Bashshar ibn Burd: The Blind Persian Poet Who Reinvented Arabic Verse

In the year 783, a blind, elderly Persian poet was beaten nearly to death, sewn into a sack, and thrown into the Tigris River. His crime? He had written that the Abbasid caliph—the ruler of the largest empire the world had yet seen—was no longer in control of his own government, having delegated so much authority to Persian bureaucrats that "the Persian bureaucrat is caliph." The poet's name was Bashshar ibn Burd, and his death marked the end of a remarkable seventy-year career that had fundamentally changed what Arabic poetry could be.

The World of Basra in 750

Bashshar was born around 713 in Basra, a boomtown at the bottom of the Tigris-Euphrates wetlands that had swelled to more than 250,000 residents by mid-century. The city was a human amalgamation unlike anything that had existed before: Arabs, Persians, Africans, Armenians, Greeks, and Copts all mingled in its streets. You could hear Arabic, Persian, Bantu languages, Coptic, Armenian, and Greek in a single afternoon's walk. Basra had only been under Arab Muslim control for about a century—before that, it was part of the Sasanian Empire's western fringe—and the power balance between conquerors and conquered was still being negotiated daily.