Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Arabian Nights
In this period, shortly before the middle of the tenth century, the first draft of what later became Alf Laylah wa-Laylah (a thousand and one night) was made in al-Iraq. The basis of this draft, prepared by al-Jahshiyari, was an old Persian work, Hazar Afsana (thousand tales), containing several stories of Indian origin AlJahshiyari added other tales from local story tellers. The Afsana provided the general plot and framework as well as the nomenclature for the leading heroes and heroines, including Shahrazad. As time went on additions were made from numberless sources: Indian, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian and the like. Oriental fold-tales of svery description were absorbed in the course of centuries. The court of Harun al-Rashid provided a large quota of humorous anecdotes and love romances. The final form was not taken by the Nights until the later Mamluk period in Egypt. Its heterogeneous character has inspired the facetious words of a modern critic who has described the Arabian Nights as Persian tales told after the manner of Buddha by Queen Esther to ”Harun” in Cairo during the fourteenth century of the Christian era. First translated into French by Galland, the Nights have worked their way into all the principal languages of modern Europe and have taken their place as the most popular piece of Arabic literature in the West, vastly more popular than in the Muslim East itself. In English the first important translation, incomplete but accuratem is that of Edward William Lane. It has a valuable and full commentary and has gone through several editions. John Payne’s translation is complete but has no commentary. In his rendition Sir Richard F. Burton follows Payne’s except in the poetical part and endeavours to improve on it by attempting to reproduce the Oriental flavour of the original.6
Poetry
The pre-Islamic poetry of the heroic age of the Jahiliyah provided models for the Umayyad bards, whose imitations of the
antique odes were treated as classical by the Abbasid poets. The pietistic spirit fostered by the new regime of the Banu-al-Abbas, the foreign cultural and religious influences streaming mainly from Persia, and the patronage of the caliphs under whom the poets flourished and whom they were expected to laud and glorify, tended to produce deviation from the old trodden paths of classicism and develop new forms of poetical expression. Nevertheless poetry proved the most conservative of all Arab arts. Throughout the ages it never ceased to breathe the spirit of the desert. Even modern Arabic versifiers of Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad feel no incongruity in introducing their odes by apostrophizing the deserted encampments (atlal) of the beloved, whose eyes they still liken to those of wild cows (maha). Other than poetry, law~particularl> in its marital ordinances- is perhaps the only field in which the old desert elements have succeeded in perpetuating themselves.
The earliest exponent of the new style in poetry was the blind Persian Bashshar ibn-Burd, who was put to death in 783 under al-Mahdi, according to some for satirizing his wazir but more probably on account of his zindiqism, Zoroastrian or Manichaen secret views. Bashshar, who once thanked Allah for having made him blind ” so that I need not see that which I hate”, was a rebel against the archaic formulas of ancient poetry. Another early representative of the new school was the half-Persian Abu-Nuwas; the boon companion of Harun and al-Amin and the poet in whose sons love and wine found their best expression. The name of AbuNuwas has lived to the present day in the Arabic world as a synonym for clown; in reality he has few rivals in amorous sentiment, erotic expression and elegant diction. He is the lyric and bacchic poet par excellence of the Muslim world. The many songs on the beauty of boys attributed to this dissolute favourite of the Abbasid court, as well as his poems in praise of wine (khamriyat), which have not ceased to enchant those who read and drink, throw interesting light upon contemporaneous aristocratic life. The ghazal of abu-Nuwas short poems of love ranging from five to fifteen verses, follow the model of Persian bards, who developed this verse form long before the Arabs.
Just as the witty and licentious Abu-Nuwas represented the lighter side of court life, so did his ascetic contemporary Abu-alAtahiyah; a potter by profession, give expression to pessimistic meditations on mortality which the common man of religious
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622 Political and Cultural History of Islam

mentality entertained. The soul of this scion of the Bedouin tribe of Anazah rebelled against the frivolous high life of Baghdad, where he lived, and although Harun assigned to him a yearly stipend of 50,000 dirhams, he adopted the garb of a dervish and produced those ascetic and religious poems (zuhdi-yat) which entitle him to the position of father of Arabic sacred poetry.7
The provinces, particularly Syria, reared during the Abbasid period a number of first-class poets, among whom the most renowned were Abu-Tammam and Abu-al-Ala’. Abu-Tamman’s father, who kept a wine shop in Damascus was a Christian by the name of Thadus (Thaddaios), which the son changed to Aws when he embraced Islam. Abu-Tammam was a court poet in Baghdad, but his title to fame rests rather upon his compilation Diwan al-Hamasah. poems celebrating valour in battle. This Diwan embraces gems of Arabic poetry. The collection of Hamasah poems of the same description by the other court poet, al-Buhturi (820-97), is inferior to that of Abu-Tammam, after which it was modeled.
The patronage accorded by the Abbasid caliphs, wazirs and governors to poets, whom they employed as encomiasts, not only made the panegyric (madih) an especially favourite form of poetical composition but led poets to prostitute their art, and resulted in that false glitter and empty bombast often said to be characteristic of Arabic poetry, Abbasid poetry, not unlike Arabic poetry of other periods, was moreover mainly subjective and provincial in character, full of local colour but unable to soar above time and place to gain a position among the timeless and landless offspring of the Muses.