A similar work on al-Buḥturī does not survive as an independent book but has been reassembled from its quotations in the sources by the scholar Ṣāliḥ al-Ashtar.11
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABŪ TAMMĀM
The Life and Times of Abū Tammām takes readers to the heart of classical Arabic literary and court culture. It showcases the vibrancy of the life of poetry in the third/ninth century. We meet the patrons who rewarded poetry with generous sums of money, robes of honor, and paid positions.12 Al-Ṣūlī includes chapters on select patrons who supported Abū Tammām as a testimony to the poet’s success. According to some contemporaries, during Abū Tammām’s lifetime no other poet “could earn a single dirham” (§58). This support of the elite was both material and verbal (§§66.1–2, §§69.1–4). Rulers, generals, and high officials made the novel style not only acceptable but turned it into the ruling fashion for panegyrics in their honor. The patrons formed one important audience group. Al-Ṣūlī also throws light on the social classes that made it possible for the elite patrons to sponsor poets. He describes the day-to-day dealings between individual poets, and between poets and their intermediaries, who connected them to the corridors of power. He thus paints a lively picture of literary life in the capital, Baghdad, and in the palatine city of Samarra.
What is more, The Life and Times of Abū Tammām offers unique insight into the formative phase of Arabic poetic criticism. The book lies at the crossroads of various cultural, literary, and intellectual developments. As a compilation, it reveals two stages in the eventful process of the reception of Abū Tammām and his poetry, the first stage represented by the akhbār, and the second by the activity of the compiler. The first stage, the layer of the akhbār, charts practical criticism from the poet’s time: different groups of critics (and fans) are featured and their agendas are evident.13 The high Arabic language was still being codified in grammar books, and poetry was a principal source. This central role of poetry as a cultural commodity and the importance of its professional stakeholders, the philologists, worked against making Abū Tammām’s innovation uniformly welcome. What some relished and paid highly for, others found objectionable, disliked, or did not understand.14
Abū Tammām’s sophisticated intellectual style was of particular appeal to the scribes, who had a professional mastery of classical Arabic. Their appreciation of his poetry was something the caliphs did not necessarily share. When he was asked, “Did al-Muʿtaṣim understand anything of your poetry?” (§167), the poet’s answer was ambiguous. What was true for caliphs also applied to philologists and transmitters, who occasionally conceded their befuddlement at Abū Tammām’s verse. In response to one scholar’s question, “Why don’t you compose poetry that can be understood?” Abū Tammām answered impatiently, “Why can’t you understand the poetry that is composed?” (§42.1).
Abū Tammām thus heralded a crucial phase of growth in the study of Arabic as a language and of literary criticism: much of the debate surrounding the poet can be explained as a turf war between the recently established discipline of language and the competing fledgling discipline of poetics. Al-Ṣūlī, by collecting sources contemporary with Abū Tammām, shows those ideas in ferment, cast into a vivid tableau. This layer of the compilation thus presents the words of others, the contemporaries of Abū Tammām.
The second stage, the layer of the compiler’s craft, presents the arguments of the author-collector al-Ṣūlī himself, as well as his extensive commentary on several of the accounts he cites. He speaks in his own voice as an expert arbiter, and as one who defends the separation of poetics and philology. Al-Ṣūlī lived a century after his protagonist, when personal attack had matured into scholarly debate, and the contested ideas were being reformulated with greater precision. The material al-Ṣūlī provides is unusually concise, accessible, and concrete. He highlights the significance of the new type of poetic criticism, which claimed the status of scholarship, while considering features other than the purely linguistic.
Despite his clear preference for, and defense of, the contemporary poetic style, al-Ṣūlī was an even-handed arbiter between ancient and modern poets. His ire was directed at those critics of the Moderns whom he deemed incompetent and dishonest (§§9–10 and §69.6). Being a poet and an expert on poetic motifs, he well knew the indebtedness of the Moderns to their predecessors. The same is true of his subject Abū Tammām, who excerpted and reused ancient poetry, even though he boasted of his own additions: “The ancient poet has left so much for the modern!” (§109).
Thanks to the efforts of al-Ṣūlī, Abū Tammām was enshrined as one of the classics in al-Qāḍī l-Jurjānī’s (d. 392/1002) Mediation between al-Mutanabbī and His Opponents (al-Wasāṭah bayn al-Mutanabbī wa-khuṣūmihi), composed when the next genius of Arabic poetry, al-Mutanabbī, had become the major bone of contention. The great theorist ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078 or 474/1081) defined metaphor and imagery through a heavy reliance on both Abū Tammām’s and al-Mutanabbī’s verses. The subsequent fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries saw a wealth of commentaries on both Abū Tammām’s Dīwān and his Ḥamāsah anthology.
CONTENTS
The Life and Times of Abū Tammām opens with an introductory epistle, addressed to one Muzāḥim ibn Fātik, about whom almost nothing is known.15 The opening (§§2.1–4) recapitulates the conversation between al-Ṣūlī and Muzāḥim that prompted the commission to compose The Life and Times and edit the Collected Poems of Abū Tammām. Al-Ṣūlī then (in §§3–5.2)