Jaysh al-Tawshih
- Author died
- 776 AH
- Editions
- Maṭbaʿat al-Manār
Jaysh al-Tawshih (The Army of Girdle Poetry) is an anthology of Andalusian strophic poetry (muwashshahat) compiled by the Andalusian scholar and statesman Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (d. 776 AH / 1374 CE) . The work gathers selected poems from leading figures of the genre in al-Andalus, attributing each composition to its author .
Structure and Scope
The anthology was planned and arranged in two volumes (sifran) . The surviving first volume contains 165 muwashshahs by sixteen poets (washshahun) active during the sixth century AH . Among these poems, fifteen feature final strophes (kharjas) in Old Spanish or non-Arabic Romance (al-A‘jamiyyah) . The poets represented in the extant text include Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-Abyad, the physician Abu Bakr ibn Zuhr (al-Hafid Ibn Zuhr), and Abu al-Qasim al-Munayshi . The second volume, which remains lost, covered poets of the seventh century AH and the first half of the eighth century AH .
Continuation and Editions
During the Saadian era in Morocco, the chancery vizier Abd al-Aziz al-Fishtali (d. 1032 AH; also reported d. c. 1030 AH or c. 1037 AH) composed a continuation (dhayl) to the work titled Madad al-Jaysh (Reinforcement of the Army) . Al-Fishtali opened his supplement with praise and collected numerous muwashshahat by contemporary Maghrebi poets, including over three hundred pieces composed by or for Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur .
The surviving first volume of Jaysh al-Tawshih was edited by Hilal Naji and Muhammad Mador and published in Tunis in 1967 .
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