“In barba al censore: il motivo della basetta nella poesia omoerotica di Ṣiqilliyya e al-Andalus”, in «Par les geus d'Amors savoreus» Parole di Eros dal Medioevo al Moderno, a cura di A. Gurrieri, C. La Rosa, I. Licitra, N. Primo, Rubbettino Editore, Soveria Mannelli, 2022, pp. 171-192.

In the Arabic love literature, the passive role of the beloved (ma - h. būb) can be assigned both to a woman as to a beardless boy. However, when the young male begins to manifest the main characteristics of the adult man, it arises a potential ambiguity of the parties and the relationship move toward its inescapable conclusion. erefore, the incipient beard of the beloved has been converted into the symbolic trait of the inexorable farewell and, from the IX century onwards, has become the subject of a specific sub-genre of poems that omas Bauer has defined “beard epigrams” (2014; 2019). is paper aims to analyse several examples of beard epigrams from Siculo-Arabic and Andalusian poetry, in order to explore the occurrences of the term ʿidhār, “sideburn” (completely distinct from the lemma lih. ya, used instead to designate the adult beard) and retrace the evolution of his semantic and metaphorical function, up to the acquisition of the Arabism aladar in the Castilian Spanish in the XV-XVI centuries.