Abu Nuwas (Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami) (ca. 756–ca. 814). Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature

Abu Nuwas is the most famous love poet of the Islamic Abbasid dynasty (758–1258). He was called
the father of locks, apparently because of his curly
hair. Though he wrote in Arabic, he rejected traditional forms and explored new and unconventional subjects for poetry, some of which were
considered disreputable or inappropriate by his
contemporaries. While he wrote some love poems
to women, he is better known for his homoerotic
lyrics, and his own preferred practice seems to
have been pederasty.
Abu Nuwas was born in Ahwaz in Persia sometime around the year 756. Tradition says his father
served in the army of the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, while his mother was a Persian who worked
as a washerwoman. He was educated at Kufa and in
Basra, where he came under the influence of the
well-known poet Waliba ibn al-Hubab, from whom
he learned the craft of poetry and with whom he is
said to have become intimate. After this education,
Abu Nuwas followed the conventional route for
poets by going to the desert to spend time with the
Bedouin tribes and improve his Arabic.
Though he learned his Arabic from the
Bedouin, Abu Nuwas refused to accept traditional

Bedouin values, and spurned the conventional literary form of the QASÍDA, a genre of poem in which
the poet customarily lamented an abandoned
campsite and, perhaps, a love he had enjoyed there.
Abu Nuwas parodied this theme in a famous poem
in which he laments abandoned taverns and the
loss of good places to drink.
Abu Nuwas wrote in virtually every genre of
Arabic poetry. Another of his more unusual and
popular forms was the hunting poem, in which he
seems to have emulated the ancient desert hunters.
He was the first Arabic poet whose published
works include a special section devoted specifically
to poems about hunting.
Aside from his hunting and his erotic poems,
Abu Nuwas is best known for his bacchic drinking
poems. Critics have speculated that his celebration of drunkenness is a symbol in his poetry of
the total liberation of the mind and body from the
tyranny of logic and of convention. Others have
suggested that his focus on the poetry of wine is in
fact related to his Persian roots, in that here he
continues the hard-drinking tradition of the older
Sassanian court of Persia. In any case the Abbasid
caliphs, whose relocation of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad helped to bring about a fusion
of Semitic Arabic and Persian cultures, were sympathetic to Abu Nuwas’s poetry, and he became a
favorite of the caliphs al-Amin and Harun arRashid.
Abu Nuwas is said to have even been employed
as tutor for the caliph Harun’s son, and to have become the boy’s lover as well. Most of his life was
spent as a courtier in Baghdad, and for his readers
across the centuries he has embodied the extravagance and excesses of life as a favored courtier. His
life, as celebrated in his poetry, became the stuff of
legend for later Arabic writers. In a 13th-century
joke book, it is stated that Abu Nuwas claimed he
never saw anybody drunk—this was because wherever he was, he was always the first to become intoxicated, and therefore was unable to judge
whether anybody else was. Abu Nuwas even appears as a character in the
THOUSAND AND ONE
NIGHTS several hundred years after his death.
Despite the fame he experienced in his life, Abu
Nuwas ended in obscurity. Some say he became
deeply religious in his old age and abjured his former sins. Some say he died in prison. Some say that
he went too far in satirizing a member of a certain
clan and that members of the clan beat him to
death. Whatever the truth is, Abu Nuwas died
sometime around the year 814. He left a body of
work remarkable for its variety, its innovation, and
its controversial themes. He was sometimes criticized for borrowing too much from other poets (a
practice not uncommon in his time), but is praised
for his powerful language, his memorable imagery,
and his exquisite poetic style. Yet in many ways he
remains at least as well known for the legend of
his life as for his literary production: His motto
was purported to be a line from one of his poems
that reads “Accumulate all the sins that you can.”
Bibliography
Abu Nuwas. Selections from the Diwan of Abu Nuwas
ibn Hani al-Hakami.
Edited and translated by
Arthur Wormhoudt. Oskaloosa, Iowa: William
Penn College, 1998.
Kennedy, Philip F.
The Wine Song in Classical Arabic
Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

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