Another poem begins—
"Ho! a cup, and fill it up, and tell me it is wine, For I will never drink in shade if I can drink in shine! Curst and poor is every hour that sober I must go, But rich am I whene'er well drunk I stagger to and fro. Speak, for shame, the loved one's name, let vain disguise alone: No good there is in pleasures o'er which a veil is thrown."[532]
Abú Nuwás practised what he preached, and hypocrisy at any rate cannot be laid to his charge. The moral and religious sentiments which appear in some of his poems are not mere cant, but should rather be regarded as the utterance of sincere though transient emotion. Usually he felt and avowed that pleasure was the supreme business of his life, and that religious scruples could not be permitted to stand in the way. He even urges others not to shrink from any excess, inasmuch as the Divine mercy is greater than all the sins of which a man is capable:—
"Accumulate as many sins thou canst: The Lord is ready to relax His ire. When the day comes, forgiveness thou wilt find Before a mighty King and gracious Sire, And gnaw thy fingers, all that joy regretting Which thou didst leave thro' terror of Hell-fire!"[533]
We must now bid farewell to Abú Nuwás and the licentious poets (al-shu‘ará al-mujján) who reflect so admirably the ideas and manners prevailing in court circles and in the upper classes of society which were chiefly influenced by the court. The scenes of luxurious dissipation and refined debauchery which they describe show us, indeed, that Persian culture was not an unalloyed blessing to the Arabs any more than were the arts of Greece to the Romans; but this is only the darker side of the picture. The works of a contemporary poet furnish evidence of the indignation which the libertinism fashionable in high places called forth among the mass of Moslems who had not lost faith in morality and religion.
Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya, unlike his great rival, came of Arab stock. He was bred in Kúfa, and gained his livelihood as a young Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya (748-828 a.d.). man by selling earthenware. His poetical talent, however, promised so well that he set out to present himself before the Caliph Mahdí, who richly rewarded him; and Hárún al-Rashíd afterwards bestowed on him a yearly pension of 50,000 dirhems (about £2,000), in addition to numerous extraordinary gifts. At Baghdád he fell in love with ‘Utba, a slave-girl belonging to Mahdí, but she did not return his passion or take any notice of the poems in which he celebrated her charms and bewailed the sufferings that she made him endure. Despair of winning her affection caused him, it is said, to assume the woollen garb of Muḥammadan ascetics,[534] and henceforth, instead of writing vain and amatorious verses, he devoted his powers exclusively to those joyless meditations on mortality which have struck a deep chord in the hearts of his countrymen. Like Abu ’l-‘Alá al-Ma‘arrí and others who neglected the positive precepts of Islam in favour of a moral philosophy based on experience and reflection, Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya was accused of being a freethinker (zindíq).[535] It was alleged that in his poems he often spoke of death but never of the Resurrection and the Judgment—a calumny which is refuted by many passages in his Díwán. According to the literary historian al-Ṣúlí († 946 a.d.), Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya believed in One God who formed the universe out of two opposite elements which He created from nothing; and held, further, that everything would be reduced to these same elements before the final destruction of all phenomena. Knowledge, he thought, was acquired naturally (i.e., without Divine Revelation) by means of reflection, deduction, and research.[536] He believed in the threatened retribution (al-wa‘íd) and in the command to abstain from commerce with the world (taḥrímu ’l-makásib).[537] He professed the opinions of the Butrites,[538] a subdivision of the Zaydites, as that sect of the Shí‘a was named which followed Zayd b. Alí b. Ḥusayn b. ‘Alí b. Abí Ṭálib. He spoke evil of none, and did not approve of revolt against the Government. He held the doctrine of predestination (jabr).[539]
Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya may have secretly cherished the Manichæan views ascribed to him in this passage, but his poems contain little or nothing that could offend the most orthodox Moslem. The following verse, in which Goldziher finds an allusion to Buddha,[540] is capable of a different interpretation. It rather seems to me to exalt the man of ascetic life, without particular reference to any individual, above all others:—
"If thou would'st see the noblest of mankind, Behold a monarch in a beggar's garb."[541]
But while the poet avoids positive heresy, it is none the less true that much of his Díwán is not strictly religious in the Muḥammadan sense and may fairly be called 'philosophical.' This was enough to convict him of infidelity and atheism in the eyes of devout theologians who looked askance on moral teaching, however pure, that was not cast in the dogmatic mould. The pretended cause of his imprisonment by Hárún al-Rashíd—namely, that he refused to make any more love-songs—is probably, as Goldziher has suggested, a popular version of the fact that he persisted in writing religious poems which were supposed to have a dangerous bias in the direction of free-thought.
His poetry breathes a spirit of profound melancholy and hopeless pessimism. Death and what comes after death, the frailty and misery of man, the vanity of worldly pleasures and the duty of renouncing them—these are the subjects on which he dwells with monotonous reiteration, exhorting his readers to live the ascetic life and fear God and lay up a store of good works against the Day of Reckoning. The simplicity, ease, and naturalness of his style are justly admired. Religious poetry, as he himself confesses, was not read at court or by scholars who demanded rare and obscure expressions, but only by pious folk, traditionists and divines, and especially by the vulgar, "who like best what they can understand."[542] Abu ’l-‘Atáhiya wrote for 'the man in the street.' Discarding conventional themes tricked out with threadbare artifices, he appealed to common feelings and matters of universal experience. He showed for the first and perhaps for the last time in the history of classical Arabic literature that it was possible to use perfectly plain and ordinary language without ceasing to be a poet.