Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i

her, and to noble families who had fallen on hard times”⁴²—the kind of encomium that Ibn al-Sāʿī goes on to apply to late-Abbasid consorts. Khamrah ends the sequence of early-Abbasid concubines; after her begins a series of virtuous Saljūq princesses and late-Abbasid models of female virtue whose merits clearly redound to the honor of the dynasty as a whole—merits which in Ibn al-Sāʿī’s time, at least before the Mongols, were highly visible in the streetscape of Baghdad, in the shape of the public works and mausolea ordered by these women.⁴³ In this, important ladies of the caliph’s household were following the example of Zubaydah, the most famous of early-Abbasid princesses, well-known to every citizen of Baghdad and indeed to every pilgrim to Mecca,⁴⁴ and Ibn al-Sāʿī, in recording their piety, good works, and burial places, is following the example of his older contemporary, Ibn al-Jawzī.⁴⁵ According to Jawād, Ibn al-Sāʿī means “Son of the Runner” or merchant’s errand-man; if it is not a surname taken from a distant ancestor, but instead reflects a humble background—as Jawād argues, on the basis that Ibn al-Sāʿī’s father Anjab is unknown to biographers⁴⁶—then Ibn al-Sāʿī’s grateful descriptions of the later consorts’ public works may reflect the feelings of ordinary Baghdadis.

      Virtue, however—loyalty or piety-based virtue that finds social expression—is not the whole reason why Ibn al-Sāʿī devotes so much space to the early-Abbasid concubines, since most of them are not virtuous at all by these standards.

      THE EARLY-ABBASID CONSORTS AS CULTURE HEROINES

      The majority of the early-Abbasid consorts were professional poets and musicians. Ibn al-Sāʿī and his sources, which include nearly all the great names in mid-Abbasid cultural mythography,⁴⁷ rate them very highly: ʿInān “was the first poet to become famous under the Abbasids and the most gifted poet of her generation”; the major (male) poets of her time came to her to be judged.⁴⁸ No one “sang, played music, wrote poetry, or played chess so well” as ʿArīb.⁴⁹ Faḍl al-Shāʿirah was not only one of the greatest wits of her time, but wrote better prose than any state secretary.⁵⁰ Above all, they excel in the difficult art of capping verse and composing on the spur of the moment.⁵¹ Their accomplishments are essentially competitive, and it is usually men that they compete with. The competition is not only a salon game. For the male poets—free men who make their living by performing at court—losing poses a risk to their reputation and livelihood. The women who challenge them or respond to their challenge are all slaves (jāriyah is the term used for such highly trained slave women). Of the risks to a slave woman who fails to perform, or to best her challenger, only one is spelled out in Consorts of the Caliphs, in the case of ʿInān, whose owner whips her.⁵² On the other hand, the returns on talent and self-confidence can be great, as is seen in the case of ʿArīb, whose career continues into old age, when her verve and authority seem undiminished and she has apparently achieved a wealthy independence.⁵³ We are shown how, between poets, the fellowship of professionalism transcends differences between male and female, free and slave. But even in the battles of wits between a jāriyah and her lover, where the stakes are very high—if she misses her step, the woman risks not just the loss of favor and position, but the loss of affection too, for many jāriyahs are depicted as being truly in love with their owners—there is often, again, a touch of something like comradeship: a woman’s ability to rise to the occasion can compel her lover’s quasi-professional admiration. We should remember that nearly all the early-Abbasid caliphs composed poetry or music themselves, and they all considered themselves highly competent judges. Though the consorts’ beauty is routinely mentioned, when we are shown a cause of attraction, it is the cleverness, aptness, or pathos of their poetry that wins over the lover. The workings of attraction and esteem can be imagined and explored in the case of slaves as they rarely are in that of free women; and this, in addition to their talents and exquisite sensibility or dashing manners, is what makes the early-Abbasid jāriyahs culture heroines, whose hold on the Arabic imagination persists through the ages.

      IBN AL-SĀʿĪ’S CONTRIBUTION

      Unlike Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, the authority most cited in Consorts of the Caliphs,⁵⁴ Ibn al-Sāʿī seems far less interested in music than in poetry. He was a poet himself, as indeed was almost any contemporary Arabic speaker with any claim to literacy and social competence. He and all his readers knew the wide range of available poetic genres, both ceremonial and intimate. As children, they would have been taught the ancient and modern Arabic poetic classics, and as adults, they might have written verse on public occasions and would certainly have composed poems to entertain their friends, lampoon unpleasant colleagues, or give vent to their feelings about life. The poetry of the jāriyahs has its own place in this spectrum. It is occasional poetry: even when they write accession panegyrics or congratulations on a successful military campaign, the jāriyahs keep them short and light.⁵⁵ What is poignant about their poetry is its ephemerality: it captures and belongs to the moment. And what is especially moving about it is that (in the eyes of Ibn al-Sāʿī, who simplifes but does not traduce the complex vision of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī) it is identical with the woman who composes it and her precarious situation. As Ibn al-Sāʿī tells it, the poetry of the slave consorts is an act of personal daring and moral agency, which finds its reward in the love of the caliph and sometimes even in marriage.⁵⁶ This is something considerable, contained in the small compass of the anecdote format.

      There have not been many attempts, in modern scholarship, to make distinctions between the jāriyahs as poets and cultural agents, on the one hand, and as romantic heroines and objects of erotic and ethical fantasy, on the other. There are basic surveys of the sources;⁵⁷ there is a pioneering study of the world of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s Book of Songs;⁵⁸ and, most recently, there is an exploration of the values underlying the competition between jāriyahs and free male poets and musicians.⁵⁹ Medieval contemporaries were alive to the social paradox of the woman slave performer as a leader of fashion but also a commodity, an extravagance but also an investment for her owners, able to some extent to turn her status as a chattel to her own profit by manipulating her clients—and they satirized it unsympathetically.⁶⁰ By comparison, modern reflection on female slavery and its place in medieval Islamic societies is unsophisticated.⁶¹ The time span of Consorts of the Caliphs is wider than that of the mid-Abbasid classics which have been the focus of modern scholarship until now, and the life stories it presents of female slaves bring together a greater range of backgrounds and situations and open up more complex perspectives.

      Ibn al-Sāʿī’s special contribution to the subject is his seriousness and sympathy, the multiplicity of roles within the dynasty that he identifies for consorts, and his systematic, and challenging, idealization of the woman over the slave.

      Julia Bray

      MAPS

      1. The Abbasid Caliphate

      2. Early Baghdad

      3. Later Baghdad

      4. Later East Baghdad

      Note: The maps of Baghdad are based principally on Le Strange, Baghdad (1900), Jawād and Sūsah, Dalīl (1958), Makdisi, “Topography” (1959), Lassner, Topography (1970), and Ahola and Osti, “Baghdad.” In cases where precise locations are not known, the aim has been to give readers of Consorts an idea of the relationships between different places topographically. Outright conjectures are followed by a question mark.

      NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

      SHAWKAT M. TOORAWA