ʽInān bint ʽAbdallāh (Arabic: عنان بنت عبد الله, died 841)[1] was a prominent poet and qiyan of the Abbasid period, even characterised by the tenth-century historian Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahāni as the slave-woman poet of foremost significance in the Arabic tradition.
[6] In the assessment of Fuad Matthew Caswell, Her salon at the house of al-Nāṭifī was frequented by the celebrated poets and men of letters of the time, including Abū Nuwās, Diʽbil al-Khuzāʽī, Marwān b. Abī Ḥafṣa, al-ʽAbbās b. al-Aḥnaf and al-Ma’mūn's tutor al-Yazīdī al-Ḥimyarī, among a host of others, one of the attractions being that her master was devoid of jealously and tolerated the ease with which she bestowed her favours.ʽInān's fame led Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd to seek to buy her to include her in the Abbasid harem, but he refused al-Nāṭifī's asking price of 100,000 dīnārs.
[7] A large part of her surviving corpus comprises her responses to male poets' challenges in verse-capping contests.
[8] As rendered by Eric Ormsby, one of the virtuosic yet obscene exchanges between ʽInān and Abū Nuwās runs thus:[9] One day she asked him whether he was any good at scansion; when Abu Nuwas replied boastfully that he was superb at it, she said, "Try scanning this verse: Abu Nuwas broke the line into metrical feet and responded: which means: The assembled courtiers broke into loud laughter at the poet's expense.
Not to be outdone, he asked ʽInān whether she could scan the following (rather nonsensical) verse: She too had to break up the metrical feet to produce: which comes out as