Court poetry functioned as pre-mass-media propaganda and image-making for rulers.

Evidence

A much more accurate idea of the image of al-Mu izz, as seen by his followers and projected to his new subjects, may be found in the poems of Ibn Ha¯ni’, his Andalusian panegyrist. The poet, in medieval Islamic courts, often had an im­ portant public function. As panegyrist, he praised his patron; as satirist, he abused his enemies. In a society that was sophisticated and literate, but without mass media, poetry could to some extent take their place; the poet devised, for publication and dissemination, versions of events or sketches of personalities which were vivid, memorable—and slanted. He was the propagandist, or, as we might now say, the public relations officer and image-maker of the ruler, and his compositions can tell us a great deal about the policies and intentions of rulers and sometimes even about the responses of the ruled. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to how medieval Islamic regimes made themselves legible to their own subjects and rivals — a mechanism passage feeding the representation-production cluster. Contrast with Anderson’s imagined communities / print-capitalism thesis: here poetry substitutes for mass media.
• SEED: A possible essay: ‘Orientalism’s medieval mirror’ — how hostile intra-Islamic narratives (the al-Mu’izz sword story) prefigure Western-constructed images of Eastern rulers, showing the image-making machinery predates modern Orientalism.