Inan bint Abdallah


Inān bint Abdallāh was a prominent poet and qiyan of the Abbasid period, even characterised by the tenth-century historian Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahāni as the slave-woman poet of foremost significance in the Arabic tradition. She was later the concubine of Harun al-Rashid.

Biography

Inān was born a muwallada to Abd-Allāh. To her appearance, she was described as a Blonde. She was trained in Yamamah. She was sold to Abū Khālid al-Nāṭifī, who brought her to Baghdad.
In the assessment of Fuad Matthew Caswell,
Her salon at the house of al-Nāṭifī was frequented by the celebrated poets and men of letters of the time, including Abū Nuwās, Dibil al-Khuzāī, Marwān b. Abī Ḥafṣa, al-ʽAbbās b. al-Aḥnaf and al-Ma’mūn's tutor al-Yazīdī al-Ḥimyarī, among a host of others, one of the attractions being that her master was devoid of jealously and tolerated the ease with which she bestowed her favours.

Inān's fame led Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd to seek to buy her to include her in the Abbasid harem, but he refused al-Nāṭifī's asking price of 100,000 dīnārs. However, on al-Nāṭifī's death, al-Rashīd had Inān put up for auction, ostensibly to help clear al-Nāṭifī's debts. Via an agent, al-Rashīd then acquired her for 225,000 dirhams. As al-Rashīd's concubine, Inān bore him two sons, both of whom died young. She accompanied him to Khurāsān where he, and, soon after, she died.

Work

Inān was noted for her rapier-like repartee, which was often sexual or even vulgar in tone, and this will have been an important aspect of her fame/infamy. A large part of her surviving corpus comprises her responses to male poets' challenges in verse-capping contests. A significant proportion of her surviving verse is dialogue with the famed poet Abū Nuwās.

Example

As rendered by Eric Ormsby, one of the virtuosic yet obscene exchanges between Inān and Abū Nuwās runs thus:
One day she asked him whether he was any good at scansion; when Abu Nuwas replied boastfully that he was superb at it, she said, "Try scanning this verse:
Abu Nuwas broke the line into metrical feet and responded:
which means:
The assembled courtiers broke into loud laughter at the poet's expense. Not to be outdone, he asked Inān whether she could scan the following verse:
She too had to break up the metrical feet to produce:
which comes out as

Editions and translations