Arabic Poetry

Why a student of Arabic reads poetry

It is not a literary luxury: verse is the evidence of the language. Open any work of nahw, sarf or balagha and you will find shawahid, lines cited to establish a rule or show its exception. Sibawayh cites more than a thousand. Whoever does not read poetry therefore stays dependent on someone else's commentary on the very examples in his manuals. A second, more concrete benefit: verse is the best repository of the old lexicon and of dhawq, the feel for the language that no rule replaces.

The main periods

• Pre-Islamic: the Mu'allaqat, seven or ten odes depending on the recension, with Imru' al-Qays, Tarafa, Zuhayr, Labid, Antara; the Lamiyyat al-Arab attributed to al-Shanfara. The language at its densest, and the bedrock of the shawahid.
• The Abbasid age: Abu Tammam, al-Buhturi and above all al-Mutanabbi, whose diwan is the most commented in the whole tradition, notably by al-Ukbari. Then Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri.
• Anthologies: the Diwan al-hamasa compiled by Abu Tammam, still the most studied selection, and thematic florilegia that let you approach the material without tackling a whole diwan.
• The modern age: Ahmad Shawqi and the neoclassical school, who brought the qasida back into the language of their time.

'Arud: learning to scan

Arabic metrics, codified by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, rests on sixteen metres and a system of feet learned by ear as much as by rule. Treatises on 'arud and qafiya teach the scansion of the line, the licences allowed and the faults of rhyme. It is a short subject, often skipped, and it changes the reading: a line scanned wrongly is a line understood wrongly.

Bare text or commented diwan?

This question decides your purchase. A bare diwan is for someone who already reads fluently and wants the text with nothing in the way: light, inexpensive, unusable for a student. A commented diwan (sharh) explains the rare lexicon, restores the context and unpacks the imagery: that is what you need in order to work, and it explains the gap in price and bulk. Between the two, vowelled editions without commentary suit anyone memorising. Every listing states which it is, who the commentator is and whether the text is fully vowelled.

The other language sciences

Reading a line of verse presupposes Arabic grammar (nahw) to parse it and morphology (sarf) to recognise rare forms. Rhetoric and eloquence (balagha) then supplies the tools to explain what gives an image its force. Arabic literature extends the reading into prose. Overview: Arabic.

Ordering and shipping

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