A Poet of the Abbasid Period: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahi (lhringAli b. Ishaq b. Khalaf al-Zahi), 313-352 AH/925-963 CE. His Life and Poetry * Annotated, edited with an introduction by KHALID SINDAWI

Abstract

Al-Zāhī, cotton merchant and poet, was one of the many Arabic minor poets of the fourth/tenth century who were overshadowed by al-Mutanabbī. Little more than two pages, with 19 verses, are allotted to him in the large anthology Yatīmat al-dahr by al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038), who calls him a poet good at description, rich in ‘pleasantries and novelties’, kathīr al-mulaḥ wa-l-ṭuraf (thus, for the sake of the rhyme and syntactic parallelism, instead of wa-l-ẓarf as in the Yatīma and adopted by Khalid Sindawi, Arabic introduction p. 54). Al-Zāhī lived in a time in which Shiʿism was dominant, both in Baghdad, where he was born, and in Aleppo, which he visited during the reign of the celebrated Hamdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla. Most of his output consists of eulogies on the Prophet’s family and the Shiʿi imāms, although he also made panegyric odes on leading contemporaries such as the famous vizier and patron of the arts al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Muhallabī. It is clear that only a small part of his poetry has been preserved. Khalid Sindawi has collected and edited 54 pieces, ranging between one-liners and a poem of 34 lines. The edition of the text is well done, as far as I can see. Each piece is followed by a line-by-line Arabic commentary by the editor, who apparently takes it for granted that the reader is wholly unfamiliar with classical Arabic poetry or poetically obtuse, for every line is given a prosaic paraphrase. These paraphrases, an insult to the reader, should have been drastically cut. As a random example of the editor’s method, here is an epigram of two lines on the night (p. 120): I see the night pass, while the stars seem to be like the eyes of my drinking companions, tending to blink: For dawn has appeared, and its light floods the sky as a spring on the earth bursts forth with its water.