Abbasid Panegyric: Badīʿ Poetry and the Invention of the Arab Golden Age

Suzanne Stetkevych: Abbasid Panegyric: Badīʿ Poetry and the Invention of the Arab Golden Age

2017, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

eBuch

Comparative Literature, Arabic Literature, Classical Arabic Poetry, Abbasid History, Postcolonial Literature

This study argues that the third AH/ninth CE century panegyrists (praise poets) of the Abbasid caliphal court at Baghdad (and briely at Samarra) were responsible for constructing the image of a Golden Age of Arab-Islamic dominion that was subsequently adopted by the poets and thinkers of the Nahḍa or ‘Arab Awakening’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Challenged to create a poetry that would serve as the linguistic correlative of the astounding and unprecedented might and dominion of the rulers of the Arab-Islamic state, the Abbasid Modernist Poets (al-shuʿarāʾ al-muḥdathūn) invented a powerfully and radically innovative poetic style, termed badīʿ. The panegyric odes of poets such as Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī were canonized so as to promote a vision of an Arab-Islamic Golden Age and, further, to serve as models for the expression of Arab-Islamic hegemony and the conferral and contestation of legitimate authority. In the Nahḍa of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Neo-Classical poets such as Aḥmad Shawqī recouped the Abbasid master poets to both retroject and project a vision of an Arab-Islamic ‘Enlightenment’. Finally, this study examines the fraught relationship of the post-Naksa (1967) Arab poet, as exempliied in the modern Yemeni poet ʿAbd Allāh al- Baradūnī, with the poets and poetry of the Golden Age.

Suzanne Stetkevych Georgetown University Faculty Member

A specialist in Classical Arabic Poetry, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych holds a BA in Art History from Wellesley College (1972) and a PhD in Classical Arabic Literature from The University of Chicago (1981). She taught Arabic literature for many years

"The panegyric odes (s. qaṣīdat al-madḥ) of these poets—chief among them Bashshār ibn Burd, Abū Nuwās, Muslim ibn al-Walīd, Abū Tammām and al-Buḥturī— were in their original presentation to their patrons an integral part of a courtly ceremonial verbal performance of allegiance for the conferral and contestation of legitimacy. Subsequent to their court performance, these odes were canonized in such a way as to promote a vision of an Arab-Islamic Golden Age and thereby became models for the expression of Arab-Islamic hegemony. Thus, in the Neo-Classical ‘revival’ in the Nahḍa or Arab Awakening of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Abbasid panegyric tradition—in its badīʿ style as well as cultural political substance—became formative in the work of such poets as Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī and Aḥmad Shawqī for the conceptualization and expression of their nationalist and anti-colonialist stance. Finally, this study examines the persistence of the hegemonic vision and mode of expression of Abbasid panegyric as a reproach to the humiliation and defeat of the Arabs in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, as exempliied in the poem entitled alternately Abū Tammām wa-ʿUrūbat al-Yawm (Abū Tammām and the Arabs Today) or Risāla ilā Abī Tammām (Letter to Abū Tammām), by the modern Yemeni poet, ʿAbd Allāh al-Baradūnī."