Ibn Nāqiyā al-Baghdādī (, full name ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn Dāwūd Ibn Nāqiyā, born 15 March 1020 in
Baghdad
Baghdad ( or ; , ) is the capital and List of largest cities of Iraq, largest city of Iraq, located along the Tigris in the central part of the country. With a population exceeding 7 million, it ranks among the List of largest cities in the A ...
, died in the same place 15 February 1092) was a noted Arabic-language litteratus.
Life
Ibn Nāqiyā spent his childhood in a district of Baghdad previously occupied by the palaces of the
Tahirids
The Tahirid dynasty (, ) was an Arabized Sunni Muslim dynasty of Persian dehqan origin that ruled as governors of Khorasan from 821 to 873 as well as serving as military and security commanders in Abbasid Baghdad until 891. The dynasty was f ...
and their outbuildings.
[J.-C. Vadet, "Ibn Nāḳiyā", in ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'', ed. by Paul Bearman and others, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2005), .] Apparently he did not travel much, and his only known patron was one Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Shahrazūrī.
The city was considered one of the most important and interesting cities in the world at the time, populated by philosophers, artists, free spirits and merchants — a milieu that is also reflected in Ibn Nāqiyā's works.
[Ibn Naqiya, ]
Moscheen, Wein und böse Geister: Die zehn Verwandlungen des Bettlers al-Yaschkuri
', trans. by Stefan Wild, Neue Orientalische Bibliothek (Munich: Beck, 2019), . Ibn Nāqiyā composed an elegy for the
Shāfiʿī
The Shafi'i school or Shafi'i Madhhab () or Shafi'i is one of the four major schools of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), belonging to the Ahl al-Hadith tradition within Sunni Islam. It was founded by the Muslim scholar, jurist, and traditionist al ...
scholar
Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī and has accordingly been thought to have been a disciple of his.
Works
Ibn Nāqiyā al-Baghdādī was famed for his literary knowledge. These include an important ''diwān'', now lost, and a résumé of the ''
Kitāb al-Aghānī
''Kitāb al-Aghānī'' (), is an encyclopedic collection of poems and songs that runs to over 20 volumes in modern editions, attributed to the 10th-century Arabic writer Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, Abū al-Farāj al-Isfahānī (also known as al-Is ...
''.
But his ''al-Jumān fī tashbīhāt al-Qur'ān'' survives, in at least two manuscripts.
The work comprises 36 chapters, each named after a Koranic ''sūra'': each chapter identifies similes (''tashbīhāt'') found in that chapter, and often in others besides, and adduced parallels from both Arabic verse and rhyming prose (''
sajʿ''). The work thus constitutes a kind of literary commentary on a selection of the Qur'an's ''sūra''s (beginning with ''sūra'' 2, ''al-Baqara'', and ending with 105, ''al-Fīl''), though in total it cites 167 individual verses of the Qur'an from 68 different ''sūrāt''.
[Matthew L. Keegan, ''Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Arabic Anthologies'', Islamic History and Civilization, 180 (Leiden: Brill, 2021) , .] In Matthew Keegan's estimation, he 'compiles his examples from the Arabic poetic tradition to provide, on the one hand, the
Jāhilī background for the Quran and, on the other, an account of the way poets responded to and developed quranic imagery. The effect is to highlight the intertextualities between the Quran and the Arabic poetic tradition ... Ibn Nāqiyā seems to delight in exploring the intertextualities between the quranic similes and the Arabic poetic tradition'.
Most noted, however, is Ibn Nāqiyā's collection of ''
maqāmāt'', a particular form of
satirical
Satire is a genre of the visual arts, visual, literature, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently Nonfiction, non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ...
rhyming prose.
Preserved in a single manuscript, his ''Maqāmāt'' are considered a long-neglected treasure of Arabic literature.
Herein the author makes fun of all conventions in an offensive and subversive way.
The principal character is the versatile al-Yaschkuri, who cunningly and eloquently makes his way through the world.
Sometimes disguised as a preacher, sometimes as a beggar, sometimes as a pious man, he travels the country and masters the challenges of life and survival in an outrageous and clever way.
Editions and translations
''al-Jumān fī tashbīhāt al-Qur'ān''
Scholarly Arabic editions of this text have been published by Aḥmad Maṭlūb and Khadīja al-Ḥadīthī (Baghdad, 1968), Muṣtafā al-Ṣāwī al-Juwaynī (Alexandria, 1974) and Muḥammad Riḍwān al-Dāya (Beirut, 1991); Keegan views the first of these as the best.
Keegan gives an English translation of the commentary on Qur'an sura 76, ''al-Insān''.
''Maqāmāt''
* Oskar Rescher,
Beiträge zur Maqamen-Literatur' (Istanbul: Maṭbaʻa-i Aḥmad Kāmil, 1331
914 CE, part iv, pp. 123–52 (edition of the Arabic)
* ''Maqāmāt Ibn Nāqiyā'', ed. by Ḥasan ʿAbbās (Alexandria, 1988) (critical edition of the Arabic)
* Ibn Naqiya,
Moscheen, Wein und böse Geister: Die zehn Verwandlungen des Bettlers al-Yaschkuri', trans. by Stefan Wild, Neue Orientalische Bibliothek (Munich: Beck, 2019), (German translation).
* Philip F. Kennedy,
1092 deaths
11th-century Arab people
Poets from the Abbasid Caliphate
People from Baghdad
Maqama
11th-century Arabic-language poets