Abu Nuwas
Abū Nuwās al-Ḥasan ibn Hānī al-Ḥakamī (variant: Al-Ḥasan ibn Hānī 'Abd al-Awal al-Ṣabāḥ, Abū 'Alī (), known as Abū Nuwās al-Salamī () or just Abū Nuwās ( "Abū Novās"); 756814) was a classical Arabic poet, and the foremost representative of the modern (muhdath) poetry that developed during the first years of Abbasid Caliphate. He also entered the folkloric tradition, appearing several times in "One Thousand and One Nights". Early life. Abu Nuwas was born in the province of Ahvaz (modern Khuzestan Province) of the Abbasid Caliphate, either in the city of Ahvaz or one of  its adjacent districts. His date of birth is uncertain, he was born sometime between 756 and 758. His father was Hani, a Syrian or Persian who had served in the army of the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II (). His mother was a Persian named Gulban, whom Hani had met whilst serving in the police force of Ahvaz. When Abu Nuwas was 10 years old, his father died. In his early childhood Abu Nuwas followed his mother to Basra in lower Iraq where he attended Qur’an school and became a Hafiz at a young age. His youthful good looks and innate  charisma attracted the attention of the Kufan poet, Abu Usama Waliba ibn al-Hubab al-Asadi, who took Abu Nuwas to Kufa as a young apprentice. Waliba recognized in Abu Nuwas his talent as a poet and encouraged him toward this vocation, but was also attracted sexually to the young man and may have had erotic relations with him. Abu Nuwas's relationships with adolescent boys when he had matured as a man seem to mirror his own experience with Waliba. Work. Abu Nuwas wrote poetry in multiple genres; his great talent was most recognized in his wine poems and  in his hunting poems. His erotic lyric poetry, which is often homoerotic, is known from over 500 poems and fragments. He also participated in the well-established Arabic tradition of satirical poetry, which included duels between poets involving vicious exchanges of poetic lampoons and insults. Ismail bin Nubakht, one of Nuwas's contemporaries, said: "I never saw a man of more extensive learning than Abu Nuwas, nor one who, with a memory so richly furnished, possessed so few books. After his death we searched his house, and could only find one book-cover containing a quire of paper, in which  was a collection of rare expressions and grammatical observations." The earliest anthologies of his poetry and his biography were produced by: Imprisonment and death. He died during the Great Abbasid Civil War before al-Ma’mūn advanced from Khurāsān in either 199 or 200 AH (814–816 AD). Because he frequently indulged in drunken exploits, Nuwas was imprisoned during the reign of Al-Amin, shortly before his death. The cause of his death is disputed: four different accounts of Abu Nuwas’s death survive. 1. He was poisoned by the Nawbakht family, having been framed with a poem satirizing them. 2. He  died in a tavern drinking right up to his death. 3. He was beaten by the Nawbakht for the satire falsely attributed to him; wine appears to have had a role in the flailing emotions of his final hours - this seems to be a combination of accounts one and two. 4. He died in prison, a version which contradicts the many anecdotes stating that in the advent of his death he suffered illness and was visited by friends (though not in prison). He most probably died of ill health, and equally probably in the house of the Nawbakht family, whence  came the myth that they poisoned him. Nuwas was buried in Shunizi cemetery in Baghdad. Legacy. Influences. Nuwas is one of a number of writers credited with inventing the literary form of the "mu‘ammā" (literally "blinded" or "obscured"), a riddle which is solved "by combining the constituent letters of the word or name to be found". He also perfected two Arabic genres: Khamriyya (wine poetry) and Tardiyya (hunting poetry). Ibn Quzman, who was writing in Al-Andalus in the 12th century, admired him deeply and has been compared to him. Commemoration. The city of Baghdad has several places named for  the poet. Abū Nuwās Street runs along the east bank of the Tigris River, in a neighbourhood that was once the city's showpiece. Abu Nuwas Park is located on the 2.5-kilometer stretch between the Jumhouriya Bridge and a park that extends out to the river in Karada near the 14th of July Bridge. In 1976, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in honor of Abu Nuwas. The Abu Nawas Association, founded in 2007 in Algeria, was named after the poet. The primary aim of the organisation is to decriminalise homosexuality in Algeria, seeking the abolition of  article 333 and 338 of the Algerian penal code which still considers homosexuality a crime punishable by imprisonment and accompanied by a fine. Censorship. While his works were in circulation freely until the early years of the twentieth century, the first modern censored edition of his works was published in Cairo in 1932. In January 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture ordered the burning of some 6,000 copies of books of Nuwas's homoerotic poetry. In the Saudi "Global Arabic Encyclopedia" entry for Abu Nuwas, all mentions of pederasty were omitted. In popular culture. He features as a character in  a number of stories in "One Thousand and One Nights", where he is cast as a boon companion of Harun al-Rashid. A heavily fictionalised Abu Nuwas is the protagonist of the novels "The Father of Locks" (Dedalus Books, 2009) and "The Khalifah's Mirror" (2012) by Andrew Killeen, in which he is depicted as a spy working for Ja'far al-Barmaki. In the Sudanese novel "Season of Migration to the North" (1966) by Tayeb Salih, Abu Nuwas's love poetry is cited extensively by one of the novel's protagonists, the Sudanese Mustafa Sa'eed, as a means of seducing  a young English woman in London: "Does it not please you that the earth is awaking,/ That old virgin wine is there for the taking?" The Tanzanian artist Godfrey Mwampembwa (Gado) created a Swahili comic book called "Abunuwasi" which was published in 1996. It features a trickster figure named Abunuwasi as the protagonist in three stories draw inspiration from East African folklore as well as the fictional Abu Nuwasi of "One Thousand and One Nights". In Pasolini's Arabian Nights, the "Sium" story is based on Abu Nuwas' erotic poetry. The original poems are used throughout the scene. Abu Nuwas