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.
[6] More widely known than his poetry is his great anthology, the al-ʿIqd al-Farīd (The Unique Necklace), a work divided into 25 sections.
It is an adab book resembling Ibn Qutaybah's `Uyun al-akhbar (The Fountains of Story) and the writings of al-Jahiz from which it borrows largely.
He included in his book his 445-line Urjuza, a poem in the meter of the rajaz in which he narrates the warlike exploits of Abd al-Rahman al-Nasir, along with some of his eulogies of the Umayyads of al-Andalus.
Ibn Abd Rabbih’s conception of his book is that it is a necklace made of 25 fine jewels, 12 pairs and a larger middle one.