Tuesday 25 June 2024, 5pm
Online - Register via Eventbrite.
This event is part of the ongoing Doctoral Seminar ‘Projecting Poetry’ and will be held online on Teams. To obtain the link, please register at the following Eventbrite link.
Registration closes 2 days before the start of the event. You will be sent the joining link within 24 hours of the event, on the day and once again 15 minutes before the event starts.
For further information, you can contact Ugo Mondini at ugo.mondini@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk.
Speaker: Gabrielle Russo, D.Phil. at Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
In the year 255 AH/869 CE, the Turkic military general Ṣāliḥ ibn Waṣīf (d. 256/870) detained three high-ranking ʿAbbāsid bureaucrats and the caliph al-Muʿtazz. He later murdered the caliph and two of the bureaucrats, while the remaining bureaucrat was released and purportedly fled to Egypt. As an unintentional result, the court poet al-Buḥturī (d. 284/897) lost three of his patrons. The same year, al-Buḥturī shifted the subject of his praise and composed three poems under Ṣāliḥ’s patronage, praising the general’s actions as righteous and in service of the caliphate.
The resulting poetry exists at a collision point. Al-Buḥturī places the values of the ideal military general in dialogue with those of the ideal king, and Ṣāliḥ emerges as not only a general and leader par excellence, but also as the ideal court patron. In the language of these multiple sets of values, al-Buḥturī confers honour upon Ṣāliḥ and his martial action. As for al-Buḥturī, the poet attempts to convey a sense of stability- in both his personal relationship to the patron and on a theological level- in a way that employs the ideal roles of both praise and the military. Al-Buḥturī’s poetry for Ṣāliḥ is part of a wider corpus of praise writing on the ʿAbbāsid Turkic guard. In most extant sources, the Turkic guard, newly founded at the beginning of the third/ninth century, are framed as disruptive outsiders. My overall project aims to understand how and why praise writing for the Turkic military was constructed from this context.
Poetry in the Medieval World Network
