The Byzantines in Medieval Arabic Poetry: Abu Firas’ "Al-Rumiyyat" and the Poetic Responses of al-Qaffal and Ibn Hazm to Nicephore Phocas’ "Al-Qasida al-Arminiyya al-Malʿuna" (The Armenian Cursed Ode)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Up until the Crusades, it was al-Rūm who were universally seen by Arab writers and Arab poets in particular as the Other par excellence. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the sub-genre of Al-Rūmiyyat (poems about the Byzantines), namely as found in the Rūmiyyat of Abu Firas al-Hamdani(d.968), and in the poetic responses of al-Qaffal(d. 946) and Ibn Hazm(d. 1064) to what was described by several medieval Muslim chronicles as Al-Qasida al-Arminiyya al-Malʿuna (The Armenian Cursed Ode). By exploring the forgotten views of the Byzantines in medieval Arabic poetry, this article purports to demonstrate that contrary to the impression left after reading Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) and other postcolonial studies, Orientals have not existed solely to be ‘orientalized’. Perhaps even before this came to be so, they too had ‘occidentalized’ their Euro-Christian Other(s) in a way that mirrored in reverse the subject/object relationship described as Orientalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".