Crossing enemy boundaries: al-Buhturi's ode on the ruins of Ctesiphon re-read in the light of Virgil and Wilfred Owen

After a brilliant career at the heart of empire, the ‘Abbam sid court poet alBu D hturi found himself disillusioned with royal patronage. In AD 883 he set out in doleful mood to find solace in the vestiges of another empire which his own people, the Muslim Arabs, had humbled and defeated two centuries earlier: Sasanid Persia and the by now abandoned ruins of its capital, Ctesiphon. The contemplation of the majestic remains of its royal palace—the great central arch of which stands to this day—inspired him to compose a masterpiece which is ranked among the finest specimens of classical Arabic literature and has been subject to much critical attention, especially in recent times. The circumstances of the poem’s composition have been examined in the light of previous scholarship by Waqayyamn, who also provides an extensive commentary on the poem’s thematic development which stresses al-Bu D hturi’s outstanding skill in the domain of was D f or poetic description (1985: 179–97). Focusing on the highly unusual manner in which al-Bu D hturi’s portrayal of the ruined palace remoulds the traditional Arab poetic theme of the at D laml, the abandoned campsite, Serrano explains the poet’s encounter with the Sasanian past as an attempt to reclaim his own poetic heritage by means of ‘travelling to an imagined alternative, alien and ancient tradition’ (1997: 86). In a similar vein, Meisami sees the poem as a reassertion of the poet’s fortitude in adversity and his belief in moral values (1998: 73–4), thus taking exception to the approach of Jaroslav Stetkevych who views it as a melancholy ode dominated by a mood of ‘loss and remembrance’ in the vein of the nasib, the conventional erotic prelude of the qas D ida (1993: 190–91). More recently, Sumi subjected the poem to a close reading as part of her study on was D f, description in classical Arabic poetry. Like Stetkevych, she sees the poem primarily as a reverie on bygone glory, occasioned by al-Bu D hturi’s personal misfortune and the political decline of the ‘Abbam sids. In association with David Quint’s notion of the ‘loser’s epic’, Sumi goes so far as to describe the work as a ‘loser’s qasida’, exhibiting ‘reiteration and aimlessness’ and hence ‘a deviant structure’ (2004: 118). Notwithstanding their different conclusions, these studies all approach the poem by seeking to define and interpret it in the context of classical Arabic poetics and its conventional themes, in particular was D f, at D laml and nasib. In comparing the poem to a work on the same topic by the Persian poet Xamqamni