When I Found the Qiyān

The last few months I have lived differently. I stepped away from noise, from conversations that didn’t matter, from the rhythm of ordinary life. It wasn’t a dramatic disappearance, but more like closing the door gently behind me. I let myself drift into silence. I filled my evenings with reading, with poetry, with long hours where I didn’t expect anything of myself other than presence.

When I isolate, it is not because I am angry or distant. It is because I need to listen more carefully. Some people find answers in movement, in travel, in dialogue. For me, it comes when I am still, when I let language carry me elsewhere. Books become companions. Poetry becomes the room itself.

It was in this state that I came across the Qiyān. I wasn’t searching for them; I simply opened a book and they were there, waiting for me. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, a man of the tenth century, wrote Kitab al-Aghani — The Book of Songs. A vast work, overflowing with fragments of poems, stories of musicians, anecdotes of courts and salons. Hidden inside were the Qiyān: women trained in music, in poetry, in refined conversation.

He wrote of them as if they belonged to another world, and yet when I read those passages, I felt as though I knew them. These were not women who fit neatly into a single role. They were not only artists, not only companions, not only intellectuals. They carried all of it within them. They could sit in a room and sing, and in that song was not just beauty but knowledge, intimacy, and a form of power that was subtle and almost invisible.

What moved me was not the description of their talents but the way they lingered in memory. Caliphs, scholars, and poets all remembered them; not just their faces but their words, the way they spoke, the verses they recited. They left behind impressions that outlasted their presence. That, to me, felt familiar.

As I read, something in me softened. I realized that for years I had been carrying questions about myself. How can one be devoted to poetry and yet live so vividly in the world of the body? How can one be private and withdrawn, yet find such meaning in intimacy? I always thought these were contradictions, flaws in the way I was assembled. But the Qiyān made me see it differently. What I felt as dissonance, they had embodied as wholeness.

It’s a strange comfort to find yourself reflected in women who lived more than a thousand years ago. I don’t mean that I suddenly felt like them, or that I could take their place. I mean that they gave me language I didn’t have before. They gave me a sense that the life I live — with all its quiet complexities — is not an accident. It belongs to a lineage, one that is mostly forgotten but still alive if you know where to look.

Heritage is often spoken of as something passed down directly: family, language, tradition. But sometimes heritage comes to you sideways, unexpectedly, through a page of text or a fragment of song. It is recognition more than inheritance. It is that moment when you read about someone far away in time and place, and something in your chest says: yes, this is me too.

Since then, I find myself thinking of them often. When I write, I wonder how they would have written if they had been allowed to leave more of themselves behind. When I sit across from someone, and the air fills with that silence that is not empty but charged, I imagine they must have known this too. The way intimacy can be as intellectual as it is physical, as much about listening as it is about touch.

I don’t want to place myself too close to them. They lived in conditions I cannot fully imagine, bound to circumstances that were both restricting and liberating in ways that don’t exist today. But I know that if we were to meet, they would recognize something in me, just as I recognize them in the fragments left behind. That thought alone makes me feel less solitary.

Reading about the Qiyān did not give me answers. It gave me something more subtle: reassurance. The reassurance that my way of living and seeing the world has existed before, that I am not inventing it out of nothing, and that what feels solitary is, in fact, shared across centuries.

When I think of them now, I don’t see them as historical figures. I see them as companions in the quiet. Women whose names are mostly lost, but whose presence still lingers in the way they were remembered, in the way their songs and words touched others. And perhaps that is the greatest gift of all: not immortality, but recognition, carried gently from one life into another.