You know you’re in good hands when the dedication reads: ‘To the writers, drinkers and freethinkers of the Arab and Islamic worlds, long may they live.’ Abu Nuwas was all three, and a complete hoot. Why he is so little known in Britain should be a mystery. But outward-looking as we are as a nation, we remain peculiarly parochial in our literary tastes outside the Western canon.
Born in the late 750s in Ahvaz, Abu Nuwas came to Baghdad during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al Rashid in what was Islam’s golden age. In and out of favour as much as he was in and out of prison, he led a free-spirited, wine-drenched, sex-filled life, recorded in electrifying verse.
For many Arab readers, he was the most famous bacchic poet, immortalised in his swashbuckling appearances in The Arabian Nights. Yet for the real cognoscenti, as Alex Rowell emphasises in his excellent introduction, Abu Nuwas was much more than that.
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