Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian discusses, of course, ʿAbd al-Jabbār Ibn Ḥamdīs (d. 1133), a significant and intriguing Arabic poet from Syracuse who jumped ship shortly after the Norman conquest of the Muslim-controlled island was completed in 1091, making his way across North Africa and Spain, composing panegyric for local warlords as he went and lamenting in memorable verse the absorption of his homeland into Christendom. Ibn Ḥamdīs's Sicily was riven by internecine fighting amongst the Kalbid dynasty, descendants of governors appointed by the Shiite Fatimid caliphate which controlled North Africa, but which later built and in 973 relocated to Cairo. Ibn Ḥamdīs's exile was also spent amid the ruins of stronger states, with the North African Zirids and their spinoffs, who had also once served the Fatimids, and with al-Muʿtamid, the colourful local king of Seville following the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate in Córdoba in 1031. When the Saharan Sanhaja Berber Almoravids arrived from Morocco following al-Muʿtamid's invitation to help against the Castilians, they helped themselves to southern Iberia, and Ibn Ḥamdīs set to wandering again around 1091, winding up at the Zirid court of Mahdiya, dying thereafter at a very advanced age.

Ibn Hamdis is an attempt to reconstruct the biography of this man, about whom virtually nothing is known other than his literary output, which consisted almost entirely of his poetry. The book is part of the extensive “Makers of the Muslim World” series by Oneworld, which presents readable biographies of important figures from Islamic history. As a part of this series, Ibn Hamdis is aimed at more general readers, non-specialists, and undergraduates. Granara uses his long-standing and intimate expertise on Ibn Ḥamdīs to pad out the slim biographical information that can be gleaned from his poetry, with background discussions on the Islamicization of Sicily, its later conquest by the Normans, and the various dynasties in North Africa and Spain with which the poet interacted. He tracks the poet's peregrinations from city to city in a series of nine chronologically organized chapters illustrated with lengthy translated poetic passages. Ibn Ḥamdīs's psychological and day-to-day experiences are quite imaginatively reconstructed in a manner that will make a potentially mystifying historical situation more accessible to many readers.

Given the audience of the book, the task of rendering pre-modern Arabic verse – which is rhetorical, linguistically playful, and highly intertextual – into readable English is a significant challenge. Granara's translations are consistently sturdy and quite accurate. Ibn Hamdis's elegy for his father, for example, co-translated with Sheida Dayani, resonantly captures the rhetorical balance of the poignant original:

Moreover, each poem is discussed at length, and Granara draws attention to most of the features likely to perplex a reader new to Arabic poetry.

The main themes that emerge in Ibn Ḥamdīs's poetry are his longing for his homeland, the suffering entailed in exile, and a pathetic and vain hope for Sicily's restoration to Islam. The poet adopts a uniquely melancholy but stoic persona for these themes, and grafts them onto the panegyric that paid the bills for most medieval Arabophone poets. The book's goal, in line with that of the series it is published in, is exposition and synthesis rather than advancing a groundbreaking argument. Nevertheless, Granara seems to be of two minds on some major issues that require clarification. Ibn Ḥamdīs is at times “sentenced to exile” (p. 139), and apparently enduring immense personal suffering, but we are also reminded that this was “self-imposed” (pp. 62, 139). Many Muslims, including many members of Ibn Ḥamdīs's family, remained behind without so much hand-wringing, and they easily remained in contact with co-religionists elsewhere. This raises the question of how, psychologically, we should read Ibn Ḥamdīs's textual agony and to what extent it rather constitutes a carefully constructed aesthetic self-representation that suited the legitimizing ideologies of North African and Spanish courts. A second issue is whether notions of self-conscious Sicilian identity even existed such that we could define what “homeland” means in these texts. Sicily is both a social “carbon copy” (p. 10) of North Africa, yet an “indigenous” Sicilian identity emerged such that Ibn Ḥamdīs can become a “‘national’ poet-in-exile” (p. 18). Further documentation of such a process would have been welcome.

In a handful of places the translations and literary or historical commentary lose focus. Untranslated Italian (p. 54) will be lost on many of the book's intended readers. The combined use of an asterisk as well as square brackets in the poems seems odd to me. Why not just use footnotes? In the poems themselves, when “lovely maidens” are described as jaʾādhir khuns, they are as beautiful as the Arabian oryx, a charismatic desert antelope, and I fear “pug-nosed heifers” confuses the intended effect (p. 112). A sword “by which perdition sustains itself” (p. 119) is also unclear and I would suggest for bi-hā yuḥmā al-dhimār, a sword “that secures our sacred home”. The entire poem (p. 28) in which a “desert ship” (safīnat al-barr) is mentioned deals with camels and desert travel, so safīnat al-barr is probably also a camel, not a literal ship, and the poem thus does not refer to Ibn Ḥamdīs's departure from Sicily (p. 30). There are some distracting typos, e.g. poem no. 119 in the Arabic edition is “199” (p. 14); “Iraquis” (p. 22); and the adverbial “sometimes” for the adjectival “sometime” (p. 54).

Overall, however, the aim of an accessible and faithful introduction to this important figure is admirably accomplished. The inclusion of historically interesting poets like Ibn Ḥamdīs in the series is very welcome. The field of premodern Arabic literary studies has a long way to go to properly historicize premodern aesthetic projects and ideologies and Ibn Hamdis brings us closer to that goal, especially as both specialists from adjacent fields as well as interested readers without a deep background in the period, now have a quick read that offers significant insight into a unique figure in Arabic literary history.