The work of Professor V.M. Beilis on the Diwan by Abu Ishaq Al-Ghazi (the beginning of the 12th century)

This article presents the study which was made by Professor V.M. Beilis (1923-2001). He researched a collection of poems (Di-wan) written by Abu Ishaq al-Ghazi, one of the greatest Arab poets of the Seljuk period. Volf Mendelevich Beilis is a Soviet Ukrainian Arabist, a specialist in source study and in the history of the Medieval Arab East, the Great Patriotic War veteran. He is known for his research in the field of translation and analysis of the works of al-Mas'udi, Mas'ud ibn Namdar, al-Idrisi, Ibn Fadlan. In his research, V.M. Beilis paid special attention to the Arabic geographical literature of the 11th-12th centuries and to the panegyric poetry of the Seljuk period. In the 1970s, Professor V.M. Beilis together with well-known Azerbaijani Orientalist Z.M. Bunyatov applied to the study of Abu Ishaq al-Ghazi's collection of poems. Despite the fact that al-Ghazi was one of the most famous poets of the period of the Great Seljuk Empire, the study of his artistic heritage was sketchy and fragmentary until the middle of the 20th century. Al-Ghazi's poems were mostly studied by Arabists, philologists and historians of Arabic literature. Arabist Volf Mendelevich Beilis from Luhansk was the first scholar in the history of Russian and even international Oriental studies who explored scrupulously the Diwan of al-Ghazi as a historical and literary source. V.M. Beilis not only made a detailed textual analysis of Abu Ishaq al-Ghazi's panegyric qasida but also compared its content with data from other sources - both literary and narrative (Arabic historical chronicles, geographical writings, biographical dictionaries). V.M. Beilis devoted many years of his life to this work and the results of it allowed us to clarify some important aspects which relate to the biographies of famous people of the Seljuk period such as Ahmad Sanjar, Shirvanshah Fariburz I, vizier Baha' ad-Din Rashid ad-Daulatain, official and poet Abu Isma'il al-Husayn at-Tughra'i, wali of Ray Abu-l-Hasan 'Ali al-Bayhaqi. Beilis's work demonstrated that the examples of medieval Arabic-language panegyric poetry may contain valuable data about social and political history. Thanks to the efforts of V.M. Beilis we have now unique information from al-Ghazi's poems which complements the content of narrative sources and biographical dictionaries. This article describes the main milestones of al-Ghazi's biography, a brief history of the study of his Diwan, and detailed historiographical analysis of all Professor Beilis's works in which he describes Abu Ishaq al-Ghazi's development as a poet.

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