Abbasa

Abbasa (* around 765; † after 803) was a half-sister of the fifth Abbasid caliph Hārūn ar-Raschīd .

Life

Abbasa was the daughter of the third Abbasid caliph Al-Mahdi and a Persian woman; But she was best known as the (half) sister of Harun ar-Raschid. She survived three husbands, so the court poet Abu Nuwas advised the caliph in a mocking poem to marry off a person he did not like to Abbasa.

Several versions were in circulation about the reasons for the fall of the powerful family of the Barmakids , which initially enjoyed great influence with Harun, including the romantic story that Harun's friend Dja'far bin Yahya , who came from the Barmakid dynasty , had a love affair with Abbassa and therefore incurred the wrath of the caliph. This folk tale is already being told by the important Persian historian Tabari and later chroniclers painted it further. After that, Harun wanted his companion Dja'far, whom he loved so much, but also his beautiful sister Abbasa, whom he supposedly loved himself, to always be close to him - even on his night outings. Since the latter was against good morals, he had his sister and his friend formally married, but the marriage was not allowed to be consummated. So he could be with both of them. But the two fell in love and Abbasa, disguised as a slave, crept into her lover's bedroom. She eventually gave birth to twin boys who were to be secretly raised in Mecca . But after an argument with a maid, she made the scandal public. The caliph found out about this and, after being satisfied that the rumors were true, executed Dja'far and almost the entire Barmakid dynasty (803 AD).

This story is unlikely to be based on truth. Historians before Tabari do not know them. The scholia to the mocking poem of Abu Nuwas list the names of Abbasa's husband without mentioning Dja'far. For Tabari and other historians, too, this story was at best one of several reasons for Dja'far's execution. The eminent Islamic historian and statesman Ibn Khaldun later declared it unreliable. In fact, the Barmakids are likely to have become too powerful and influential for the caliph. One can conclude from a remark by Tabari that Abbasa was older than 40 years at the time of her relationship with Dja'far; in any case, her second husband died eleven years before her future lover. Accordingly, the couple couldn't have been too young anymore. There was a similar story in pre-Islamic times, which reported about the marriage of a minister to the ruler's sister and perhaps served as a model for the episode of Dja'far and Abbasa. Some sources name the Barmakid's mistress not Abbasa, but Maimuna or Fakhita , who would have been two other sisters of the caliph.

The older historians do not report anything about Abbasa's life after the execution of the Dja'far; later sources portrayed their end in a gruesome and mysterious way. According to one version, Harun had his sister and her sons executed, according to another he banished them from the court, whereupon she wandered about lonely and sang about her sad fate. Some Arabic stanzas about her lot are ascribed to her herself.

In modern times, the love story between Abbasa and Dja'far also found its way into European literature, for example in the French novel Abbasa (1753) and in Les nuits de Bagdad (1904) by Aimé Giron and Albert Tozza .

literature

• J. Horovitz: Abbasa. In: Encyclopaedia of Islam . 1st edition, Vol. 1, pp. 13f.
• Abassa. In: Women in World History . Vol. 1 (1999), pp. 7f.