Medieval Court Poetry | 651 Gallagher, Nancy Elizabeth. Egypt’s Other Wars: Epidemics and the Politics of Public Health. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Shows how malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera became major political issues in the post–World War II era. Gallagher, Nancy Elizabeth. Medicine and Power in Tunisia, 1780–1900. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Discusses the transition from Galenic-Islamic to Western medicine in Tunisia in the context of European political and economic expansion. Good, Byron. “he Transformation of Health Care in Modern Iranian History.” In Modern Iran: he Dialectics of Continuity and Change, edited by Michael Bonine and Nikki R. Keddie, pp. 59–82. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981. Inhorn, Marcia C. Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt. New York: Routledge, 2003. Inhorn, Marcia C. he New Arab Men: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012. Inhorn has edited and co-edited numerous volumes that pertain to issues of health and technology across the Muslim world. Inhorn, Marcia C. Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Jundī, Aḥmad Rajāʾī, ed. al-Abnāth wa-aʿmāl alMuʾtamar al-ʿĀlamī al-hānīʿan al-Tibb al-Islāmī [Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Islamic Medicine]. Kuwait: Munazzamat al-Tibb al-Islamic, 1982. Khan, Muhammad Salim. Islamic Medicine. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1986. Argues that the creative thought, balanced lifestyle, and healing forces known to the Islamic medical tradition can reform modern medicine. Kuhnke, LaVerne. Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Discusses epidemics of cholera, plague, and smallpox, as well as Western medical institutions introduced by Muḥammad ʿAlī. Morsy, Soheir A. “Towards a Political Economy of Health: A Critical Note on the Medical Anthropology of the Middle East.” Social Science and Medicine 15B (1981): 159–163. Provides background to the study of traditional medicine. Nanji, Azim A. “Medical Ethics and the Islamic Tradition.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 13 (1988): 257–275. Rahman, Fazlur. Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition: Change and Identity. New York: Crossroad, 1987. Indispensable study of Islamic ethics, medicine, and health, beginning with a comprehensive analysis of “Wellness and Illness in the Islamic World View.” Rispler-Chaim, Vardit. “Islamic Medical Ethics in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Medical Ethics 15 (1989): 203–208. Rispler-Chaim, Vardit. Islamic Medical Ethics in the Twentieth Century. Leiden, Netherlands, and New York: Brill, 1993. Rispler-Chaim, Vardit. Disability in Islamic Law. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006. Rispler-Chaim, Vardit, ed. Special issue of Medicine and Law 21 (2002) dedicated to Muslim medical ethics and law. Sonbol, Amira El Azhary. he Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt, 1800–1922. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Surveys the introduction of Western medical institutions into Egypt. Yacoub, Ahmed Abdel Aziz. he Fiqh of Medicine: Responses in Islamic Jurisprudence to Advances in Medical Science. London: Ta-Ha, 2001. Nancy E. Gallagher Updated by Yasmin Safian, Robert Gleave, and Miri Shefer-Mossensohn Medieval Court Poetry. he irst hint of court poetry in the Arabo-Islamic cultural memory begins with the irst courts in the preIslamic era, such as those of the Ghassānids (in present-day Syria) and Lakhmids (in present-day Iraq) in roughly the sixth century ce hose courts bequeathed the poetry of ʿAlqamah ibn ʿAbadah and al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī. In terms of style, these early poets enshrined the ritual tripartite structure of the Arabic ode (qaṣīdah), and in terms of function they set models of poetry that function in society as ransom, git exchange, oath, apology, and/or peace ofering. Likewise, as 652 | Medieval Court Poetry the Prophet Muḥammad gained political and spiritual inluence, Ḥassān ibn hābit (d. 674) and Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr (d. 7th century) composed poetry projecting a wise-kingly reputation that served as an interface for those seeking the Prophet’s favor. he Prophet’s earthly need for poetry would enshrine many genres, such as praise (madīḥ) and even wine poetry (khamrīyah), despite the new-fangled Qurʾānic taboo, as insignias of authority that were particularly “Islamic.” Court poetry lourished with the irst empire builders of Islam, namely the Umayyads, from 661–750. he Umayyads looked to their Byzantine and Persian peers for insignias of power, such as coinage, monuments, and palaces, and, of course, viral poetry that was transmitted by public performance. he Umayyad era was paradoxical, though: While the Umayyads enjoyed tremendous global reach, building a commonwealth from the Atlantic to the Indus Valley, they mismanaged two civil wars in their own backyard that traumatized the Muslim