Long appreciated for its combination of lyric charm and mordant wit, Ibn Shuhayd al-Andalusi's (992–1035) Risalat al-tawabiʿ wa-l-zawabiʿ (Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons),¹

as I have argued recently,² also offers a sophisticated treatise on poetic influence and inspiration. Composed around 1013–17, the epistle consists of the young poet's highly ironic and parodic defense against accusations of plagiarism leveled by one Abu Bakr ibn Hazm. The epistle, as edited by Butrus al-Bustani, is divided into an introduction and four chapters on the attendant jinn of poets, the attendant jinn of writers (kuttāb), the jinn of critics, and animal jinn. These are held together by the conceit of a visit by Ibn Shuhayd, conducted by his own attendant jinni (“poetic muse”), Zuhayr, to the Valley of the Jinn. During what I have termed his “initiatory journey,” Ibn Shuhayd encounters and tests himself against his major poetic and literary influences, attends a literary majlis, and finally is asked to serve as judge for the poetry of a group of asses and mules (presumably the jinn of his contemporaries/competitors). The journey, however parodic and humorous, provides a revealing allegory of the poet–littérateur's struggles with his poetic and literary forebears, critics, and competitors on the one hand and his individual poetic “genius” on the other hand.

The passage that concerns us is from the introduction. Here Ibn Shuhayd assures his accuser that he is right when he says his verse is too good for him to have composed it unaided. In fact, Ibn Shuhayd declares, it was his attendant jinni, Zuhayr, who helped him!

He then recounts how once he was suffering from writer's block when a knight on a dark horse appeared, leaning on his spear, and supplied the missing lines for him. When asked who he is, he replies that he is Zuhayr ibn Numayr of the Banu Ashjaʿ (Ibn Shuhayd's ancestral tribe) of the Jinn, who has come out of affection for Ibn Shuhayd and a desire to befriend him. He then tells the young poet that if he needs to summon him for poetic assistance, he need only recite the lines above—lines lexically very simple but semantically a bit slippery.³

The lines both as text and as metatext (charm or conjuration) are at once simple and complex. At the textual level, they are quite recognizably three lines of nasīb, that is, the amatory prelude that signals the opening of a classical Arabic qaṣīda, or ode, addressed to a beloved named ʿAzza. They can also be taken as a self-contained ʿUdhri-type ghazal of chaste love of the sort we know from Majnun Layla.

All the lines play with forms of the verb dhakara, whose semantic possibilities range from “remember” and “recall” to “mention” and “name.” Further, the feminine plural dhākirāt of line one could also mean maidens or women who “mention” or “remember” Zuhayr. In either case, the intention seems to be that when summoned by voice or memory, he appears. In line two, the mention (dhikr) of the beloved's name on others' lips evokes her presence for the poet in the sensuous form of a kiss. This process we can identify, at least poetically, as metonymy or synecdoche. Finally, in line three, the poet acts upon this metonymy as he fulfills his longing for his lost beloved by visiting the distant abodes of those who mention/remember her.

At the metatextual level, that is, the poem as conjuring charm for the poetic jinni, further metaphorical and allegorical meanings emerge from these simple lines. Zuhayr, the poet–lover of the text, becomes the poetic jinni of the metatext; the object of desire, the beloved, becomes the poem itself; and the entire passage becomes a metaphor or allegory of the process of poetic inspiration or creation. This suggests that the inception of poetry is in memory and, further, that the recitation/recollection of a poem, here in its eminently performative function of conjuring the poetic jinni, constitutes an anamnestic exercise through which the poet can open the channel to his inspiration. At yet another level, the poem encapsulates the mysterious power of the poetic word: the power of the word or name to evoke the presence of the thing named. Within such a talismanic metatext, the insistent play on dhakara describes the poet as the one who remembers, recalls, and mentions. He is the one who accesses his inner poetic genius through recalling his poetic forebears—by traveling, in his mind, to “the abodes of those who remember.”