Ebook: Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʻAbbāsid Age

Foremost among the poetic accomplishments of the "Abbasid age was the sudden flowering of a highly rhetorical and strikingly modern style of poetry, termed "badī'." It found its most radical and controversial exponent in the celebrated panegyrist to the courts of al-Ma'mūn and al-Mu'tasim, Abū Tammām Habīb ibn Aws Al- Tā'ī.
The present study offers a reevaluation of the Arabic literary dispute over Abū Tammām and badī'. It then proposes a redefinition of his diwan and of his major anthology, the Hamāsah, as a metapoesis that served to decode the poetic tradition of the pre-Islamic desert for the Islamic 'Abasid caliph and his urbane and urban courtiers and subjects, and conversely, to encode contemporary Arab-Islamic political experiences in classical form.
This book is extensively illustrated with original translations.