Ziryab

Abu l-Hasan ‘Ali Ibn Nafi‘ (Persian and Arabic: أبو الحسن علي ابن نافع ) (c. 789—857), nicknamed Ziryab (زرياب, Arabic for Blackbird, زرياب Persian for "finder of Gold"), was a poet, a musician and singer and one of the most famous gourmands at the Umayyad court in Córdoba in Spain. Historians differ over whether Ziryab was Kurdish [1], Persian [2] [3] or African. According to some sources, he was a former slave, possibly a Zanj of Tanzanian descent. He first achieved notoriety at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, Iraq, his birth place, as a performer and student of the great musician and composer, Ishaq al-Mawsili. Zyriab came originally from the Dasht-e Arzhan area of the Fars Province of Persia.