Ibn Nubata al-Misri His Dewan and Its Place in Arabic Literature

One of the Arab poets of the Mamluk period is Ibn Nubata al-Misri. He lived in Cairo, Egypt in the years 1287-1366. In the first years of his life, he started poetry by writing poems to praise statesmen. However, these praise poems were ignored and did not receive the attention and reputation he expected. The Malik of Eyyubi al-Melik al-Mueyyed Ebu al-Fida liked the praise poems written by Ibn Nubate about him and supported him materially and morally. After this period of his life, he became famous for his poems.

Ibn Nubata published works in areas such as travel books, khutba, description, strange words in verse and hadiths. He became famous for his poetry rather than prose works. His work named Faraid as-Suluk fi Mesaid al-Muluk, which contains an ode consisting of one hundred and sixty-seven couplets depicting a hunt they went out with the Malik of Eyyubi al-Melik al-Efdal of the time is an important poetic work of the poet. The ode in this work is also included in Muhammed b. Ibrahim el-Beshteki’s dewan compiled from Ibn Nubata’s poems.

In this dewan, where mostly praise poems take place, there are 1.733 odes consisting of 13.385 couplets. In addition to praise-themed poems, there are also poems with the content of elegance, wine, love, gazal and nature depiction on the dewan. In his poems, he used literary arts such as tevriya, pun, similitude and metaphor frequently and in complete harmony. The poet wrote almost all of his poems with Halil b. Ahmad al-Ferahidi’s classical bahirs. There is only one poem from modern bahirs written in muvashshah on the dewan. His poems were put on the dewan according to the rewi letters in the order of the Arabic alphabet. It is seen that he uses all Arabic letters as rewi. The longest poem consists of 167 couplets and the shortest poem consists of one couplet. Most of the poems in the dewan are written in ode genre. Besides the odes, there are a few poems written in tahmis genre.

The poet’s separate poetic work, which includes both the dewan and the hunting depictions, are two important works to be studied. These works should be examined in many aspects such as content, form and style, literary arts, sentence structures, rhythm and rhyme situations and the literary superiority in poems should be revealed.