Uncentering the Eye: Phenomenological Visions in the Poetry of Abū Nuwās

While Abū Nuwās is most often celebrated for his irreverent exaltation of wine and homoerotic desire, his hunting poems (tardiyyāt) reveal a lyrical mode of interspecies perception and affective entanglement. Drawing on thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donna Haraway, and Giorgio Agamben, I consider how Abū Nuwās develops an ecological and relational poetics that decenters human centrality and enacts a shared field of perception. The poet’s work offers a proto-phenomenological account of embodiment, relational ethics, and aesthetic attention that anticipates contemporary philosophical concerns with nonhuman agency, multi-species intersubjectivity, and an ethics of perception.