Abbasid Baghdad's wine poet kept almost no books
Abu Nuwas, born in Ahvaz between 756 and 758, became the star of muhdath modern verse under the early Abbasids. Mixed Arab-Persian roots, Qur'anic schooling, and patrons from Harun al-Rashid to al-Amin shaped a diwan of wine, hunt, and desire. Folklore later slid him into One Thousand and One Nights.
His father Hani, an Arab veteran of the last Umayyad caliph's army, met his Persian mother Gulban while policing Ahvaz, and died when the boy was ten. In Basra he memorised the Qur'an young; the Kufan poet Waliba ibn al-Hubab then took him on as an apprentice, and possibly as a lover, before Khalaf al-Ahmar and grammar study followed. A contemporary swore he had never met anyone so learned with so few books: searching the house after his death turned up one cover holding a quire of rare words.
The diwan sorts panegyric, elegy, invective, love poems to men and women, penitence, hunting pieces, and khamriyyat wine songs. Over 500 erotic poems and fragments survive, mostly homoerotic. His wine verse, likely written to amuse Baghdad's elite, lavishes attention on colour, scent and effect, prizes Persian imagery over Arab classicism, and in one poem jokes that a handsome Christian cupbearer could tempt him into converting. He is credited with perfecting the wine and hunting genres and with helping invent the mu'amma letter riddle.
Drunken escapades landed him in prison under al-Amin shortly before he died, around 814 to 816, during the Abbasid civil war. Four rival death stories circulate, from poisoning by the Nawbakht family to expiring in a tavern; illness in the Nawbakht house seems most likely, and he lies in Baghdad's Shunizi cemetery.
Modern reception swings between honour and censorship. Baghdad has a riverside street and park named for him and a Mercury crater has borne his name since 1976, yet Cairo issued a censored edition in 1932 and Egypt's culture ministry ordered some 6,000 copies of his homoerotic verse burned in 2001.
Source: Abu Nuwas
