ABU NUWAS AS AN ADULTERER
BY AHMAD AL-TIFASHI

The Delight of Hearts by Aḥmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi (1184-1253), its translation (through the French of René R. Khawam) into English by Edward A. Lacey and the amendments to it made on this website are introduced here. A glossary there is critically important for the reader wanting to understand the precise meaning in what follows of various key words as ordinary as “boy”. 

Lacey limited himself to translating the content of homosexual interest, so the only section of its Chapter IV about adulterers that he translated was the section presented here about the famous (and usually boysexual) poet Abu-Nuwas (AD 756-814).

Chapter IV. Strange facts about adulterers. The best poems written by them and stories in which they play a part.

     Among famous adulterers,^[1] much mention is naturally made of Abu-Nuwas, who, despite his reputation as a notorious sodomite, also had affairs with women. He had a servant-girl named Hashimiyya who really henpecked him. Whenever she observed that he was on the point of starting up a romance, she would follow him about and would manage to drive a wedge between the two of them by spreading the rumour that her master was also interested in women. She was such a tyrant that the poet finally had to hide out from her as best he could….
     [But Abu-Nuwas had many other girls. Here he reminisces about one of them:] ^[2] 

His master found him handsome,
and so he called him “Sweet.”
Proud of the name, he began
to strut around like a man:
the world lay at his feet.

He is like a young gazelle:
on his cheeks, shining
the constellation of the Pleiads
is rising, not declining.

In all his lover’s meetings
Jupiter, the star
of Good Luck and of Happiness
blesses him from afar.

He looks into your eyes,
and the sword of his gaze
pierces you to the quick:
his blade’s already red
when he’s merely thought, not said:
“I’ll just make a little nick.”

May the good Lord never favour
my pelt or pelf
if I stoop to ask him
to make my poor heart glad
with the love he holds for himself! ^[3]

Lacey’s edition continues with an anecdote, here excluded as having nothing to do with boys or Greek love, of a jest played by one poet in Abu Nuwas’s circle on another, both men older than him.

^[1] In strict Muslim practice, an adulterer is anyone, married or unmarried, who has unauthorized sexual relations with anyone else, married or unmarried, of the opposite sex. The prohibition of adultery does not affect relations with concubines and slave-girls owned or borrowed by the person who has intercourse with them. [Note by Lacey]

^[2]  Several lines of text have been omitted here; the line in brackets has been supplied as a bridge. [Note by Lacey]

^[3]  This poem is interesting as an example of gender-switching, a frequent device in Arab/Muslim poetry: a girl is addressed as a boy, for purposes of concealment and circumspection. Abu-Nuwas’s genius and notoriety caused writers after his time to imitate him slavishly; and since most of his Bacchic poems praised boys and drinking, later poets judged these two elements indispensable to their verse, and almost always addressed their love in the masculine, even if the latter was a woman, and wrote of the joys of wine, even if themselves non-drinkers. The Sufi mystic poets, who were the true lyrical heirs of Abu-Nuwas, carried the Bacchic genre in another direction by writing of the mystical union with God in terms suggesting sexual union with a male lover and glorifying the intoxication of the “wine” of divine love. Abu-Nuwas and most of the poets cited in this text were of course writing of real boys and real wine, but, in the case of some writers, like the Persian Hafez (died 1388), the debate over whether to interpret wine-and boy-songs literally or otherwise has continued for centuries. [Note by Lacey, taking in another in the French edition by Khawam]