Abstract
The poet known by the moniker Sumayka (“little fish”) is arguably one of the most bad-mouthed poets of the eighth/fifteenth century. At least this is the impression one gets when reading the zajal and several epigrams about him by Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, the distinguished zajjāl and author of epigrams from Cairo. As his foe Sumayka, al-Miʿmār died in the plague of 749/1348. This paper introduces Sumayka as a minor poet of the Mamluk times who made his way into some bio-bibliographies and historiographic works of his time and got famous especially for his defamatory verses. It includes his complete works of which there are only a few and all the poems that Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār, his favorite enemy, wrote on or rather against him.
Özkan, Hakan