Abu Tammam

Habib ibn Aws al-Ta'i, known as Abu Tammam, was born in Jasim in southern Syria to a Christian father before embracing Islam. Working in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad, he won the patronage of Caliph al-Mu'tasim with his magnificent ode celebrating the Byzantine defeat at the battle of Amorium in 838.

Abu Tammam revolutionized classical Arabic poetry by introducing the bad' style, characterized by daring metaphors, philosophical abstraction, and dense rhetorical ornamentation. Stranded by winter snows in Hamadan, he read through private libraries and compiled the Diwan al-Hamasah, the definitive ten-chapter anthology of early Arab heroic verse that became a foundational textbook of Arabic literature.