Shams al-Dīn AbūʿAbdallāh Muḥammad Ibn Dāniyāl b. Yūsuf al-Khuzā ʿī al-Mawsịlī (1248 – 1311), commonly referred to as Muḥammad Ibn Dāniyāl, was an

Arab Arabs (, , ; , , ) are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in West Asia and North Africa. A significant Arab diaspora is present in various parts of the world. Arabs have been in the Fertile Crescent for thousands of years ...

poet and playwright who became well known in Egypt during the Middle Ages. His trilogy of

shadow puppetry Shadow play, also known as shadow puppetry, is an ancient form of storytelling and entertainment which uses flat articulated cut-out figures (shadow puppets) which are held between a source of light and a translucent screen or scrim. The cut-o ...

plays are the first from the medieval era to be translated from Arabic to English.

Early life

Dāniyāl was born in 1248 in

Mosul Mosul ( ; , , ; ; ; ) is a major city in northern Iraq, serving as the capital of Nineveh Governorate. It is the second largest city in Iraq overall after the capital Baghdad. Situated on the banks of Tigris, the city encloses the ruins of the ...

. Little is known about his family life, other than the fact that his father was illiterate. When he was a teenager, a Mongolian attack on the city forced him to immigrate to

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

. In his new city, he earned a living as an eye doctor, but it didn't take long before he gained a reputation as a writer and wit among the city's bohemian population.

Career

For much of his career, Ibn Dāniyāl wrote celebratory

maqama The ''maqāma'' (Arabic: مقامة aˈqaːma literally "assembly"; plural ''maqāmāt'', مقامات aqaːˈmaːt is an (originally) Arabic prosimetric literary genre of picaresque short stories originating in the tenth century C.E.Qian, ...

poems that honored the city's public figures and events. His most studied works, the trilogy of plays for

, were written at the request of a friend who was frustrated by the genre's current state. The plays, entitled ''The Shadow Spirit'', ''The Amazing Preacher and the Stranger'', and ''The Love Stricken One and the One Who Inspires Passion'' were made available for scholarly study, particularly in the west, through the translations of Safi Mahfouz and

Marvin Carlson Marvin Albert Carlson (born September 15, 1935) is an American theatrologist, currently the Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and also previously the Walker-Ames Professor at Universi ...

References

{{Authority control 1248 births 1310s deaths 13th-century dramatists and playwrights 13th-century Arabic-language poets Writers from Mosul Oculists 14th-century dramatists and playwrights 14th-century Arabic-language poets