A Comparative Study: The Abstinence Motif of Ibn Gabirol, Rābi’a al’Adawiyya, and Abū al’Atāhiyya

Abstract

I intend to examine motifs and subjects that were an integral part of poetry that moved between the sacred and the secular. The article focuses on specific Muslim and Jewish poets, who are representative of the period, poets who referred to abstinence (الزهديات), Fate, and the love of God. In the Middle Ages secular Hebrew poetry was not analyzed as more than poetic ornamentation, and that is one of the reasons that even modern research has not dealt at length with this genre for its own sake. The examples and motifs to which I shall refer in this article concern abstinence poetry, as well as philosophical and ethical poetry that are close to sacred poetry in character. The study focuses on two concrete poets who wrote poems about abstinence. Both of them express Sufi ideas that they incorporated in their poetry on abstinence. The first is Rābi’a al-’Adawiyya (717 - 796) 1 and Abu Isḥāq, known as Abū al-’Atāhiyya (748 - 828), the poet of the zuhdiyyat (شاعر الزهد), who preceded R. Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1021 - 1058) by two centuries. Ibn Gabirol was born in Malaga, lived in Saragossa, and died in Valencia. For the purpose of comparison and discussion of the influence of his predecessors on Ibn Gabirol, a number of his poems were selected that deal with abstinence, the relation between man and his Creator, the interaction of body and soul, and the use of motifs related to time and the Cosmos.