Poetry as Propaganda: The Rise of a New Cultural Form in Umayyad Damascus

This paper will investigate the relationship between poetry and politics, focusing on the example of Ghiyath b. Ghawth al-Taghlibi al-Akhtal (640-710), the Christian panegyrist of the Umayyad dynasty. His poetry captures the moment of the emergence of the praise-poem (madih) as a political tool in the Islamic realm, and illustrates the Umayyad adoption and integration of older forms into a new hybrid culture.

Akhtal's poetry embodies the cultural complexities of the Umayyad dynasty, which connected the austere caliphate of Medina to the lavish courtly culture of the Abbasid empire. Born in Hira, the capital of the Persian-allied Lakhmids, Akhtal used pre-Islamic poetic forms and Biblical references to craft panegyrics for the Umayyad caliphs. His poems comparing the caliph to Noah, David, and other shared prophets of the Abrahamic faiths anchor the Umayyads in a Near Eastern religious tradition; while others, repeating the trope of comparing the ruler to the Euphrates, firmly establish the Umayyads in a tradition of Arab leadership. His poems are both clearly Christian and clearly Arab, using an idiom closer to pre-Islamic poetry than his contemporaries Farazdaq and Jarir, yet despite his faith and his contemporaries' use of Islamic imagery, it was Akhtal who would be anointed by Abd al-Malik as the poet of the Umayyads: "This is the poet of the Commander of the Faithful, this is the poet of the Arabs."

Akhtal’s career and poetry reveal the Umayyads' flexibility, which enabled them to transform their dynasty, and the Islamic world, into an empire.  Exploring his poems shows the diverse roots of Umayyad culture; much like their architecture, the vision of the caliphate in his poems combines elements from earlier cultures into a new, Islamic form.