Al-Ahwas

Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Abdullah bin Asim bin Thabit al-Ansari (variant:ʿAbd Allāh bin Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh bin ʿĀṣim bin Ṯẖābit Al-Anṣārī) also known as "Al-Ahwas" Al-Ansari or simply as Al-Ahwas was a satirical Arab poet from Madinah living under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate. Along with Umar ibn Abi Rabi'ah, he is one of the representatives of the literary form of ghazel which became popular in the urban centers of the Umayyad Caliphate, but his better known works were his satirical poems, which influenced later satirical poets like Abu Nawas and Al-Jahiz.

The nickname of "Al-Ahwas" ("The one that squints") was given to him due to the fact that he couldn't open one eye fully due to the tightness of the eyelid muscles, making it seem that he was constantly squinting.

Biography Al-Ahwas was born in 35 AH (655 AD) in Madinah. He belonged to the Ansar from Madinah, more specifically to the Banu Aws tribe, and during his life he rose to enough prominence in the tribe to become the mouth-piece of the Ansar. He was part of the rich and noble classes of Madinah and lived through the Battle of al-Harra, in which the Ansar and other member of Medinan society rebelled against the rule of the very unpopular caliph Yazid I, and were later quelled by Yazid I's forces.

Al-Ahwas was an acquaintance of caliph Al-Walid I and frequented the caliph's parties; however, after it came out that Al-Ahwas tried to seduce some of the boy servants of another guest to have intercourse with him, he lost the caliph's favor and even got whipped by the order of the then governor of Madinah and future caliph, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz. When Al-Walid died and the new caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik appointed the qadi Ibn Hazm as governor of Madinah, Al-Ahwas wrote a satirical poem in which he slandered the new governor and attacked the caliph. These offensive attacks, along with his constant love affairs, accusations of homosexuality and his passive role in intercourse, although the most commonly given reason for his banishment was that he constantly mentioned aristocratic women by name in his love poems, against Medinan society's mores. However, no full translation of this text into English has been made, except for some poems as part of a collection of Arabic Poetry translated into English by Charles Greville Tuetey.

His poetry has been compared in style and quality to that of Umar ibn Abi Rabi'ah, and is described as highly rhythmical an aesthetically pleasing due to his use of parallelism of terms between verses, of repetition and of epanalepsis, which is the repetition of the first word of a verse at its end.

His main literary compositions were ghazel (love poems), fakhr (boasting poems), hija (lampooning poems) and madih (panegyric poems); although his most know works are his satirical poems.