Abu'l-'Atahiyya

Abu al-Atahiyya, Isma'il ibn al-Qasim, who was a seller of jars and a poet. Al-Mas'udi relates that he was among the easiest of people in speech and the most able to put words into metre, and that he composed a great deal of love poetry about Utba, a slave-girl of al-Khayzuran, so al-Mahdi flogged him and then gave him fifty thousand dirhams. ²

In the view of Ahmad Amin he was the leader of religious poetry and the first to it among the clients. ³ It is said that people disputed which of the two was the better poet, he or Abu Nuwas, without a definite preference. ⁴

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), signed by A. Guillaume, gives Abu 'Ishaq Isma'il b. al-Qasim b. Suwayd b. Kaysan, nicknamed Abu l-'Atahiya ("father of craziness"), as born in Kufa or 'Ayn al-Tamr in 130/748 and dying in 210/825 or 211/826. His family had been clients of the 'Anaza for generations, and his father was a cupper; as a youth the poet himself sold earthenware in the streets. The article ties his bitterness to a sense of social inferiority, and it links his lack of formal study to the freshness of his style. He first rose by a panegyric on al-Mahdi, but his love-poems for 'Utba, a slave-girl, led to a flogging and exile to Kufa, and his praise of al-Hadi annoyed Harun al-Rashid, who imprisoned him with Ibrahim al-Mawsili. ⁵