Scorpions on the Cheek, Stars in the Gaze

Across the intellectual sky of the late Abbasid world, the stars no longer served merely as tools of calculation but as mirrors of legitimacy, theology and desire. This article traces the transformation of astrology in Arabic culture—from a science of cosmic governance to a language of poetic imagination—revealing how celestial symbolism became a means of negotiating divine order and human authority. In the later Abbasid centuries, as imperial power waned, astrology became a privileged idiom through which poets reflected on fragility, irony and loss. Through a tripartite analysis, the study examines the political role of astrology in shaping Abbasid ideals of sovereignty, its theological contestation within debates on fate and free will, and its poetic afterlife as a field of aesthetic invention. In the verses of al-Buḥturī (d. 284/897), Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908), Abū Bakr al-Arrajānī (d. 544/1149) and al-ʿAntarī (d. 570/1175), the Moon in Scorpio and the scorpion on the cheek cease to portend doom and instead shine as emblems of beauty, wit and peril. By tracing the evolution of astrology from science to art, this paper examines how the late Abbasid imagination transformed the heavens into a stage of persuasion—where rhetoric, faith and legitimacy converged beneath the indifferent stars. Keywords: Astrology, Abbasid poetry, political legitimacy, theology and determinism, poetic imagination, celestial symbolism, Arabic literary culture