Ghazal Poetry and the Marwānids: A Study of Kuthayyir ʿAzza Samuel Truman Wilder Trinity Hall January 2019 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge 1 This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. 2 1. Introduction 4-19 1.1 ‘Transitional’ Umayyad Poetry: Approach to the Sources 4-11 1.2 Kuthayyir: Texts and Life 11-18 1.3 The Structure of this Dissertation 18-19 2. Kuthayyir’s Ghazal 20-135 2.1 Reading the Emergence of Ghazal Poetry 20-42 2.2 The Performance Context of Ghazal 43-51 2.3 The Form of Kuthayyir’s Ghazal 52-67 Note on Metre 55-57 2.3.a Poem Openings 57-59 2.3.b The Aṭlāl 59-60 2.3.c The Ẓaʿn Motif 60-62 2.3.d Raḥīl, Oaths, and Transitions 62-64 2.3.e Closing Sections 64-67 2.4 Reading Kuthayyir’s Ghazal 68-103 2.5 The Pilgrimage-Oath and Pilgrimage References In Kuthayyir’s Ghazal 104-118 2.5.a The Pilgrimage as Setting in Ḥijāzī Poetry 107-116 2.5.b The Significance of Pilgrimage-Reference in Marwānid Poetry 116-118 2.6 Illness of Distance: The Poetics of Suqm 119-135 3. Kuthayyir’s Panegyric 136-248 3.1 Introduction: Kuthayyir’s Career as a Panegyrist 136-139 3.2 Panegyric in the Contested Ḥijāz: Kuthayyir and Ibn Al-Ḥanafīya 140-156 3.3 Panegyrics of Marwānid Supremacy: Kuthayyir and ʿAbd al-Malik 157-188 3.4 Poetry and Ḥijāzī Prestige among the Banū Marwān: Kuthayyir and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Marwān 189-209 3.5 ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Piety, and ‘the End of Poetry’ 210-240 4. Conclusion: Patronage and the Sacred Ḥijāz 241-248 Bibliography 249-268 3 INTRODUCTION 1.1. ‘Transitional’ Umayyad Poetry: Approach to the Sources This dissertation will offer an account of the poetry and life of Kuthayyir b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, a prolific love poet and panegyrist of the early Umayyad period who died in his hometown of Medina, in the Ḥijāz in Western Arabia, in AH 105/723 AD. In order to provide background for this study, this introduction will first discuss some fundamental issues related to the interpretation of the poetry of the early Umayyad/Marwānid period (circa 60-110/680-730), before going on to discuss the transmission of the texts attributed to Kuthayyir, and the sources of information about his life. This introduction will then conclude with a description of the structure of the remainder of the dissertation. The Umayyad era, and the early period of Marwānid rule in particular (roughly 60- 110/680-730), was formative in relation to many of the aesthetic norms and practices of later classical Islamic culture, including, for example, monumental Islamic architecture, and early Arabic scribal practice and manuscript production. The researcher into Umayyad-era art and literature must therefore confront a number of interpretive difficulties that often attend the study of ‘formative’ periods: works of the Umayyad period are difficult to place coherently into a defined historical context, as they must first be isolated from their later presentation in the sources of the classical period; compounding this difficulty, one often has little concrete evidence about the historical circumstances in which works from the period were produced and first received. In recent decades, the most prominent and illuminating contributions to the study of the Umayyad period have appeared under the rubric of the study of Late Antiquity, i.e., by way of attempts to incorporate the study of early Islamic culture and history within the broader epistemic scope of the world west of India in the first millennium of the common era. Particularly in the fields of art history and religious studies, the Late Antiquity paradigm has produced a great number of remarkably 4 illuminating treatments that have broken new ground in the study of the Umayyad period.1 Yet, despite the boon of new studies under the rubric of the study of Late Antiquity, the most voluminous and conspicuous contemporaneous literary source for the study of the early Islamic and Umayyad period, the corpus of poetry in Arabic attributed to poets who lived, composed, and performed within the early Islamic polity, has remained largely neglected. Very few studies have appeared in recent decades that have attempted to provide detailed historical interpretation of the work of Umayyad-era poets. While this neglect can be attributed in part to traditional disciplinary boundaries, namely the persistent isolation of philology from its adjacent areas in historical and cultural