own right, and eminent luminaries like al-Marzubānī and Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. 356/967) quoted al-Ṣūlī extensively.
The bulk of al-Ṣūlī’s life was devoted to serving several caliphs as companion, helping them to while away their idle hours with erudite and entertaining conversation, and as tutor of their sons. It was his chess playing that first earned him the attention of Caliph al-Muktafī (r. 289–95/902–8). Thereafter al-Muqtadir (r. 295–317/908–29) entrusted him the care of his two sons, one of whom, when he became Caliph al-Rāḍī in 322/934, gave al-Ṣūlī a privileged position at court. With al-Muttaqī (r. 329–33/940–44) al-Ṣūlī’s fortunes waned. In search of new patrons, he made his way to the Turkish commander and future regent Bajkam (d. 329/941) in Mosul before retiring to Basra, where he died in 335/946–47.
The composition of The Life and Times of Abū Tammām probably dates to the last two decades of al-Ṣūlī’s life. The addressee of its introductory epistle, Muzāḥim ibn Fātik, remains strangely obscure.7 No contemporary source mentions him, but al-Ṣūlī tells us that the composition of The Life and Times of Abū Tammām took place during a period of disgrace (§2.4), which means that it probably happened during al-Ṣūlī’s temporary absence from court under al-Qāhir (r. 320–22/932–34), or after his final departure from it under al-Muttaqī. The eulogies al-Ṣūlī appended to the names of the two grammarians al-Mubarrad and Thaʿlab (§4.1), who died in 286/899 and 291/904 respectively, provide a post quem for the epistle. Muzāḥim may thus have been a military man of minor importance but with literary interests, whose favor al-Ṣūlī sought when his star was fading. The dedicatory epistle may be a petition for sponsorship and patronage.
Al-Ṣūlī lived at a time when literary scholarship about an earlier oral tradition had become primarily a written exercise, though it did not sacrifice person-to-person teaching and transmission. During the previous century, the standardization of the Arabic language (ʿarabiyyah) and the introduction of papermaking from Central Asia had supported a flourishing book culture. Oral transmission continued to alternate with the use of written sources and is preserved in the introductory chains of transmission (isnād). Thus a text’s journey from memorization to oral transmission to written transcript, sometimes over as long a period as three centuries, was carefully documented, transmitter after transmitter. Al-Ṣūlī owned a large library,8 but claimed to have studied all his books with relevant authorities.
The books of this era, however, show the history of their inception in their structure—and they differ from the continuous text we expect of books today. The main ingredient of early Arabic prose was short texts, or akhbār (sg. khabar), which had been transmitted from as early as the sixth century ad. In fact, the large body of orally transmitted literature accelerated the process of book composition and was one of the conditions for the cultural revolution that led to the emergence of the Arabic book; the oral texts in circulation needed to be collected, sorted, and presented on the page. There were two main terms for the production of a book. One kind, the redacting of oral matter, was referred to as taṣnīf. The composing of a text from scratch was known as taʾlīf. Compiling required its own set of skills—the sources still needed to be cited—but disciplines differed in the level of strictness in evaluating the reliability of the transmitters: those of literature and history were not given the same scrutiny as those of Hadith, which served as a basis of religious ritual and law. Authors wrote in this way because they wanted to authenticate their materials; thus, the lines of transmitters are akin to modern footnotes, except that they come at the beginning of an account in reverse chronological order, from the most recent to the earliest—“headnotes” so to speak. In the fourth/tenth century, writing from scratch would come to dominate, and chains of transmitters lost their original function, becoming instead a literary device authors played with or something they invented outright.
Compilation does not make for fluid reading—like a snapshot, each piece captures one situation from a specific angle and together with the others creates a kaleidoscope. While a compiler basically arranged preexisting texts, compiling was no less scholarly or creative than composing anew. Individual compilers differed in their degree of intervention in their material. It could be minimal, simply arranging snippets of text into thematic chapters, or it could be more extensive, clustering variant retellings of the same event, commenting on their differences and relative authenticity, and integrating them into a new overall narrative. Al-Ṣūlī is an “interfering” compiler who leaves his readers in no doubt about his interpretation of the material he collected. And because many of his texts were contemporary with his subject, Abū Tammām, they strengthened al-Ṣūlī’s case of showing the poet’s acclaim historically.
Al-Ṣūlī’s own writings, many of which are extant, treat history and poetry.9 His Book of Folios (Kitāb al-Awrāq) chronicles literary aspects of the court during the reigns of caliphs he knew personally, and The Scribe’s Vademecum (Adab al-kuttāb) imparts technical advice and epistolary etiquette to secretaries. But al-Ṣūlī’s main concern was modern poetry. He collected the work of nearly every major Abbasid poet and of numerous minor ones, and his list of edited dīwāns10 reads like a who’s who of early Abbasid literature. But al-Ṣūlī also treated poetry in its social context, as he deemed audience appreciation important in a proper evaluation of the art of the word. To this end he collected narratives about poets’ verses recited in public, their occasions of delivery, and their critical reception. His book on Abū Tammām is a fine demonstration of this. A similar work on al-Buḥturī does not survive as an independent book but has been reassembled from its quotations in the sources by the scholar Ṣāliḥ al-Ashtar.11
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABŪ TAMMĀM
The Life and Times of Abū Tammām takes readers to the heart of classical Arabic literary and court culture. It showcases the vibrancy of the life of poetry in the third/ninth century. We meet the patrons who rewarded poetry with generous sums of money, robes of honor, and paid positions.12 Al-Ṣūlī includes chapters on select patrons who supported Abū Tammām as a testimony to the poet’s success. According to some contemporaries, during Abū Tammām’s lifetime no other poet “could earn a single dirham” (§58). This support of the elite was both material and verbal (§§66.1–2, §§69.1–4). Rulers, generals, and high officials made the novel style not only acceptable but turned it into the ruling fashion for panegyrics in their honor. The patrons formed one important audience group. Al-Ṣūlī also throws light on the social classes that made it possible for the elite patrons to sponsor poets. He describes the day-to-day dealings between individual poets, and between poets and their intermediaries, who connected them to the corridors of power. He thus paints a lively picture of literary life in the capital, Baghdad, and in the palatine city of Samarra.
What is more, The Life and Times of Abū Tammām offers unique insight into the formative phase of Arabic poetic criticism. The book lies at the crossroads of various cultural, literary, and intellectual developments. As a compilation, it reveals two stages in the eventful process of the reception of Abū Tammām and his poetry, the first stage represented by the akhbār, and the second by the activity of the compiler. The first stage, the layer of the akhbār, charts practical criticism from the poet’s time: different groups of critics (and fans) are featured and their agendas are evident.13 The high Arabic language was still being codified in grammar books, and poetry was a principal source. This central role of poetry as a cultural commodity and the importance of its professional stakeholders, the philologists, worked against making Abū Tammām’s innovation uniformly welcome. What some relished and paid highly for, others found objectionable, disliked, or did not understand.14
Abū Tammām’s sophisticated intellectual style was of particular appeal to the scribes, who had a professional mastery of classical Arabic.
