NEW CULTURAL FORMS
With revenues from commerce and (above all) taxes from agriculture in their coffers,
the Abbasid caliphs paid their armies, salaried their officials (drawn from the many
talented men—but, in this relentlessly male-dominated society, not women—in the
Persian, Arab, Christian, and Jewish population), and presided over a cultural revival
even more impressive than the one at Constantinople.
In the ninth century, most spectacularly under caliphs Harun al-Rashid and al-
Ma’mun, literature, science, law, and other forms of scholarship flourished. Books of
all sorts were relatively cheap (and therefore accessible) in the Islamic world because
they were written on paper. The caliphs launched scientific studies via a massive
translation effort that brought the philosophical, medical, mathematical, and
astrological treatises of the Indian and Greek worlds into Islamic culture. They
encouraged new literary forms, including the experimental, irreverent “New Poetry”
of men like Abu Nuwas (d.813/815):
So I advanced in their [some young men’s] company
And was told to climb with them [to the spot we were
making for];
There vessels were unveiled for them (like wives exposed for
the first time)
While a bird warbled in a melancholy strain.
I skipped up to the glasses, and polished them,
Leaving them like dazzling snow;
My dexterity impressed the beardless young men
(Though with my skill I intended no good for them);
I served them without respite wine mixed with water
—It was as warming and bright as kindled fire—
Until I noticed their heads incline,
Bent and crooked with drunkenness
And their tongues tied and heavy,
They now either slept or reclined;
I got up trembling to have sex with them
