Search results

No other people in the world, perhaps, have given more information in their poetry on their cultural and social life than have the Arabs over the centuries. Many years before the advent of Islam and long before they had any national political organization, the Arabs had developed a highly articulate poetic art, strict in its syntax and metrical schemes and fantastically rich in its vocabulary and observation of detail. The merciless desert, the harsh environment in which the Arabs lived, their ever shifting nomadic life, left almost no traces of their social structure and the cultural aspects of their life. It is only in their poetry – these monuments built of words – that we find such evidence, and it speaks more eloquently than cuneiform on marble statues ever could.

The forms, themes and patterns of classical Arabic poetry were laid down in the Arabian Peninsula before the advent of Islam. Indeed the oldest poem of which we have any record dates back to the period of Jâhiliyya, a derogatory term meaning 'ignorance' coined by the early Muslims to denote the state of religious and moral depravity of pre-Islamic Arabs. This period covers scarcely more than a century and a half (c. a.d. 500–622). Yet when the Arabs first sprang onto the stage of world history to carve an empire for themselves, they already had an extremely complex and refined poetic art. This remarkable phenomenon has baffled the student of Arabic literature and history: 'The most striking feature in Arabic literature is its unexpectedness' remarks Gibb, while Goitein refers to it as 'the miracle of pre-Islamic poetry and literary language'. The Jâhili poets, though springing from primitive and illiterate nomadic tribes, were no beginners declaiming shaky lines in a mixture of dialects in prevalence at the time. These were a host of poets erupting all over northern Arabia, from Syria to Yemen and from the fringes of Iraq to the borders of Egypt, masterfully reciting highly developed qasîdas (odes) in one and the same language, betraying little of the dialects of their region. Above all, their poetry, vigorous and vivid as it was in general, was cast in the same, steel structure of a set of complex metrical schemes.