The three poets, Abu Nuwas, Abu Al-Atahiyah, and Dibil, wrote during the Abbasid Caliphate, from the period 750-1258. The Abbasid Caliphate is commonly considered to be the golden age of medieval Islam (and Abu Nuwas its golden poet) because of its cultural, scientific and literary innovations, achieved at a time when Europe was struggling to emerge from its dark ages. The literature of the time period indicates the kind of intellectual freedom and variety that the Abbasids tolerated.

The Abbasids are the descendants of Abul al-Abbas as-Saffah, the uncle of the Prophet, who led the Abbasids in a revolution against the increasingly corrupt Umayyads in 749. The Abbasids founded the city of Baghdad in 762 and made it the international hub of the arts and sciences. However, the founding of Baghdad, which became their capital, was merely one of many accomplishments. Their greatest ruler was Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph (786-809), who ascended to the Caliphate at the vulnerable age of 20 years. However, the young leader soon established and solidified his authority and, during his time, the rule of the Abbasids extended from north Africa and the Mediterranean to India. Al-Rashid is immortalized as a central character in the 1001 Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla), a masterpiece of world literature. This is not surprising, as Rashid was an enigmatic and captivating figure, often traveling through the streets in disguise at night to speak to the peasants and listen to their woes. In many cases, he would rectify the problems of his people the morning after his midnight sojourns. Above all, al-Rashid is remembered as a great patron of the arts.

He was, in fact, the generous patron and the intimate friend of Abu Nuwas, the most exalted poet of the age. To this day, Abu Nuwas continues to be remembered in the Arab world as the most clever of the classical poets, as one who embodied the spirit of the age of Islamic expansion. Indeed, Abu Nuwas' poetry is instilled with a spirit of revelry, emphasizing the importance of indulgence in both the body and spirit. He writes, "Far apart shall be / my body and spirit", indicating that there should be a separation between the two. Such lines are an insight into the age of the Abbasids, in which the arts as well as religious studies flourished and progressed. Abu Nuwas' philosophy is best illustrated in the following lines:

Tell the severe master of dialectic
You have learned something and we honour it
But your power exterminates itself
As long as you omit
Passion and compasssion and charity
The berry in love with itself.

Here, Abu Nuwas asserts that the investigation of truth cannot be conducted solely on the basis of reason, that is, the discovery of truth necessitates the utilization of other faculties. This can also be interpreted as a defense of poetry and of the arts in general.

The poetry of Abu al-Atahiyah, on the other hand, reflects his deep-rooted and unshakable belief in fatalism and indicates the poet’s resignation to a life of tedious and often unrewarding work. Abu al-Atahiyah says, "Every man has his book of fate", or that every person's life is predestined. This is an odd notion, since Islam preaches that Allah gives humans freedom to choose good or evil. Yet, the poet writes, "All you see was planned by a dear king". If one interprets the "dear king" to be Allah Himself, then the verse reinforces the notion of predestination. Abu al-Atahiyah also embraces the difficulty of life as a theme: "You thought you were a husk when you found / The milk of life meant endless churning". The "milk of life" is a common theme to indicate a paradise-like environment, where there is an ample supply of milk and honey, etc. But the milk means only "endless churning" for its discoverer, because s/he must work hard to maintain that paradise. In other words, there is no respite from hard work and labor, even when one has attained paradise. The third theme upon which I want to expound is that of the inevitability and the democracy of death. In one poem, Abu al-Atahiyah asserts that the human race builds homes, permanent edifices, for no apparently good reason: "For whom build we, who must ourselves return / into our native element to clay?" The poet sees the inevitability of death as something that humanity chooses to deny, building permanent homes, that is, retreating to the material, in order to resist the reality that they will one day die. Al-Atahiyah also insists that death will "disjoint the proudest nose," an indisputable assertion that death knows no class boundaries; it arrives to claim the rich and the poor alike. He writes that "mud piled on mud," the process of building (presumably) great homes and palaces, will not help one to escape death. In an especially fine line, the poet says, "Wouldst thou see the noblest man of all, / Look at a monarch in a beggar's pall!". Abu al-Atahiyah even mocks the great fifth Abbasid Calpih, Harun al-Rashid in his poem, "Vanity: To Harun al-Rashid." In the poem, he writes that the caliph may "live securely" in his palaces and enjoy his luxurious life, but that when death overtakes him, the caliph will know that "your life was vain as idle tongues". Therefore, the poet does not even spare the man heralded as the greatest caliph of the age and the man responsible for the golden age of Islam from his gloomy ruminations and moralistic judgements.

A third poet of the Abbasid age is Dibil, who cannot be more different from Abu Nuwas and Abu al-Atahiyah. While the former was light-hearted and the latter was gloomy, Dibil struck at the core of Arab societal and religious values. He recounts a drinking fest that he attended, in which "we were cheered thrice with the wine cup / And thrice did I divorce my wife". One knows that a Muslim man must only say "I divorce you!" three times in order to divorce his wife, so the play on the number three is rather clever. But later, he describes a scene with a particularly unattractive lover, one who possesses a "defective chin, a thick nose, and a forehead like the beam of the money-changer". However, after such stanzas that make one wonder if Dibil was only trying to provoke his audience, the poet defends himself in an almost arrogant way: "The bad poem dies before its author, but the excellent one lives, though its author dies". Obviously, Dibil survived his own standard.

The Abbasids' rule ended in 1258, when the Mongols, led by the grandson of Genghis Khan, captured the city of Baghdad. However, the Caliphate had already lost any real power after the 1055 Turkish conquest of Baghdad and had been serving Islam only in the role of symbolic leadership when the Mongols invaded. At that point, the Abbasid Caliphate relocated, so to speak, to Cairo and continued to serve as the symbolic head of the Islamic world until 1517.