THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Literary Themes of the Poetry of Mu ḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfah ānī in Kit āb al-Zahra A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © All Rights Reserved By Jennifer Tobkin Washington, D.C. 2011 Literary Themes of the Poetry of Mu ḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfah ānī in Kit āb al-Zahra Jennifer Tobkin, Ph.D. Director: Sidney H. Griffith, S.T., Ph.D. Mu ḥammad ibn D āwūd al-Iṣfah ānī (d. 297/909) was a judge of the Ẓāhirite madhhab of Islamic law, but his only surviving work is Kit āb al-Zahra ( The Book of the Flower ), an anthology of poetry, including some of Ibn D āwūd’s own poems. The biographical tradition names Ibn D āwūd’s motivation for writing Kit āb al-Zahra and his poetry therein as his unrequited love for a male friend, and this love story became much more famous than the poetry Ibn D āwūd actually wrote. This dissertation argues that the subject of Ibn D āwūd’s poetry was not erotic love as is typically described in love poetry, but brotherhood ( ikh ā’), friendship among males of similar age and social status, which was frequently a topic of discussion in `Abb āsid literature, although Ibn D āwūd may be the only poet of the Arabic language to make it the central theme of his work. A survey of other early Arabic works that deal with brotherhood, including pre-Islamic poetry, treatises on courtly etiquette, and philosophical writings influenced by the Aristotelian tradition, will provide insight into the cultural construct of brotherhood to which Ibn D āwūd’s poetry constantly returns. Close readings of Ibn D āwūd’s poetry show how he employed various conventions of Arabic poetry, such as intertextuality and a level of diction more appropriate to the entertainments and debates of the majlis than to the ceremonial ode ( qa ṣīda ), in order to convey his ideas about brotherhood. This dissertation by Jennifer Tobkin fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures approved by Sidney H. Griffith, S.T., Ph.D., as Director, and by Shawqi Talia, Ph.D., and Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Ph.D., as Readers. _____________________________________ Sidney H. Griffith, S.T., Ph.D., Director _____________________________________ Shawqi Talia, Ph.D., Reader _____________________________________ Lourdes Maria Alvarez, Ph.D., Reader ii Table of Contents Introduction: Mu ḥammad ibn D āwūd al-Iṣfah ānī, Misunderstood …………..1 Chapter One: Mu ḥammad Ibn Dāwūd and his Interlocutors: A Man of our Times and a Mystery for the Ages ……………………………………….6 Chapter Two: The Twin of your Mind: Toward a Study of Brotherhood Literature in `Abb āsid Society ………………………………..35 Chapter Three: This Book is a Brother: Kit āb al-Zahra and its Poetic Hero, the Man of our Times …………………………………………85 Chapter Four: I shall not Exaggerate in Anything I Say: Some Stylistic Features of the Man of our Times Poems …………………………138 The Man of our Times Poems: Arabic Text and English Translation ……...188 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………...278 iii Introduction Mu ḥammad ibn D āwūd al-Iṣfah ānī, Misunderstood In the first years of this century, the Egyptian writer Alaa al-Aswany, author of the popular and controversial novel The Yacoubian Building , lamented the lack of appreciation audiences have for the distinction between literary artifice and historical fact. In the introduction to Friendly Fire , a collection of his short stories, he compared the public’s reaction to his previous books to the way the audience reacted to the first cinema screening in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1896. According to al-Aswany, when images of a moving locomotive were projected on the screen, people in the audience panicked and ran out of the theater as though they were running out of the way of a real train. Al-Aswany expressed disappointment that readers too often paid attention only to the worst of the behavior depicted in his books and took offense as though, by writing about these actions of fictional characters, he was directing accusations at the readers themselves. Unfortunately, what al- Aswany experienced is something that happens too often to writers of imaginative literature, prose or poetry; the very fact that a writer describes a fictional scenario dealing with the complexity of human emotions and behavior leads readers to attack the character of the author himself. 