Its Arabic title is Kitab ul'Ibar, wa diwan el Mubtada wa'l Khabar, fi ayyamul`Arab wa'l`Ajam wa'l Berber; that is, "The Book of Examples and the Collection of Origins and Information respecting the History of the Arabs, Foreigners and Berbers."
If we compare this with a similar allegory in Nasir's diwan, which culminates in the praise of Mostansir, we are fairly entitled to look upon it as a covert allusion to the eminent men who revealed to the poet in Cairo the secrets of the Isma`ilitic faith, and showed him what he considered the "heavenly ladder" to superior knowledge and spiritual bliss.
The 12th century contributes the Diwan Mukhtarat ush-Shu`ara'i with fifty gasidas.
There is indeed a tradition that a written collection (diwan) existed in the family of an-Nu ` man, the last Lakhmid king, containing a number of poems by the Fuhul, or most eminent poets of the pagan time, and especially by those who had praised the princes of the house, and that this collection passed into the possession of the Omayyad caliphs of the house of Marwan; to this, if the tradition is to be believed, al-Mufaddal probably had access.
In West-ostlicher Diwan (1819), a collection of lyrics - matchless in form and even more concentrated in expression than those of earlier days - which were suggested by a German translation of Hafiz, Goethe had another surprise in store for his contemporaries.
