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Qur’anic Rhythm in Classical Arabic Poetry: The Case of Poetic Fawāṣil
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.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Islamic World
Sub Area
None