Ibn Hamdis

Who was Ibn Hamdis?

Ibn Hamdis was a Sicilian Arab poet.

He was born in Noto, near Syracuse. When he was 31, his town was captured by the Normans and he was forced to move to Andalusia, then still under Muslim control, at Taifa of Sevilla, where he made friends with prince Al Mutamid, who was also a poet. After the death of the latter in an Almoravid prison of Aghmat, Hamdis moved to central Maghreb under the protection of prince al-Mansur. When the latter died, he then moved to Madhiyya in Tunisia, as a guest of the Zirid rulers.

Hamdis thence continued to move in most of the Mediterranean Islamic countries until his death at Majorca in 1133. His works include c. 6,000 verses, many of them devoted to his lost Sicily.

"Abd, al-Jabbar Ibn Hamdis left his native Sicily in 1078 at the age of twenty-four, and for the rest of his long life wandered in al-Andalus and North Africa as a court poet, singing the praises of his Arab hosts and lamenting the loss of his home and the demise of Muslim culture in the wake of the Norman invasion of Sicily and the Reconquista in Spain."