The Life and Times of Abu Tammam - Abu Bakr al-Suli Library of Arabic Literature

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I began each of these genres with the rhyme letter alif and then bāʾ and continued in alphabetical order to make it easier for you to look things up should you so wish. I found no reason to disagree with you or depart from your will. I agreed to do this for you, no one else—I would not have done it for any other. It is not that I wish to with-hold knowledge from scholars or that I am unwilling to disseminate it among those who deserve it. I am revealing what was hidden and removing its cover. It is something in which I am a reliable and trustworthy expert.5

      I have found (God support you) that in our time most of those who wear culture as an ornament differ from what I was used to from the masters and learned scholars of the past. Nowadays someone studies one area of culture, receives his share of it and reaches a certain level. Then he thinks he will not be called a proper scholar or be thought of as a leader in his field without attacking other scholars, belittling the dead, and denigrating the living. He becomes so accustomed to voicing these attacks that they become the most important task he can perform, and they dominate his gatherings. He is not satisfied with the little bits of knowledge he has acquired but lays claim to it in its entirety. He keeps at bay anyone who would engage him in debate and expose his limited knowledge by besting him in an argument. He achieves this with the aid of people whom he has trained to pounce on those who ask a question or demand an answer. In this way he claims expertise in areas he has never thought of or put his mind to, or whose experts he has never met or was even known to have studied with. He thinks that if he does not know everything, he will not be considered a leading and preeminent scholar.

      Abū l-ʿAbbās Muḥammad ibn Yazīd ibn ʿAbd al-Akbar al-Azdī l-Mubarrad and Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā l-Shaybānī Thaʿlab (God show them mercy) were two of the greats—men we knew, frequented, and gained much knowledge from. They were of high renown, recognized as scholars, and universally acclaimed. We never knew them to claim to be the most knowledgeable about ancient sagas, the rise and fall of dynasties, the study of who was first to do or say a thing, the stories of kings, or the history of Quraysh and the life of the Emissary (God bless him and keep him), his mission and campaigns, and knowledge of his kin and Companions (God show them mercy). Yet these are the most eminent subjects to study.

      4.2

      They did not claim to be the most knowledgeable about the history and genealogies of the Arabs, the battles of the pre-Islamic era, the history of Islam, the lives of the caliphs (God’s blessings upon them) and their viziers, their governors and supporters, the Dissidents, and movements which had sprung up in their own lifetime.

      4.3

      Nor did they claim preeminence in jurisprudence, upon which people depend, or in Hadith, on which the religion of Islam hinges, and the knowledge of its scholars, methods, transmitters, and their chronology and lifespans, such that they would know if a transmitter were placed in the wrong order in a sequence or were put in contact with someone he never met. Nor preeminence in the science of transmitters’ names and teknonyms, and knowing who among them is sound and reliable, and who weak and dubious.

      4.4

      They did not claim preeminence in the sort of knowledge that would seem to be the preserve of kings, to wit, which poems were intoned, which poets they are attributed to, the reasons they were composed, and who put which ones to song, as well as the explanation of the songs’ modes, genres, and fingering on the lute strings. The people of Medina were conspicuous for their virtue, preeminence, and asceticism, and none of their legal experts ignored the fact that they deemed singing licit.

      4.5

      Nor did they claim preeminence in memorizing the things kings need and inquire about when something catches their eye and they expect to be instantly obliged. I mean, for example, questions about various kinds of drinks and their description, and about the best verses composed on the subject; or on the subject of fruits, fragrant herbs, and the seasons; descriptions of palaces and gardens, artificial lakes and literary gatherings, wine-drinking at morning and evening, clear skies and rain clouds, the sun and the moon, the constellations and rain-bringing stars; descriptions of horses and weaponry; and all the other topics of love poetry and so forth in the manner I have outlined. And they did not claim preeminence in the lore of amusing stories collected for kings or extemporized on the basis of recent events.6

      They did not claim preeminence in the study of the modern poets and the pioneers from the beginning of the Abbasid dynasty (God prolong and safeguard it). And when they turned to this poetry, they did not claim that they had the ability to compose poetry like it. Nor did they claim that they had mastery of its entire lexicon and were able to distinguish between the rare, the mediocre, and the inferior, beyond rejecting a linguistic error or a lexical slip.

      4.7

      They did not claim that they had a better command than anyone else of the science of prosody and rhyme, genealogy, official and private correspondence, and rhetoric, and of how to spot when poets plagiarize and borrow from one another, and how to recognize which poets did it properly and which badly. Nor did anyone else make this claim on their behalf. What they were preeminent in was knowledge of syntax and lexicography, but they each knew something about these other fields. Neither of them declared, “I do not make mistakes,” or felt embarrassed to say, “I do not know” when he did not know something.

      Think then (God support you) about these two great, preeminent men. Think of how much they did not know of all these subjects I have listed for you. And then think of how highly they are revered among people, since they did not pretend expertise in anything they did not master, nor give answers about anything they did not know.

      5.1

      None of the contemporary scholars I alluded to is worth a tenth of either al-Mubarrad or Thaʿlab—they do not come close, not even in the eyes of their most ardent and partisan supporters. And yet they claim to know everything and never admit, “We simply do not know.” They are as the poet says:

      He dabbles in everything yet masters nothing.

      It’s not his insight but his delusion that increases.

      We might turn a blind eye to this as long as the scholarship is good and it is commonly acknowledged that they have studied properly and diligently with experts and scholars and have attended the right gatherings. But if they acquire learning by deceit, or by attacking and pillaging it, then God help us for having to depend on those who are unacceptable and unreliable!

      Some things I dictated long ago about the motifs that poets contend with one another over had not been given a proper and systematic arrangement before I made them available. People had adopted such motifs without understanding them. Now I see that some individuals have broken them up and have made them available in a piecemeal fashion, strewn throughout their dictated lectures with no organization at all. The work that emanates from me is all too obvious when compared with the fruits of their own learning and stands out as distinct in their compilations—the setting speaks volumes that it does not belong.7

      You (God support you) are my witness that Abū Mūsā l-Ḥāmiḍ insulted me in your presence, and you forbade it. He heaped blame and injury upon the other books I dictated, finding no good in any of them. When he passed away, and his books were brought to you, you discovered that he had written out in his own hand most of my Compendium on the Knowledge of the Qurʾan and my Book of Youths and Choice Anecdotes, which I dictated, and the poetry of Abū Nuwās I had gone through. He had used my works as primary sources and would dispense smatterings of them to all who came to study with him and to benefit from his learning. You were astonished and found this offensive.

      7.1

      I consider next a class of people whose sole intention is to read poems, memorize some strange vocabulary, learn some problems of grammar, dip into a book of lexicography, and then attend

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