Music, Games and Gatherings in Abbasid Society

The Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) was ruled by caliphs from successive capitals at Baghdad and Samarra in present-day Iraq. Music and games brought skilled performers and players into court and wealthy homes. The examples here range from ninth-century music and court audiences to a tenth-century household anecdote, provincial gatherings and chess writing. A caliph was the ruler of the caliphate; a vizier was a senior minister, and the vizierate was his office.

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Music at Baghdad and Samarra

Ishaq al-Mawsili, born in Ray in present-day Iran around 767 and dead in 850, became one of the leading musicians at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. His father, Ibrahim, was summoned to court, and Ishaq grew up among Baghdad’s cultured elite. His training joined music to literary learning: he studied the oud with his father and the celebrated player Zalzal, and learned from prominent scholars of Arabic literature. Caliph al-Ma’mun let him attend sessions with men of letters and legal scholars, rather than limiting him to the musicians’ circle.

The oud was a lute used in urban and court music. Accounts of Ishaq’s performances present its strings as something a musician had to hear and control closely. In one reported contest, he played accurately on an oud that a rival had deliberately mistuned. In another, he identified one mistuned string among twenty ouds sounding together. These stories make musicianship a combination of trained fingers, a sensitive ear and command of a musical tradition.

Ishaq’s standing also rested on repertoire. He wrote songs and collected poetry, and Caliph al-Wathiq asked him to revise a collection of one hundred famous songs originally assembled for Harun al-Rashid. That commission placed the selection and ordering of songs within court patronage. The later Book of Songs, compiled by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani in the tenth century, preserves extensive quotations from Ishaq’s now-lost writings.

Court music formed part of a larger public display. The Abbasid court moved from Baghdad to Samarra in 836, both in present-day Iraq, where rulers built new palaces and audience halls. By the early tenth century, a chamberlain supervised access to the caliph, who sat behind a curtain until it was drawn aside for the audience. Courtiers stood in assigned ranks and gave formal greetings. Drums and trumpets sounded at audiences and festivals. The ceremony turned who could approach, where each person stood and how the ruler appeared into part of the event.

Singers in a household gathering

Professional singing slaves known as qiyān (singular qayna) were trained in music and literature. Such skill made them valuable to wealthy owners, who directed their work; musical accomplishment did not remove their enslaved status. Julia Bray discusses a tenth-century anecdote that the judge and writer al-Tanukhi (939–994) included in al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda. Its narrator is a wealthy landowner near Baghdad. He recalls marrying a rich, educated woman from the Wahb family, linked with the vizierate, the office of the caliph’s senior minister. She surrounded herself with singing jāriyas, enslaved women trained as courtesans in music and literature. After the couple quarrelled, she locked her chamber while her husband pleaded outside for three nights. When she emerged, some attendants held instruments and sang while others carried small pastries. Wine and music accompanied their reconciliation. The anecdote gives the wife control over access to her room and timing of the reunion, while the singers and pastry carriers appear as enslaved attendants whose labor supports the household gathering.

Conversation, wit and storytelling

At provincial courts, gatherings could bring together poets, grammarians, drinking companions, storytellers and jesters. The Tahirid governor ʿAbd Allah ibn Tahir and his successors gathered such companions at Nishapur, in northeastern Iran, between 828 and 873. Arabic nadim meant a companion who attended a patron at social gatherings. Storytelling and comedy sat alongside poetry and learned conversation, where a participant’s wit could entertain a governor and earn notice.

Shatranj and chess problems

Chess, called shatranj in Arabic, drew players into contests of calculation on an eight-by-eight board. Chess masters wrote about the game in the ninth and tenth centuries, including al-Adli and Abu Bakr al-Suli. The counselor, or firzan, moved one square diagonally; the elephant, or fil, leapt two squares along a diagonal, passing over the intervening square. Pawns advanced only one square on their first move and became a firzan on reaching the far rank. Players sought checkmate, so these shorter piece moves shaped how quickly attacks could develop. A chess manual copied in 1257 brings together material attributed to al-Adli, al-Suli and other earlier writers. Its 215 diagrams show openings and chess problems: a position is arranged on the board, and a player must find a winning sequence in a specified number of moves.

An ivory king excavated at Tepe Madrasa in Nishapur, northeastern Iran, is dated by the Metropolitan Museum to the ninth through twelfth centuries. The city lay on routes linking Iran and West Asia with Central Asia and China.