He wrote poetry in the conqueror's language, and was sewn into a sack and thrown in the river
Bashshar ibn Burd was the grandson of a slave and a blind poet who used Arabic to mock the Arabs and insulted a caliph and lived twenty more years — until one poem put him in the Tigris.
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Persians used Arabic to strike back at the Arabs
Bashshar ibn Burd was an early literary representative of the Shu'ubiyya movement. The word comes from "peoples" in Quran 49:13, "I made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another." For Persian Muslims, if the scripture plainly says Muslims are equal, there is no reason to bow to Arab elites just because they are Arabs — Arab Muslims should not live in garrison cities lording it over other Muslims in the provinces. The movement was mainly started by Persians, and also included other conquered peoples; its demand was equal rights. Bashshar wrote poetry in the conqueror's language, but his origins left him sympathetic to the conquered.
His grandfather was a slave, his father a freedman
Bashshar was born around 713 in Basrah. Two generations earlier, his grandfather fought the Muslim conquerors in Tukharistan in the Oxus valley (today northern Afghanistan), was captured and enslaved, and died in Basrah; his father was freed and joined an Arab tribe. Bashshar later told stories of how noble his paternal lineage was, but the episode states plainly that the truth of these stories is unknown. He had smallpox as a child, which disfigured him, and he was blind and huge and unwieldy. He himself said blindness actually helped him write poetry: "lack of sight strengthens the acuteness of the heart and cuts out interference from things which are visible."
He wrote poems mocking Arabs for eating lizards
In one satire Bashshar declared that his grandfather and father were the noblest of Persians, that the Roman emperor was his uncle, and that they all wore crowns; his father wore Persian sable and drank from gold cups, never sang camel songs behind a mangy camel, never dug up desert melons to stave off hunger, and never dug lizards out of stony ground to eat. The episode notes that this lineage was mostly invented, but the satirical intent is clear: Persia is the land of civilization, and the Arabs can keep their wretched qasidas that romanticize the dry desert. His attitude toward Bedouin poetry was playfully irreverent, while he could still use its conventions expertly.
One poem put him in the Tigris
Bashshar had a tense relationship with the caliph al-Mahdi (r. 775-785), who once ordered him to stop writing love poetry; he ignored it. According to the historian al-Tabari, around 783 Bashshar wrote a poem saying: wake up, sons of Umayya, you have slept too long, the Persian bureaucrat Ya'qub b. Dawud is the caliph, your caliphate is ruined, go look for God's caliph among the tambourines and lutes. This amounted to saying the Abbasid dynasty could be replaced by the Umayyads they had usurped — crossing from insolence into sedition. He was imprisoned, beaten half to death, sewn into a sack and thrown into the Tigris to drown, at about seventy years old.
He insulted a caliph and lived twenty more years
In 762, descendants of the Prophet's daughter Fatima rose in revolt against the Abbasids in Medina; Bashshar sided with the rebels and wrote a poem telling the reigning caliph al-Mansur, then in his eighth year in power, directly: you are a bad Muslim, more guilty than the Umayyad caliph Marwān whom you overthrew, and those descendants of the Prophet who rose up are better suited to rule than you. After writing this poem he lived another twenty years. Some accounts say he later altered the verses to turn their edge against al-Mansur's enemies. This shows that the young Abbasid monarchy, though a totalitarian state, was still a "new, soft" state, and first-generation writers enjoyed great political freedom.
Insulting someone by declaring you won't insult them
Eighth-century Arabic satire often used a rhetorical device called apophasis (paralepsis): saying a thing by declaring you will not say it. Bashshar used it against members of the Abbasid royal family — first advising his target, "seek my satisfaction, do not provoke me, a weak and decrepit man cannot bear the burden I would lay on him," then offering false praise, "how noble this man of Quraysh is, we do not deny his kinship with the Prophet, even if his mother is of low birth," then driving the knife in: his ancestors were the tribe's lions when they went to the evening feast, and the tribe's wolves before the enemy. Bashshar compared his poetry to a branding iron searing into the other man's flesh.
Panegyric was a meal ticket and also art
Beeston pointed out in 1977 that Abbasid poets sang the praises of the fabulously wealthy nobles who occasionally fought on the Byzantine frontier, and those lists of exaggerated courage and generosity "had little basis in reality"; writing panegyric was mostly about squeezing money out of the person being praised — and if the reward fell short of expectations, the poet turned around and wrote satire. But the host adds a layer: panegyric was both a calculated transaction and, at the same time, genuine gratitude and superb art. Early Abbasid society was astonishingly tolerant of political dissent, so much so that satire aimed at the caliph and his family could exist; and the other side revealed by panegyric is that the Islamic cities along the Tigris and Euphrates were packed with the newly rich, and the private relationships between poets and patrons, based on appreciation of art, grew into the cross-cultural market of the later Islamic Golden Age — because the Golden Age really did need gold in the literal sense.
