Abu Tammam and Ibn Hani

Extract

In recent years I have had occasion to examine the Dîwâns of these two Arabic poets in connexion with theses prepared by two Indian candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Oxford, and it has occurred to me that a short selection of what appeared to me at the time to be the best verses of these poets might not be lacking in interest, as no translations into English of any of the poems of either have yet been published, so far as I have been able to discover. I am not unmindful of the objections made by Doctor Nicholson when I applied a similar method of selection to the works of Mutanabbi eleven years ago, but I think that they apply, if at all, only in a very limited degree to poets of the calibre of Abu Tammâm and Ibn Hânî, whom no critic would be inclined to place in the first rank. Abu Tammâm is mainly famous as an anthologist, but his original verse is of much higher quality than that of Ibn Hânî, whose fame seems to rest more on the incidental facts that he was born in Spain and that he expressed heterodox religious opinions in a very violent way than on any poetic quality. The really great poet Abu,’l ‘Alâ, al-Ma‘arrî expressed a great dislike for his verse, comparing it to wheat grains crushed in a mill, owing to the harshness of his phraseology.