Abstract
The present paper presents a hitherto unstudied collection of twenty-six early Arabic poems (sixth to eighth centuries) on date palms. The poems are preserved in the Kitāb al-Fuṣūṣ (“Book of Gemstones”) of Ṣāʿid al-Baġdādī (ca. 335–417/945–1026), an Iraqi philologist and littérateur who made a career as a court poet in Muslim Spain. Despite its importance as a crop, the date palm was a topic very rarely raised in Abbasid poetry. As this unique collection shows, however, poems praising the date palm were more common in earlier times. The poems examined here express the benefits of date palm farming by contrasting the supposed ease and safety of agriculturists to the difficulties and risks faced by camel breeders. The repeated comparison of palm trees with camels conveys the tension between the sedentary and the nomadic lifestyles, as they co-existed in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia.
Papoutsakis, Nefeli