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Rh whether or not those panegyrics did not contribute more than the exploits themselves to making Sayf the myth he is in Arabic annals. In them the poet appears as the con- summate phrase-maker in the Arabic language. He later got into a dispute and deserted Aleppo for the court of Kafur, whom he first praised and later — disappointed in his hopes for high office — ridiculed in verses which almost every school child in the Arab world today commits to memory. In places the Mutanabbi style appears bombastic and ornate, the rhetoric florid and the metaphor overdone — but not to the Easterner. Such is the hold that this poet has had upon the imagination of generations of Arabic- speakers that he is still generally considered the greatest in Islam. In him and his two predecessors, abu-Tammam and al-Buhturi, Arabic poetry reached its full maturity. With few exceptions the decline after al-Mutanabbi was steady.

Of the rest of Sayf's circle two deserve special mention. Al-Isbahani (897-967) compiled the monumental Kitab al-Aghani, a twenty- volume treasury of Arab songs and anec- dotes. His senior al-Farabi (870-950) was one of the earliest Moslem thinkers to attempt a harmonization of Greek philosophy and Islam. His system was a syncretism of Aristotelianism, Platonism and Sufism. He became in effect the intellectual ancestor of all other subsequent Moslem philosophers. In addition he was the greatest of all Arabic musical theorists.

Sayf was succeeded by his son Sharif, called Sad-al- Dawlah (967-991), but his authority was disputed by his cousin, the poet abu-Firas, who claimed Horns until he was slain. Internal discord enabled Nicephorus to capture Aleppo, Antioch and Horns (968) and to impose an ephemeral Byzantine suzerainty over the Hamdanid realm. Aleppo was lost to the Hamdanids only until 975, but Antioch remained in Byzantine hands for over a century (968-1084). Nicephorus's successor, John Tzimisces, in 974 reduced not only the coastal towns from Latakia to Beirut but such Rh