Abstract
Scholars have long explored echoes of Qur’anic vocabulary and themes in classical Arabic literature, from implicit moral and aesthetic values (bin Tyeer 2016) to explicit images, quotations, and even a pastiche of the Qur’an (Zubaidi 1983, Qutbuddin 2017, McAuley 2017, Stewart 2017, and other contributions in the edited volume, The Qur’an and Adab). In this paper I build on this scholarship but pivot to structural features found in classical Arabic poetry. Specifically, I turn to the oft-occurring Qur’anic end-clauses known as fawāṣil, such as inna -llāha l-ʿazīzu l-ḥakīm, which Neuwirth (1981) referred to as “Schlusskola” and Stewart (2017) as “cadenced tag-phrases.” I argue that many of the sententia found in early Islamic and Abbasid poetry follow the cadence of these fawāṣil by being both parenthetical and summative, acting both as a pause and a coda.
I draw most of my examples from classical Arabic works of criticism, homing in on the verses that critics adduce under the poetic devices of tadhyīl (“appending a supplement”), istishhād (“adducing a [mock] proof”), tamthīl (“uttering a [mock] parable/moral”), and tashbīh (“uttering a similarity statement”). The poets I engage with range from al-Farazdaq (late 7th c.) to Bashshār ibn Burd (8th c.), Abū Tammām (9th c.), Ibn al-Rūmī (9th c.), and even the famed exegete-philologist, al-Zamakhsharī (12th c.). My initial research suggests that this development was an Islamic-era one, informed by Qur’anic rhythm, but the structure in question was not absent in pre-Qur’anic poetry. However, whereas the pre-Islamic examples exhibit a truth-bearing coda, the post-Islamic ones exhibit a mock-truth one.
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