Was Abu Nuwas an Arab? / A Thread. So this week @newlinesmag we published @alexjrowell's unsurprisingly popular essay about the love early Arab poets had for wine. (Unsurprising because it contained two topics our audience loves. You know what they are.) https://newlinesmag.com/review/the-wine-critics-of-early-islam/

The strongest reaction was not, as you might have thought, the linking of Islamic rulers to wine. Instead it was this line: "the undisputed master of classical Arabic wine poetry, Abu Nuwas, an Arab court poet in Baghdad". We received emails and tweets. Was AN Arab or Persian?

Well, it depends. On the " #Persian" side, he was born in a city that is today in modern #Iran, #Ahvaz, to a Persian mother. On the "Arab" side, his father was #Arab, he wrote in Arabic in an Arab empire. My definitive view is that Abu Nuwas was certainly [message limit reached]

But look, the chances are he did view himself as Arab, or at least considered the dominant intellectual culture of his life to be Arab. As @kshaheen pointed out in a Slack conversation, was Obama culturally Kenyan or culturally American? Ethnicity isn’t destiny.

Still, I'm less interested if AN was Arab, Persian, Abbasid or born in Hawaii, and more in why it matters today. Why is his ethnicity contentious 1,200 years later? (From our Slack: “Who cares if he was Iranian or Iraqi? We should listen to what he was saying and all get drunk.”)

The reason is that debate about Abu Nuwas's heritage is an attempt to re-run current political competition through historic figures. To adherents of a particular #Iranian and #Arab nationalism, it matters enormously that he was a particular ethnicity; they see it as a victory.

And Nuwas in particular. Because for some, his drinking poetry – #khamriyaat, as it's known – is seen as “modern”, and they want that spillover of perceived modernity to splash over their own culture.

There you can see the reactionary nature of this competition. Because it's not really about saying Iranian or Arab culture is better; it's about saying that at the least it isn't like "them" – and therefore "worse".

And it is particularly worrying because the measure of this modernity – how debauched, how libertine these poets were – is an aspect that was, at the least, not a significant part of historical Islamic societies.

(It's true, as @DiabolicalIdea points out in his book, that alcohol has been part of Islamic societies since before Islam until today, but these societies were not, let's say, built around the consumption of alcohol. It was tolerated, rarely celebrated.)

So when nationalists either side celebrate Muslim poetry on wine, it's not the poetry they like, it's the Muslim part they dislike. The nationalists want to distance the Islamic aspect – usually because, let's be honest, of the criticism that is coming from non-Islamic countries

By glorifying the poetry of wine, they hope to respond to the criticism that Islamic societies aren't sufficiently "modern" – forgetting that the parameters of modernity are being defined by someone else. You can't win on someone else's pitch.

All of which is unusual, because actually #AbuNuwas and the #Abbasid era he lived in represents a far better example to current Islamic societies than the arbitrary standard of being a modern-day Oscar Wilde.

What Nuwas' glorification of alcohol and his mutlifarious heritage reminds us is that an Abbasid culture that was politically secure had space in it for differences, for heretics. That is the part to emulate. A society secure enough, to quote another poet, to contain multitudes.