Ethnicity in modern rewritings of Bashshār ibn Burd: “free thinker,” “libertine” or “love poet”?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Modern scholarship on and translations of Bashshār ibn Burd (d. 784), especially into English, adopt his Persian origin as a method for, or at least as a key, to interpreting and understanding his work. Western rewritings of the poet try to use his Persian origin as a way of disassociating him from his Arabic context. While in the case of modern Arab intellectuals from the 19th century and onward, the search for a “pure Arab heritage” makes Bashshār ibn Burd, who showed “inappropriate” explicitness in his poetic handling of sexual desire, a perfect target for these intellectuals to defend themselves against the colonial and orientalist accusations against their “culture” or “lack of culture.” Thus, most Arab intellectuals argued that these practices, namely what they termed mujūn or al-adab al-mājin, are something foreign to Arab culture, and in the case of Bashshār, mainly related to the poet's Persian origin.