Ibn Chafajah

Ibn Chafadscha ( Spanish Ibn Jafaya , Arabic إبن خفاجة Ibn Ḫafāja , with full name Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm ibn Abī l-Fatḥ ibn Ḫafāja al-Andalusī , * 1058 ; † in the 12th century ) wasone of the most famous poets in Andalusia in the 11th and 12th centuriesduring the reign of the Almoravids .

Life

Ibn Chafajah was born in Alzira (جزيرة شقر) Born near Valencia in 1058, where he spent most of his life and also died there on June 25, 1139. He grew up in Alzira in a well-off family whose ancestry went back to Arabs and Berbers . His sister was the mother of his nephew Ibn az-Zaqqaq , who was to continue his literary work.

Ibn Chafajah was unmarried but had many friends and was over eighty years old.

During his apprenticeship in Alzira he had the lawyer, writer and poet Abu-Imran ibn Abi-Talid, the grammarian and lexicographer Abu-Ishaq ibn Sawad and the lawyer Abu-Bakr ibn Aswad. In Murcia he regularly visited the religious scholar Abu-Ali as-Sadafi. Apparently he was also heavily influenced by Eastern Arab poets such as Abd-al-Muhsin as-Suri and Abu-l-Hassan Mihyar ad-Daylami.

Ibn Chafadscha had good relationships with prominent personalities of the Almoravid dynasty. He was in correspondence with the governor of Murcia Abu-Bakr ibn Ibrahim ibn Tifilwit and his daughter Maryam, the governor of Granada , Seville and Murcia Abu-t-Tàhir Tamim ibn Yusuf ibn Tashfin and the governor of Ceuta , Valencia, Murcia and Seville Abu-Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Yusuf ibn Tashfin. He dedicated various poems to the sons of the almoravid emir Ali ibn Yusuf . His correspondence also included other personalities from politics and culture in Andalusia of his time.

Even if he stayed in Alzira most of the time, he made several smaller trips in addition to his forced stay in the Maghreb. Among other things, he stayed in Murcia, Valencia and Xàtiva . He also went to the court of al-Mutassim ibn Sumadih in Almeria and visited the court of the Emir of the Zirids Tamīm ibn al-Muʿizz az-Zīrī in Mahdia .

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Since Ibn Chafadscha was economically independent due to his lands in Alzira, he could devote himself to poetry and enjoy it with complete freedom.

Ibn Chafadscha developed natural poetry to sophisticated sophistication. Among his poems there are also very rare hymns of praise, for example to Yusuf ibn Tashfin , whom he thanked for rescuing Al-Andulas from chaotic conditions - after the reconquest of Valencia in 1109, Yusuf ibn Tashfin regained the entire region from the Spaniards recovered. During the occupation of the area around Valencia by the Spaniards (around 1100) Ibn Chafadscha fled to North Africa.

According to the writer Salma Chadra Dschayyusi , Chafadschaa uses an almost revolutionary language. She describes his very original choice of words as

"Warm and sensual, full of human sensuality, stirring and fully aware of the violence that surrounds a war-torn country, with deep reverence for nature and forever enchanted by its beauty and its permanence in relation to human transience."

Divan

The Dīwān of Ibn Chafaja (Dīwān Ibn Ḫafāja) is his main work. The divan contains 243 poems with a total of 2,913 verses, 16 letters and 4 grammatical and literary glosses . The poems can be assigned to different topics:

• Love poems - praise the lust for life with its sensual pleasures.
• Bachantic poems - full of cheerfulness and forgetting worrying thoughts.
• Poems about nature and landscapes - are considered to be the best in Arabic literature and have given Ibn Chafadscha the nickname of "gardeners" (al-dschannan). The night occupies a prominent position.
• Panegyric poems (praises) - to friends and protectors.
• Elegies (lamentations) - express the painful feelings caused by the loss or destruction of cities by Christians.
• Ascetic poems (penances) - reflections on old age, sickness and death, imbued with fatalism.

The stylistic element distinguishing Ibn Chafadscha is his mixture of nature and love in life paired with the nostalgia of bygone times, lost paradises. He also includes death in order to advance to an anthropological view of nature. Ibn Chafadscha exercised a very great influence on the following poets, whereby his characteristic style was called chafaji . Typical of his Kasside is a concentration of poetic impressions that overlap and follow one another, as well as a renewal of classicism. The principal characteristic of his natural poetry lies in the personification, whereby nature (and its components) often appears as a female figure (s) or is (are) provided with feminine attributes.

