Khalid Sindawi introduces the reader to a prominent Shi'ite poet of the Abbasid period who has
been largely ignored by modern scholarship. 'Ali b. Ishaq al-Zahi (925-963 CE) is considered
second only to al-Mutanabbi among the poets of this period. The first part of the book presents
the historical political and intellectual background of the poet's lifetime framing the
biographical section of this book with the poet's birth in Baghdad his later years in Aleppo
and his death. The study discusses his names his occupation his relations with prominent
personalities of his age such as Sayf al-Dawla and the vizier al-Hasan b. al-Muhallabi and
his conversion to Shi'ite. It then provides an account of the various themes in his poetry and
gives an analysis of the technical aspects of al-Zahi's poetry its language style and
rhetorical devices. It also discusses the transmitters of his poetry opinions of ancient and
modern critics and cases of plagiarism of his verse. The book's second part consists of a
scholarly analysis of the poems which have survived in various traditional collections. There
are fifty-four poems with three-hundred-and-seven verses in total. The final section presents
the verses as they have been extracted from the various sources and closes with a detailed
commentary of all the poems.
