Did Hammad al-Rawiya Destroy the Arabic Poetic Tradition? His Entry in Kitab al-Aghani

Hammad al-Rawiya (d. 772) meets the minimum criteria for an entry in Abu ‘l-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani by being poet, and of at least one song put to music.  Contrary to Régis Blachère’s characterization of Hammad as the “scourge” of oral tradition, and his reputation as such among both medieval Islamic and modern scholars, in the Aghani Hammad appears to be a natural product of oral tradition, considered a disruptive element to an increasingly literate society.  Hammad represents a continuity between pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetic expression and transmission at a time when poetic scholarship is being revised with the spread of literacy, availability of written collections, and perhaps with the influence of hadith studies to include notions of faithful reproduction of wording and correct attribution.  The task of the poetic transmitter or rawi of the first Islamic century was to memorize and to provide upon request the cultural and historical frameworks, obscurities, and allusions in a work, and this could include textual correction.  By al-Isfahani’s time (d. 967) the roles of composer and compiler are more distinct, and there is no longer a similar social currency in a conflation of the roles.  Hammad, though exhibiting some of the manners of the older rawi in textual substitution, is skilled and trained through written anthologies.  He can also successfully imitate the bedouin language and is immersed in tribal lore. This singular claim to understanding and being able to perform according to the older tradition is what appears threatening to the urban elite of his time.