Settings

Modern settings of Ibn Chafadscha are mostly based on contemporary interpretations by the writer Josep Piera . For example, Al Tall released the disk Xarq al-Andalus in 1985 with the group Muluk el Hwa and Carles Dénia released his album El paradís de les paraules in 2011 .

The composer Mohammed Fairouz has set three poems by Ibn Chafadscha in a cycle of vocal chamber music for the Cygnus Ensemble .

literature

• Magda M. Al-Nowaihi: The Poetry of Ibn Khafajah A Literary Analysis, (Revised PhD thesis, Harvard, 1987) . Brill, Leiden 1993, ISBN 90-04-09660-4 .
• Burgel, JC: Man, Nature and Cosmos as Intertwining Elements in the Poetry of Ibn Khafāja . In: Journal of Arabic literature . vol. 14, 1983, p. 31 .
• Hamdane Hadjadji and André Miquel: Ibn Khafaja l'Andalou, L'amant de la nature . El-Ouns, Paris 2002.
• Abd al-Rahman Janair: Ibn Khafaja l-Andalusi . Dar al-Afaq, Beirut 1980.
• Arie Schippers: Ibn Khafaja (1058-1139) in Morocco. Analysis of a laudatory poem addressed to a member of the Almoravid clan . In: Otto Zwartjes ea (Ed.): Poetry, Politics and Polemics: Cultural Transfer Between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1996, ISBN 90-420-0105-4 , pp. 13-34 .
• Arthur Wormhoudt (Editor): The Diwan of Abu Ishaq Ibn Ibrahim Ibn Abu Al-Fath Ibn Khafaja . Oskaloosa, Ia .: William Penn College 1987, ISBN 0-916358-39-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Samuel G. Armistead and E. Michael Gerli (editors): Medieval Iberia, an Encyclopedia . 2003.
2. ^ Gallega Ortega, Teófilo: Ibn Jafāŷa . In: Jorge Lirola Delgado (ed.): Biblioteca de al-Andalus . Vol. 3. From Ibn al-Dabbāg to Ibn Kurz. Almeria: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes 2004, ISBN 84-934026-1-3 , p. 547-564 .
3. ↑ Schippers, Arie: The theme of old age in the poetry of Ibn Hafāğa . In: Quaderni di Studi Arabi . núm. 9, 1991, ISSN  1121-2306 , pp. 143-160 .
4. ↑ Schippers, Aria: Manierismo e individualidad: la poesía de Ibn Jafaŷa (1058-1139), Moisés Ibn 'Ezra (1055-1138) y Yehudá ha-Leví . In: J. Targarona Borrás and A. Sáenz-Badillos (eds.): Poesía hebrea en al-Andalus (Castellan) . Universidad, Granada 2003, ISBN 978-84-338-2970-2 , pp. 173-185 .
5. ↑ Arie Schippers: Ibn Khafaja (1058-1139) in Morocco. Analysis of a laudatory poem addressed to a member of the Almoravid clan . In: Otto Zwartjes ea (Ed.): Poetry, Politics and Polemics: Cultural Transfer Between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1996, p. 14 .
6. ↑ Salma Khadra Jayyusi: Nature poetry and the rise of Ibn Khafaja . In: Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Ed.): The legacy of Muslim Spain . EJ Brill, Leiden 1994, p. 381 .
7. ↑ Ibn Khafaja, Ibrahim ibn Abi l-Fath: Dīwān Ibn Khafājah (Arabic) . In: Miṣr: al-Maṭba ʿ ah al-Khāṣṣah bi-Jam ʿ īyat al-Ma ʿ ārif, 1286 after Hijra . 1869.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Schippers, aria: «Hamdane Hadjadji et André Miquel. Ibn Khafadja l'Andalou: L'amant de la nature » . In: Arabica . vol. 50, num. 2, 2003, ISSN  0570-5398 , p. 260-266 (French).
9. ↑ Schippers, Aria: Short poems in Andalusian literature: reflections on Ibn Hafaga's poems about figs . In: Quaderni di Studi Arabi . num. 5-6, 1987, ISSN  1121-2306 , pp. 708-717 (English).
10. ↑ Lachica Garrido, Margarita: Poetas arabes del País Valenciano (Castellan) . In: Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia Medieval . num. 9, 1992, ISSN  0212-2480 , pp. 24 .
11. ^ Rubiera Mata: María Jesús (Castellan) . Edició digital. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, Alicante 2001, p. 103 .