Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry

7 Pleasure in Transgression

130 Pleasure in Transgression There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet In this chapter we shall study a wine poem (khamriyya) by the most famous libertine poet in Arabic literature, Abu Nuwas (d. ca. 815). Before giving our attention to Abu Nuwas, however, it would be useful to consider the immediate historical and literary backdrop behind him. In the last two chapters we have been discussing poets of the Umayyad period. A noteworthy poet of this period, as yet unmentioned, an important forerunner to Abu Nuwas with respect to wine poetry, is no less than an Umayyad caliph. This caliph, al-Walid II (al-Walid ibn Yazid), is not remembered for his political accomplishments: he spent two decades reveling as heir apparent and then one year reveling as caliph before he was assassinated in 744. Yet he did leave a few palaces and hunting lodges in the Syrian Desert and a Diwan of 115 poems. The art from the palaces speaks of a proud man devoted to pleasure: frescoes at one show a hunt, a pool scene with an almost naked young woman, and a prominent regal figure (shades of Imru’ al-Qays?); a mosaic in the private quarters of another depicts a lion preying on a gazelle.1 From his poetry, we know that al-Walid II did not care a fig for orthodox religious sensitivities. In one poem he invokes the pious people, and God and the angels also, to bear witness: That my pleasures are listening to music, drinking wine, and biting ripe cheeks.2 Al-Walid II stands out in Arabic literature, besides as the subject of accounts relating to prodigious wine consumption, as the poet who established the khamriyya Pleasure in Transgression 131 as an independent genre. The following khamriyya, which contains themes Abu Nuwas was later to develop, is al-Walid II’s most famous: Cut through the whisper of cares with music, and rejoice, in Time’s despite, with the daughter of the grape. And welcome the easy life in its abundance; do not follow regretfully the traces of what’s past. With a pale wine embellished by antiquity, an old lady that gets more desirable with age. More delicious to drinkers at her wedding party than the young woman of noble lineage. She revealed herself, and then was rarefied until she appeared in an extraordinary light! Prior to the mixing, she was fire itself,3 and after it, she was liquid gold. As if the glass containing her was a torch, blazing before the observer’s eye, Before noble youths of Banu Umayya: the family of glory, illustrious action, and honor. They have no peers among men; and I am unique among them. None traces his origin to such as my father.4 Al-Walid II was one of the last Umayyads, and his rule only briefly preceded a major political transformation in the Near East. These excerpts from a sermon by Abu Hamza, preached in the Hejaz of the Arabian Peninsula ca. 747, suggest what bitter anti-Umayyad feelings were being harbored among Muslims around the time of al-Walid II: 132 Abundance from the Desert Then the sinner al-Walid b. Yazid [al-Walid II] took charge. He drank openly and he deliberately made manifest what is abominable. Then Yazid b. al-Walid [Yazid III; son of al-Walid I, r. 705–15] rose against him and killed him. . . . These Banu Umayya are parties of waywardness. Their might is self-magnification . They arrest on suspicion, make decrees capriciously, kill in anger, and judge by passing over crimes without punishment. . . . These people have acted as unbelievers, by God, in the most barefaced manner. So curse them, may God curse them!5 Yet it was not from the Hejaz to the south that grave trouble came for the Umayyads. In the East—in Iraq, in Persia, and especially in the northeastern province of Khurasan—disaffection was spreading. The ‘Abbasids (descendants of al-‘Abbas, uncle of the Prophet) had been denouncing the Umayyads vehemently in mosques and other public places and soon emerged as leaders of a revolt. In 750 their army swept into Syria and overwhelmed the military force of the Umayyads. A general massacre of the Umayyad family ensued (only one male escaped with his life; he is discussed briefly in chapter 10). The ‘Abbasids then established...