studies, surely compounded by the perception of Arabic poetry as exotic, the neglect is also reinforced, in our view, by elements intrinsic to the poetic corpus itself. It should be useful therefore at the outset of our study to discuss several of these intrinsic difficulties, which we would describe in terms of the ‘transitional’ qualities of Umayyad-era verse. Renate Jacobi has expressed the problem of Umayyad poetry’s transitional quality quite concisely: ‘It [Umayyad poetry] lacks both the collective oral traditions of the pre-Islamic time (jāhilīya), and the formulated aesthetic norms of the Abbasid period.’2 This statement is true in several senses. On the one hand, the sources of transmission of Umayyad-era poetry are themselves transitional: it is only at the very end of the Umayyad period, at the earliest, that poetry in Arabic began to be systematically recorded in writing, and even then the overwhelming preference of early scholars seems to have been for the recording of pre- 1 For recent summaries, see, e.g., the essays in A Companion to Islamic Art and and Architecture. Volume 1. From the Prophet to the Mongols, eds. Flood and Necipoglu (London: 2017); and Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang (Berlin: 2010) [= KTS]. 2Jacobi, “Omaijadische Dichtung (7.-8. Jahrhundert),“ in Grundriss der arabischen Philologie, volume 2 (Wiesbaden: 1987) [= GAP 2], 32: Im Vergleich zur vorislamischen Zeit (ğāhilīya) fehlt die kollectiv geprägte mündliche Tradition, im Gegensatz zur Abbasidenzeit die formulierte ästhetische Norm. 5 Islamic Jāhilī verse rather than Umayyad-era poets. 3 Transmitted by scholars of a later age who cannot have possessed a perfect grasp of its original context and meaning, early Islamic and Umayyad-era poetry was thus caught between the ‘contemporary’ and the prestigiously ancient, as it were, and its textual transmission often reflects this difficulty. On the other hand, Umayyad-era poetry itself was already transitional, in a different literary-historical sense: the poetry shows divergences in form and content from the later ‘classical’ poetry of the Abbasid age, as well as pervasive divergence in form and content from the pre-Islamic corpus. Umayyad-era poetry exhibits a formal instability associated with the emergence of new genres, the breakdown of archaic forms, and the expression of a new range of themes and tonalities – modern literary histories have expressed this as the ‘experimental’ quality of Umayyad poetry, and have often sought to explain this experimental quality through reference to the radical social and ‘mental-historical’ (mentalitätsgeschichtlich) changes of the first Islamic century.4 Fundamental changes in form and genre are attributed to the Umayyad period, including the putative emergence of the tri-partite panegyric structure and the appearance of new poetic genres such as the ṭardīya (hunting poem) and the khamrīya (wine poem); yet concrete, diachronic descriptions of the emergence of these new forms and the historical dynamics that lay behind their apparent emergence remain lacking, not least because these narratives of emergence are impossible to extricate from the normative explanations and back- projections of Abbasid-era and later critics.5 3 On the tendency of early scholars to overlook the Umayyad period, see Gruendler, “Verse and Taxes: The Function of Poetry in Selected Literary Akhbār of the Third/Ninth Century,” in On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, ed. Kennedy (Wiesbaden: 2005), 85-124, esp. 87-88; and “Mufaḍḍaliyyāt”, EI2 [Jacobi]. 4 On Umayyad poetry as ‘experimental,’ see Jayyusi, “Umayyad Poetry,” in Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. Beeston et al (Cambridge: 1983), 387-432. 5 On these issues, see Schoeler, “The Genres of Classical Arabic Poetry. Classifications of Poetic Themes and Poems by Pre-Modern Critics and Redactors of Dīwāns,” QSA 5-6 (2010-11), 1-48.; Montgomery, “Of Models and Amanuenses: The Remarks on the Qaṣīda in Ibn Qutayba’s Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-l-Shuʿarāʾ”, in Islamic Reflections Arabic Musings, eds. Hoyland and Kennedy (Cambridge: 2004), 1-47; and the discussion in Talib, How Do You Say ‘Epigram’ in Arabic?: Literary History at the Limits of Comparison (Leiden: 2018), 1-6. 6 But prior to these genre-historical questions, the historical approach to this poetry must confront in more detail the issue of the transmission of texts from the Umayyad period.