ummah, as believers witnessed the Prophet’s kin and religion riven by war. Poets stepped in to guide and rehabilitate the Umayyads, while at the same time dressing the gaping wounds of the commonwealth with melodious, infectious poetry and song. Poets inherited a mythic role from the pre-Islamic era as oracle-rascal heroes, and they exercised that inluence to relect and shape an expanse of human needs and emotions, which forged a new universal imagined community: hopeful love poetry (ghazal), tragic love poetry (ʿudhrī), lampoon (hijāʾ), comic lytings (naqāʾiḍ), heroic praise of persons or places (madīḥ), heroic boast of self or people (fakhr), elegy of persons or places (rithāʾ), and those celebrating wine (khamrīyah) or comic bacchanalia (mujūn). Later, in the ʿAbbāsid era, these older genres morphed to meet emerging audience demands, and new genres developed, such as those romanticizing valor (ḥamāsah) and hunting (ṭardīyāt). For the purpose of forging a new commonwealth, poets in particular deployed the female beloved for varied and diverging purposes as a metaphor. In praise poetry, the female beloved was oten an avatar for the male patron, such as a caliph or governor, where the poet might protest his treatment at the hands of a cold beloved as a coded critique of political authority. In tragic love poetry, a series of couples emerged, such as Dhul Rummah–Mayyah and Majnūn-Laylī, where the poet projects the female beloved as indiferent and toying with his vulnerabilities, dramatizing a range of maddening discontents in an era of unprecedented trauma that sullied a putatively sacred ummah. Embodying the tragedy and ambivalence that many felt, Dhul Rummah says, “Mayyah is the disease; she is the cure.” Conversely in romantic love poetry (ghazal), the igure of the female beloved was oten deployed to connote hopeful attainment of an object desired. It is assumed in today’s scholarship that women contributed little to Islamic court poetry, but this is patently wrong. Poetesses like al-Khansāʾ (d. 7th century) and al-Ḥurqah (d. 7th century) composed lament (marthīyah) and incitement to ight (taḥrīḍ) and, most surprisingly, a warrior poetess dubbed al-Hujayjah, of the Banū Shaybān, raised armies and built military alliances to defend against an attack by the Sassanian emperor in the Battle of Dhū Qār, a monumental battle for early Islamic culture that dispelled the Sassanian’s aura of invincibility. Later, at the Umayyad court, Laylā al-Akhyalīyah (d. c. 704) used her poetic skill to shame the court into making concessions, to lampoon a rival poet, al-Nābighah al-Jaʿdī (d. 684), and to immortalize her deceased lover, Tawbah. Lore about Layla trumpets her capacity to overwhelm with her sharp wit any man naive enough to confront her: When the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn asked her publicly, “What Medieval Court Poetry | 653 did Tawbah see in you that made him love you?” She parried, “What did people see in you that they made you caliph?” In retrospect we can discern four overlapping persona types for poetesses in the Middle Ages: the grieving mother/sister/daughter (al-Khansāʾ, al-Khirniq bint Badr, and al-Fāriʿah bint Shaddād), the warrior-diplomat (al-Hujayjah), the princess (al-Ḥurqah, ʿUlayyah bint al-Mahdī, and Walladah bint al-Mustakfī), and the courtesan-ascetic (ʿArīb, Shāriyah, and Rābiʿah alʿAdawīyah). Rābiʿah’s biography in particular projects a paradoxical persona that embodies the complimentary opposites of sexuality and saintliness. ʿAbd al-Amīr Muhannā, in his anthology, catalogs the work of more than four hundred poetesses across the centuries. he visibility and impact of these voices was likely unparalleled in any other medieval culture, though scholars have yet to examine the factors that supported that pattern. In the ʿAbbāsid era, from 750 onward, court poetry increasingly appealed to a broader public that was ethnically more diverse and included men and women who rose to noble status, as well as an emerging sub-nobility, sometimes referred to as aḥsāb. his sub-nobility included chancery workers, judges, and a burgeoning class of merchants. By the tenth century it became conspicuous that court poetry was no longer primarily the plaything of the court. However, rather than aping courtly culture, the sub-nobility adapted it and to a large extent democratized the aesthetics and interests relected in the literature. For example, salons spread like rhizomes in the ninth and tenth centuries among the sub-nobility in the cities; they became less hierarchical and more egalitarian; there was greater emphasis on turn taking, tolerance of foibles, and a warm sociability leavened by wine, lowers, fruits, and the occasional sprig of basil to awaken the senses. he story of Bayad and Riyad illustrates how, in Andalusia, female hosts, too, held single-sex and mixed salons, where men and women could declaim court poetry or sing it to the strum of a lute. It is oten assumed that court and folk poetry were antithetical, but recent research has shown that, despite the court’s elitism, in practice there was a surprising degree of interplay. he elites oten looked down upon the lower classes, but they also paradoxically romanticized the desert and the Bedouins. he ode (qaṣīdah) began as a Bedouin genre composed and performed in the hinterlands of Arabia and evoked desertscapes and culture. Long ater Islamic culture became imperial and urban, poets continued to channel that romance particularly in the elegiac nostalgic irst section of the ode, the nasīb, with wistful tropes such as the abandoned campground (manzil), desert abode (dār), campire stones (athāfī), and traces in the sand (rusūm). his almost ritual practice in efect rendered nomadism the archetypal human condition. