Background
He was born in Cordova, now in Spain, and descended from a freed slave of Hisham I, the second Spanish Umayyad emir.
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'Abd Rabbih
Edit ProfileCareer
He enjoyed a great reputation for learning and eloquence. Not much is known about his life. According to Isabel Toral-Niehoff, He came from a local family whose members had been clients (mawālī) of the Umayyads since the emir Hishām I (788–796).
His teachers were Mālikī fuqahāʼ and muḥaddithūn who had travelled to the East in search of knowledge: Baqī b. Makhlad (816–889), Muḥammad b. Waḍḍāḥ (815–899), and a scholar named Muḥammad b.
ʻAbd al-Salām al-Khushanī (833–899), who is said to have introduced much poetry, akhbār and adab from the Islamic East to Andalusia. Ibn ʻAbd Rabbih himself is said to have never left the Peninsula. In spite of his education as faqīh, he became more a man of letters than a jurist, and functioned as a court poet since the start of the emir ʻAbdallāh’s (888–912) reign.
He reached the apogee of his career at the court of caliph ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III (912–961).
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Born
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Died
940 (aged 80)