He is Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Hani, known as Abu Nawas. He was born in the city of Ahwaz in the Khuzestan region in southwestern Iran in the year 145 AH / 762 AD to a Damascene father and a Persian mother named Jalban (with a damma on the jim). It is likely that his father was among the soldiers of Marwan ibn Muhammad, the last Umayyad caliph in Damascus.
After Marwan's defeat in the Battle of Upper Zab,
The poet's family moved to Basra when the child, Abu Nuwas, was two years old, or some say six. His father soon died, and his mother entrusted him to a school, then to a perfumer, for whom he worked as a laborer, sharpening incense sticks.
His father died and his mother moved him from Ahwaz to Basra, Iraq, when he was six years old. When he grew up, she sent him to work in a perfume shop. When the Abbasids took over the Caliphate, he moved from Basra to Kufa. History books do not mention the reason for this, except that he met Walbah ibn al-Hubab al-Asadi al-Kufi, one of the brilliant poets in the field of debauchery and immorality. Walbah took great care of him, working to educate and graduate him. He accompanied a group of licentious poets such as Mut’i ibn Iyas and Hammad Ajrad. Then he moved to the Banu Asad desert and stayed there for a whole year, learning the language from its authentic sources. Then he returned to Basra and studied literature and poetry at the hands of its scholars.
When his father died, he was taken in by a sheikh of language, literature and poetry, Khalaf al-Ahmar, and learned much of his knowledge and literature from him. He had a great cultural background from him, to the point that he was not allowed to write poetry until he memorized a good number of Arab poems. It is said that whenever Abu Nuwas announced that he had memorized what he was tasked with, Khalaf would ask him to forget it. This is a noble form of education, so that this emerging poet would not fall into the clutches of those poets who preceded him. It was narrated that Abu Nuwas said: “What do you think of a man who did not write poetry until he narrated the collections of sixty Arab women, including al-Khansa and Layla al-Akhiliya? What do you think of men?”
Abu Nuwas had barely reached the age of thirty when he mastered the language and literature, and delved into the various Islamic sciences, from jurisprudence and hadith, to knowledge of the rulings of the Quran, and insight into its abrogating and abrogated verses, its clear and ambiguous verses. Once Ibn Hani had attained this level of knowledge, he set his sights on Baghdad, the capital of the Caliphate and the focus of poets' hopes. But a quick glance at his collection of poems reveals that wine had overcome him, to the point that he preferred it to everything else.
His pursuit of knowledge was not limited to poetry and literature, but he also studied jurisprudence, hadith, and interpretation, so Ibn al-Mu'tazz said about him in his book 'Tabaqat al-Shu'ara': “Abu Nuwas was a knowledgeable jurist, knowledgeable in rulings and fatwas, perceptive of differences, a master of memory, insight, and knowledge of the methods of hadith, and he knew the clear and ambiguous verses of the Qur’an, and its abrogating and abrogated verses.”
In Basra, Abu Nuwas was infatuated with a slave girl called Janan and sang her poetry.