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī. Kitāb al-aghānī [he Book of Songs]. Edited by al-Najdī Nāṣif, under Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. 24 vols. Cairo, Egypt: al-Hayʾa al-Maṣrīyah al-ʿĀmmah lil-Kitāb, 1992–1993. Ali, Samer M. Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Ali, Samir M. “he Rise of the Abbasid Public Sphere: he Case of al-Mutanabbi and hree Middle Ranking Patrons.” Al-Qantara: Revista de Estudios Árabes, special issue on patronage in Islamic history, 29, no. 2 (2008): 467–494. Hammond, Marlé. Beyond Elegy: Classical Arabic Women’s Poetry in Context. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Meisami, Julie Scott. Medieval Persian Court Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Muhannā, ʿAbd al-Amīr ʿAlī. Muʿjam al-nisāʾ alshāʿirāt fī al-jāhilīyah wa-al-Islām: Khuṭwah naḥwah 654 | Medieval Court Poetry muʿjam mutakāmil. Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīyah, 1990. Stetkevych, Jaroslav. he Zephyrs of Najd: he Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. he Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. he Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Samer M. Ali Menstruation. Like sexual emission, menstruation is a state necessitating full-bath lustration before the Muslim can obtain the ritual purity required for worship. he requisite elements are an intention to remove major impurity; washing the hands and then the genitals thoroughly; performing the ritual ablution (wudūʿ?); washing the entire body, beginning with the head (to the roots of the hair) and right side of the body, then continuing to the let. Ḥadīth reports attributed to Muḥammad’s wife ʿĀʾishah claim that women were “ordered” (nuʿmar) to make up fasts missed as a result of the exemption granted menstruants and not ordered to make up prayers missed for the same reason. In one ḥadīth, the Prophet explains that menstruation is “decreed” for the daughters of Adam, positioning it as “an integral part of God’s plan . . . a biological fact” rather than a punishment (Katz, 198). he euphemism used repeatedly by the Prophet to refer to menstruation is nafs (“self ” or “soul”), explained by Ibn Qutayba (d. 889ce) as the metaphor the Arabs used for blood, “due to blood’s connectedness with or nearness to, or causality of life” (Tafsīr Gharīb alQurʾān, 25). Although no ḥadīth suggests it, the schools of law (both Sunnī and Shīʿī) unanimously restrict menstruating women from touching the Qurʾān. It has become habitual throughout the Muslim world to link verse 56:79 (“No one may touch it but the pure”) to the issue, despite its lack of any contextual bearing on the physical Qurʾān or the purity status of humans. Yet, some menstruants will only touch the pages of the Qurʾān via a medium or when wearing gloves. Fatwās have been issued, notably from Saudi Arabia, that menstruating female students may freely study Qurʾān during menstruation. Ibn Kathīr’s (d. 1373ce) exegesis details the Prophet’s habits with his menstruating wives. He would eat with ʿĀʾishah and drink from the same vessel and recite Qurʾān while reclining in her lap. He gave license to all forms of spousal intimacy with the exception of vaginal intercourse; this is the meaning that many exegetes give to “keep away from women in the maḥīḍ (literally, place of menstruation)” (2:222). his verse also calls menstruation “adhan” (harm): some exegetes have historically and currently deined this as meaning menstruation is harmful to men. Others insist that it is harm to the woman, who “sufers” monthly. Many scholars (notably alSayyid Sābiq al-Qurṭubī) have included the infamous ḥadīth about “deiciencies of (woman’s) mind and religion” in discussions on menstruation and purity. However, classical and postclassical jurists generally structured laws of purity in gender-neutral ways, even engaging in debates that challenged the notion that menstruation rendered a woman deicient in religion (Katz, 198–199). Modern attitudes toward menstruation vary widely according to levels of education and entrenched cultural practices. In areas as diverse as Morocco, Syria, Egypt, and the United States, some pregnant women ignore the concession to leave of fasting, illustrating their belief that the menstruant’s Ramadan fast is deicient. In Malay Muslim culture, euphemisms are generally