SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Hafsa bint al-Hajj was an Arabic poet of twelfth-century al-Andalus. Although she is associated with the city of Granada, her name links her to the village of Rakuna, as she is often called Hafsa bint al-Hajj al-Rakuniyya or al-Rukuniyya. She composed verses in a range of genres, from love poetry to satire, and she was famously romantically linked with fellow poet and dignitary Abu Jaʿfar ibn Saʿid, whom she elegized after his execution in 1163. She died in 1191, having spent the latter part of her career as an educator in Marrakech. Some 17 of her poems and fragments are extant, making her corpus one of the best-preserved of the Arabic women poets of the Iberian Peninsula.