Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʿabbāsid Age

Foremost among the poetic accomplishments of the ʿAbbāsid age was the sudden flowering of a highly rhetorical and strikingly modern style of poetry, termed "badīʿ." It found its most radical and controversial exponent in the celebrated panegyrist to the courts of al-Maʾmūn and al-Muʿtaṣim, Abū Tammām Ḥabīb ibn Aws al-Ṭāʾī.

The present study offers a reevaluation of the Arabic literary dispute over Abū Tammām and badīʿ. It then proposes a redefinition of his diwan and of his major anthology, the Ḥamāsah, as a metapoesis that served to decode the poetic tradition of the pre-Islamic desert for the Islamic ʿAbbāsid caliph and his urbane and urban courtiers and subjects, and conversely, to encode contemporary Arab-Islamic political experiences in classical form.

This book is extensively illustrated with original translations.