1 Mu ḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfah ānī (d. 297/909), the judge and poet who compiled a poetic anthology called Kit āb al-Zahra , suffered such a fate at the hands of near- contemporary biographers. Exaggeration being the faithful companion of rumor, the story grew throughout the centuries so that the first impression that twentieth-century readers, whether in the Arab world or the West, gained of Ibn D āwūd had little basis in his own 1 Alaa al-Aswany, Friendly Fire: Stories , trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: Harper, 2009), xi-xxv. 1 2 writings. Several hundred lines of Ibn D āwūd’s poetry appear in Kit āb al-Zahra attributed to a pseudonymous “Man of our Times” ( ba` ḍ ahl h ādh ā al-`a ṣr), and almost all of his poems refer to a “Brother” at whose hands the Man of our Times has suffered rejection and ingratitude. These poems, as well as the introduction to Kit āb al-Zahra , in which Ibn D āwūd describes the characteristics of the ideal friend and laments the elusiveness of such an ideal friendship, led readers to posit the existence of a male friend who did not reciprocate Ibn Dāwūd’s affections, leading the heartbroken judge to compose hundreds of verses of poetry and publish them in Kit āb al-Zahra . The fact that Ibn D āwūd described Kit āb al-Zahra as a commentary on love poetry ( ghazal ) was further evidence, in the popular imagination, that Ibn D āwūd was passionately in love with the man for whom he wrote the poems, and eventually the story became so exaggerated that some biographical anecdotes have Ibn Dāwūd dying from love for his beloved. Later Arab authors, and eventually the first European authors to write about him, formed an opinion of him based as much on his supposed death from love as on any of his own writings. The antidote to these rumors and exaggerations is a careful and sincere reading of the author’s work. It would be naïve indeed to read Ibn D āwūd’s poetry as strictly autobiographical; to do so would be to ignore the complex mixture of fact and fiction proper to the genre in which Ibn D āwūd wrote, namely, poetry. Classical Arabic poetry has gained the reputation of being almost impenetrable; its meanings are not obvious, even to those whose first language is Arabic, except after extensive study of its conventions. A popular saying says that poetry is the dīwān of the Arab people, that is, the record of the geography of their lands, the rarities of their language, and the deeds of their illustrious men. By this logic, 3 poetry began as a mnemonic for the Arabic language and culture itself, and for centuries, authors who wrote in the Arabic language, whether or not it was their first language, regarded this as an ideal, even as they adapted the medium of poetry to times, places, and concerns very different from those of the original proponents of Arabic poetry in pre-Islamic Arabia. Among the criteria by which audiences judged the merit of a poem was how well it followed the laws and precedents of poetic tradition, for if the poet deviated too far from these, his reputation as a master of the poetic craft would be compromised. The result is that Arabic poetry operates through various, often multi-layered allusions. Intertextual references allowed poets to demonstrate their knowledge of the poetic canon, but allusions to the specific situation for which the poem was written can appear alongside these echoes of earlier poems. A study of how Ibn D āwūd wielded poetic techniques, from motifs borrowed from heroic and Bacchic poetry to a level of diction that emulates prose to direct quotations from poems by earlier poets, that would have been familiar to his audience, will elucidate the fictional story he tells through his poems. Perhaps the greatest distraction for Ibn D āwūd’s readers was that his poetry represented someone who was in love, which is easily the world’s most enduring subject of gossip, for writers who dare to deal with matters relating to the sexes frequently find their personal feelings of love the target of speculation. Readers idealized and vilified, by turns, Ibn D āwūd’s love, and the fact that both the Man of our Times and the Brother in the poems are male only added to the controversy. An examination of the sources shows us that the diversity of commentators’ attitudes toward Ibn D āwūd corresponds to the diversity of their attitudes toward same-sex erotic love. 4 Never mind that friendship, the bond between two human beings that, while it may seem to arise from external circumstances, ultimately proves that it can transcend and outlast those circumstances, is among the oldest and most widespread themes in world literature. It is very difficult to delve deeply into discussion either of social etiquette or of moral philosophy without at least some discussion of friendship, and the `Abb āsid period, during which Ibn D āwūd lived, saw a flourishing of writing on these subjects.