Poetic parodies of Islamic discourses by Abū Nuwās

Abstract

Abū Nuwās (d. c. 813), one of the greatest and most versatile of Arabic poets, practised every major genre. His fame and notoriety rest especially on his large corpus of Bacchic verse and love poetry, most of which is homoerotic. All his poetry is secular: no mystical verse, hymns on God or praise of the Prophet, but religion is never very far, if not in the foreground then in the background. Much of his verse is explicitly antinomian, flouting the prescripts of Islam. The present paper deals with his humorous and often obscene verse parodies of two kinds of Islamic discourse, the waṣiyyah (‘pious instruction’ or ‘testament’), and Hadith, the corpus of sayings and doings of the prophet Muhammad.