FYI /u/Sotonic
He was very real, but the name's a bit garbled. The man in question was actually named Abu’l-Qāsim Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAbbād ibn al-ʿAbbās, not "Abdul Kassem Ismail." Most modern historians refer to him as Sahib ibn Abbad, and by God, he is a fascinating man.
Born in Persia in 938, Ibn Abbad began his illustrious carrier as a secretary. Tenth-century Persia was a turbulent place. It was the height of the Iranian Intermezzo, a time when the Arab caliphs' power waned as Persians—now Muslim and not Zoroastrian, but still Persian nonetheless—regained control over their ancient lands.
One of the big winners in the Intermezzo was the Buyid empire, briefly the most powerful kingdom in the Middle East. As a sophisticated confederation that assumed the mantle of the ancient Persian empire, its courts naturally attracted many scholars and bureaucrats.
One such man was Ibn Abbad. Just like the Buyid kings, Ibn Abbad was himself a Persian of illustrious bloodline. His own father had been the vizier of Rukn al-Dawla, the first Buyid ruler. It was natural that when his father died while Ibn Abbad was only seven or eight, his father's acquaintance, the famous Grand Vizier Ibn al-'Amid, would take him under his wing.
Ibn al-'Amid trained Ibn Abbad to be a competent bureaucrat and secretary. When the boy was twenty, he was sent to serve as the secretary of Mu'ayyad al-Dawla, the third son of Rukn. The prince and the secretary soon became close friends; the latter's nickname, Sahib, means "companion" and was given to him by Mu'ayyad to show how much he valued their mutual relationship. In 970, Ibn Abbad became Mu'ayyad's Grand Vizier.
Mu'ayyad succeeded to his father Rukn's throne in 976 but was obliged to keep the current Vizier, Abu'l-Fath (the son of Ibn al-'Amid). Abu'l-Fath distrusted Ibn Abbad's close relationship to Mu'ayyad and tried to get rid of him, but ironically he himself was executed soon after. Ibn Abbad returned to being Vizier for his old friend and remained the second most powerful man in the Buyid courts for eighteen years until his death in 995.
During these two decades, Ibn Abbad made himself famous—both in his own time and in history, for Ibn Abbad remains an example of a successful Vizier even today in the Muslim world—as a writer and patron of literature.
Sahib ibn Abbad supported a client-patron network of some 500 poets, theologians, and other writers. Part of this might have been attributable to his own vanity; a substantial number of these 500 dedicated themselves to singing the praises of the Vizier. Still, these literati were not simple sycophants. Bound to the Vizier by ties of gratitude, they helped make Ibn al-Abbad's court one of the premier centers of Shi'a and rationalist thinking in Persia. As one theologian wrote (undoubtedly with some exaggeration),
If it had not been for his [ibn Abbad's] care, [my] intention would not have been firm; if it had not been for his guidance, my] astuteness would not have been penetrating; if it had not been for his assistance, [my] state of affairs would not have been good.
Ibn Abbad's patronage network transcended religious ties. The Vizier was proud of his sectarian associations. As he wrote in one of his many poems,
She asked, "What religion have you chosen for your success?"
I replied, "I am a Shi'ite and a Mu'tazilite!"
Both the Shi'a and the rationalist Mu'tazilites were often decried as heretics, yet Ibn Abbad had little trouble seeing talent from other schools of Islam. Consider his relationship with Abu Bakr ibn al-Muqri, follower of the austere Hanbali school of Islam that harshly opposed Shi'ism and Mu'tazilism:
It was said to al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād: "You are a Muʿtazilī man and Ibn al-Muqri is a traditionist, [but] you like him."
He replied, "He was a friend of my father, and it was said 'those whom fathers like are relations for their sons'; it is also because I was once asleep and saw the Prophet in my dream saying to me: 'You are asleep while a friend of God is at your door.' I woke up, called the doorkeeper, and said: 'Who is at the door?' He answered: 'Abū Bakr ibn al-Muqri.'"
(There's also an amusing story about a debate Ibn Abbad had with the leader of the Jews, in which the Jew mocked the Vizier's vanity by asking how exactly the Qur'an could be a perfect work of literature when Ibn Abbad's poems were even better, but it's probably made up.)
Naturally, Ibn Abbad accumulated an enormous amount of literature. When the Samanid emperor invited Ibn Abbad to serve as his Vizier, he replied that he couldn't go because of his library; it would take 400 camels to take all his books, including sixty just for his dictionaries. Just the catalogue of his library took up ten volumes. (Some calculations have been done with the average weight of medieval Persian books and the average load that camels can carry, and it seems that if Ibn Abbad wasn't exaggerating, he must have owned some 206,000 books.)
Ibn Abbad himself was a great poet and writer (if probably not as great as he thought himself to be). He was a genuine polymath, as any brief overview of his works will show:
Prose is scattered hither and thither like flying sparks, but poetry will last as long as graven stone.
Some other verses:
Idhā mā naʿā l-nāʿūna ahla mawaddatī
Bakaytu ʿalayhim bal bakaytu ʿalā nafsī
--
When the announcers come announce the death of those I love,
I cry over them. No, I cry over myself.
It was no surprise, then, that when the announcers came announcing Ibn Abbad's death in 995—for he died at the age of fifty-seven—many must have wept over themselves.
Sources