Abstract
The tenth century in Iraq and Syria saw an unprecedented rise in the number of canonical poets who were delivering glorious praise hymns ( madīḥ ) to middling members of society. Scholars have posed many theories in the past 30 years to explain the function and purpose of praise hymns for royalty and rulers, but why would ordinary men who had no hope of rulership pay painful sums to commission praise hymns in their favor? This article examines the emergence of a new kind of sociability and patronage in the tenth century that enabled middling people to form alliances and exercise influence in shaping ideals of government, leadership and manhood. Examples are given of poems to patrons of middle rank who gain glory and influence via the artistic endorsement of al-Mutanabbī (d. 965): The first ode restores the public dignity of a nineteen-year-old soldier who lost his face in battle; in the second ode, the poet glorifies and defends a state clerk who had little-known Sufi leanings; in the third ode, the poet vindicates an unmasked pseudo- Muslim who was in private a Christian. Using J. Habermas’s theory of the “Public Sphere,” I show the way these odes illustrate how middling members of society gained influence in a public sphere of participation and took measures to preserve that influence.
Highlights
The tenth century in Iraq and Syria saw an unprecedented rise in the number of canonical poets who were delivering glorious praise hymns to middling members of society
Scholars have posed many theories in the past 30 years to explain the function and purpose of praise hymns for royalty and rulers, but why would ordinary men who had no hope of rulership pay painful sums to commission praise hymns in their favor? This article examines the emergence of a new kind of sociability and patronage in the tenth century that enabled middling people to form alliances and exercise influence in shaping ideals of government, leadership and manhood
I aim to offer a function for middling praise in the tenth century by placing it within a constellation of macro-social changes that conform to a phenomenon which Jürgen Habermas calls the public sphere
Summary
Habermas argues that the bourgeois public uses reason and rhetoric to influence the ruling classes and to redefine principles of authority. 22 In the medieval Arabo-Islamic context, the most influential application of reason was in the realm of oratory (khi÷×b), which included the production and dissemination of poetry and narrative for the purpose of shaping views of the present and memory of a shared past. Ibn Qutayba took it for granted that upstarts interact with kings and men of high rank He advised, for example, against embarrassing situations where the person might find himself at the salon of kings, noblemen, or scholars, unable to understand cultural and historical references in narratives, let alone to recite amusing and edifying narratives by heart. 31 Surprisingly, he presumed that members of the bourgeoisie would speak to rulers and men of influence, but that they would pursue purposes of public import He cautions, For it is rare to find any gathering organized for knowledge (khibra), established for guidance (rushd), or pursued for the sake of cultivating manliness (murù’a), but that one of these types of knowledge is displayed there [in assembly], whether in the remembrance of a prophet, or the remembrance of a king, a scholar, a lineage, an ancestor, a time, or one of the battle days of the Bedouin Arabs. With these new forms of influence, otherwise middling people could redress questions of public concern
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