Poetry was the empire's pressure valve
The scholar Salma Jayyusi wrote that early Muslim society was full of tensions: a new hierarchy was emerging, different from the old tribal order, and rapidly gaining status as a source of power and wealth; society was moving steadily toward a more urban way of life; and a Bedouin people suddenly thrown by conquest into a completely different world also produced a kind of anxiety — it took more than four generations of Islamization and urbanization to erase the influence of the pre-Islamic Arab way of life. From this the host concludes: eighth-century Islamic civilization was uneasy, and the new power relations left whole swathes of social groups feeling dispossessed. But in a city like Basrah, poetry and literature were the pressure valve — as a young man Bashshar watched the previous generation of poets, Jarir and al-Farazdaq, hurl coarse and hilarious verses at each other, and laughed along with the crowd until he could not stop; when he grew up he discovered that although certain strata of Arab society were closed to him, the Arabic language was public property for anyone with talent.
In their own words · checked verbatim
lack of sight strengthens the acuteness of the heart and cuts out interference from things which are visible. It intensifies a man’s language and stimulates his genius.
narration29:52
never did my father sing a camel-song, trailing along behind a scabby camel, nor approach the [desert melon], to pierce it for [great] hunger. . . nor did I dig for and eat the lizard of the stony ground; nor did my father warm himself standing astraddle to the flame; no, nor did my father use to ride. . .a camel saddle. We are kings, who have always been so through long ages past.
Bashshar ibn Burd30:56
Sons of Umayyah wake up! Your sleep has gone on too long. [The Persian bureaucrat] Ya‘qūb b. Dāwūd is caliph. Your caliphate has been ruined, O people! Search for the caliph of Allāh among the tambourines and lutes.
al-Tabari quoting Bashshar37:45
I will leave love's folly to other eyes; but I will not abandon the quaffing of ruddy wine and the cup.
The Islamic Golden Age would not have happened beneath a totalitarian theocracy that micromanaged its scientists and literati.
I was created with such qualities as I have, given no choice of my passion; had the choice been left to me, a clever fellow would I have been!
Such pieces were for the most part designed simply to extract money from the person praised, and the poet would as readily turn to satire if his piece failed to produce as big a dividend as he had hoped.
The term al-adab is often applied to literary output that is entertaining and edifying at the same time, based on the notion that ethics and aesthetics should go together.
Figures
| Population of Basrah (around 750) | over 250,000 | 10:12 |
| Bashshar ibn Burd, born and died | around 713-783 | 3:00 |
| Year the Sasanian empire formally fell | 651 | 4:55 |
| Year Bashshar moved to Baghdad, and his age | 762, about 48 | 35:03 |
| Years al-Mansur had been in power when the poem was written | 8 years | 1:10:22 |
| How long Bashshar lived after writing the poem insulting al-Mansur | twenty years | 1:10:22 |
| The Alid brothers' revolt against the Abbasids | 762 to 763 | 1:08:00 |
| Bashshar killed for criticism | 783 | 1:17:11 |
| Abu al-Atahiya, year of birth | around 748 | 1:36:51 |
| Abu Nuwas, year of birth | around 756 | 1:36:51 |
Glossary
- Shu'ubiyya
- An eighth-to-ninth-century Persian-led anti-Arab cultural movement asserting that non-Arab Muslims were equal to Arabs.
- badee
- An Arabic poetry term literally meaning "the newly made," which came to denote an emphasis on rhetorical devices such as metaphor and punning.
- apophasis
- A rhetorical device that says a thing by declaring one will not say it, common in eighth-century Arabic satire.
- al-adab
- An Arabic word meaning both "literature" and "good breeding," emphasizing ethics and aesthetics together.
- qasida
- A pre-Islamic Arabic poetic form, often opening with desert and camel imagery, which Bashshar both mocked and used expertly.
How to listen
Readers interested in Abbasid political history, Arabic poetry, or the situation of writers on the margins of empire; anyone who wants to understand how literature survives between total power and tolerance.
The panegyric analysis from 1:28:55 to 1:34:10 is fairly fine-grained and can be skipped quickly.