MISZELLEN

Abstract

Medieval Arabic theories of love consider gazing at a person an inevitable way of falling in love. Thus, it seems appropriate that SUSANNE ENDERWITZ' book about the Arabic love poetry (gazal) of al-Abbas b. Ahnaf attracts the gaze. The bright red cover shows two female musicians dancing the reproduction of a fresco from Samarra and reveals just the first part of the title: Love as profession (Liebe als Beruf). But as so often in life, the second gaze leads the reader to the inescapable denouement that this is not a work about singing slave girls (qiyan) or even prostitutes. It is a book about a man's love poetry, marketed like a man's sport car with women as decoration. The 'Abbasid poet al-Abbas b. al-Ahnaf, who was born around 750/751 in Khorasan or Basra and died between 803 and 810 at Basra or Baghdad, is considered the best author of the Arabic gazal and among its last important practioners. In her PhD thesis (FU Berlin 1990), ENDERWITZ approaches al-Abbas's gazal by analyzing his social position as an author of chaste love poetry within the social history of his time. According to the medieval Arabo-Islamic tradition (p. 36), the historical person al-Abbas was characterized as a member of a fraternity interested in fine arts (fata), while his gazal was understood as the love poetry of an elegant charmer (zarlf). ENDERWITZ' working assumption is that there is an interdependency between the two male roles fata andzem/and the concept of love in al-Abbas's poems. The book is divided into four sections: 1) a survey of the development of the literary genre gazal (p. 1-29: Zur Entwicklung des Gazal), 2) a description of the social concepts futuwa and zarf (p. 31-65: Fata und Zarif ), 3) the poet's biography (p. 67-122: Leben und Werk), and 4) an interpretation of al/Abbas's love poetry in relation to both the medieval Arabic and the medieval European tradition of amour courtois (p. 123-222: Dichtung und Denken''). This fourth section is the main part of ENDERWITZ' work. The book also contains an afterword (p. 223 f), a bibliography (p. 225-238), a subject index and two indices of proper names (p. 239-246), and English and Arabic summaries of ENDERWITZ' thesis (p. 247-250). Unfortunately, this extensive study of al-Abbas's gazal does not provide any indices of his poems nor a concordance of the two critical editions of his