Abū Abdallāh al-Ḥusayn ibn Aḥmad al-Mughallis


Abū Abdallāh al-Ḥusayn ibn Aḥmad al-Mughallis was a tenth-century CE poet. He flourished around 381 AH/991 CE, being associated with the court of Bahāʾ al-Dawla. He is noted as one of the only known composers of Arabic riddles in the third century AH.

Epithet

A few sources refer to Ibn al-Mughallis instead as al-Muflis, but this is due to scribal confusion of the Arabic letters غ and ف: in medial position these look similar, and short vowels are not written, so that المغلس 'al-Mughallis' was miscopied as المفلس 'al-muflis'.
The epithet has been thought to suggest that al-Mughallis originated in the Azerbaijani town of Maragheh, but has more recently been glossed to mean 'the one who tarries'.

Works

According to both the Beirut edition of 1983 and Radwan's critical edition of 1972, ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad Thaʻālibī's anthology Tatimma records ten riddles by al-Mughallis on the following themes: travel-supplies, egg, preservation of a vegetable, wasp, scissors, sword, drainpipe, book, the image one sees in the mirror, and the bath.

Primary sources