Arabic literaturethe body of written works produced in the Arabic language.

The tradition of Arabic literature stretches back some 16 centuries to unrecorded beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula. At certain points in the development of European civilization, the literary culture of Islam and its Arabic medium of expression came to be regarded not only as models for emulation but also, through vital conduits such as Moorish Spain and Norman Sicily, as direct sources of inspiration for the intellectual communities of Europe. The rapid spread of the Islamic faith brought the original literary tradition of the Arabian Peninsula into contact with many other cultural traditions—Byzantine, Persian, Indian, Amazigh (Berber), and Andalusian, to name just a few—transforming and being transformed by all of them. At the turn of the 21st century, the powerful influence of the West tended to give such contacts a more one-sided directionality, but Arab litterateurs were constantly striving to find ways of combining the generic models and critical approaches of the West with more indigenous sources of inspiration drawn from their own literary heritage.

General considerations

Both terms in the title of this article are in need of elaboration. The use of the term literature in English to imply those writings that are susceptible to aesthetic analysis (as opposed to everything that is written) is of relatively recent vintage, and the development of a field of study devoted to it is yet more recent (with the study in the West of non-Western literary traditions being even more so). In Arabic the term for “literature” in the narrow English sense is adab, best translated by the French term belles-lettres (“beautiful letters”), which conveys the combination of the aesthetic and didactic elements found in adab more effectively than does the English term literature. However, it is important to observe that, as is the case with many literary traditions, the origins of this Arabic term in the premodern period lie in the realms of correct behaviour (“polite letters”).

The English language, unlike many other European languages, uses several adjectives—Arab, Arabic, and Arabian—to depict phenomena of the particular region and people that are linked to the notion of “Arab,” a word that has the original sense of “nomad.” For the purposes of this article, the term Arabic will be used to refer only to the Arabic language. The sections that follow will be concerned only with literature that has been composed in Arabic; it thus excludes works written by Arabs in other languages.

The Arabic language

The Arabic language in its earliest phases was relatively well protected from the forces of rapid change by the peninsular environment within which it developed. It is the best-preserved model of the Semitic languages. Its syntax and morphology—recorded and systematized as part of the massive research endeavour that followed the production of an authoritative version of the text of the Qurʾān in the 7th century (although this date is a matter of controversy)—provide evidence of early features of the Semitic languages. These features have since disappeared from sister languages, of which Hebrew is perhaps the most prominent. As the history of the revelation, memorization, and eventual recording in written form of the Qurʾān makes clear, the society of Arabia was one that relied to a large extent on human memory to preserve details of important events and principles and to pass on such information and artifacts to succeeding generations. That very reality makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint precise details regarding the earliest development of the Arabic language and its literary tradition. What has survived as the earliest examples of Arabic literary compositions consists of a highly elaborate system of poetic composition and a series of oratorical and often homiletic utterances, all couched in language of a variety and at a level that was to be later reflected in the style of the Qurʾānic revelations themselves. It is unclear, however, whether this apparently elevated language (perhaps reserved for special occasions, such as poetry competitions) was ever the means of spoken communication for any particular group.

Whatever may have been the linguistic environment of pre-Islamic Arabia, the rapid spread of the faith across Africa and into Asia soon created a situation in which written and spoken Arabic inhabited opposite ends of a linguistic spectrum. At one end was the language of written communication and Islamic scholarship, which regarded the language of the Qurʾān as its inimitable yardstick; from this belief developed the later critical doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān (the “inimitability of the Qurʾān”), which resulted in a written (literary) language that has undergone remarkably little change over the centuries. At the other end was the spoken language of Arabs, which from Spain (known as Al-Andalus during the Moorish period) and Morocco in the west to the Arabian Gulf and Iraq in the east displayed—and continues to display—enormous variety, hardly a surprising linguistic phenomenon in view of the great distances involved and the wide variety of cultures with which Islam came into contact.


The Arabic literary tradition began within the context of a tribal, nomadic culture. With the advent and spread of Islam, that tradition was carried far and wide during the course of the 7th to the 10th century. It initially sought to preserve the values of chivalry and hospitality while expressing a love of animals and describing the stark realities of nature, but it proceeded to absorb cultural influences from every region brought within the fold of “Dār al-Islām” (“Abode of Islam”). Early contacts with the Sasanian empire of Persia (present-day Iran) led to a noisy but fruitful exchange of cultural values. The foundation in 762 of Baghdad, built expressly as a caliphal capital, brought about further expansion to the east and contacts with the cultures of India and beyond; one of the results of such contact was the appearance in the Middle East of the world’s greatest collection of narrative, Alf laylah wa laylah (The Thousand and One Nights). In that same capital city was founded the great library Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”), which, until the sack of the city by the Mongols in 1258, served as a huge repository for the series of works from the Hellenistic tradition that were translated into Arabic. Al-Andalus became to the rest of Europe a model of a society in which the religions and cultures of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism could work together and create a system of scholarship and teaching that could transmit the heritage of older civilizations and the rich cultural admixture of Andalusian society. Western science, mathematics, philosophy, music, and literature were all beneficiaries of this fascinating era, of whose final stages the fabulous Alhambra palace complex in Granada, Spain, remains the most visible token.

By the 10th century, the political fragmentation of the larger Islamic community was evident in the existence of three separate caliphates: that of the ʿAbbāsids in Baghdad, that of the Shīʿite Fāṭimids in Cairo, and that of the Umayyads, in Spain at this time after having been earlier removed from power in the eastern regions by the advent of the ʿAbbāsids. Ironically, this fragmentation worked to the advantage of literature and its practitioners; the existence of a continuing series of petty dynasties provided ample opportunity for patronage at court, which was the primary means of support for poets and scholars. However, literary production and creativity were inevitably marked by the ongoing series of Crusades, carried out by Christians from western Europe, the Mongol invasions and later those of the Turkic conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the fall of Granada in the Reconquista in 1492, and the fall of Cairo to the Ottomans in 1517. It has been customary in surveys of the Arabic literary tradition to write off the era between 1258 and 1800 by declaring it a “period of decadence.” However, a more nuanced analysis of the situation would acknowledge the political turmoil that characterized many regions and periods and would also suggest that a degree of caution is needed in applying Western criteria for literary evaluation to a period in which the aesthetic yardsticks were clearly different.

The nature of “the modern” in the context of Arabic literary history involves twin processes: first, renewed contacts with the Western world, something that was considerably accelerated by European imperial incursions during the 19th century, and, second, a renewed interest in the classical heritage of the Arabic language and Islam. Particularly in analyzing the earlier stages in the process known as al-nahḍah (“renaissance”), Western historians have for a long time placed much more emphasis on the first of these factors. It is certainly true that the 19th century witnessed a vigorous translation movement that introduced to the readership of Arabic literature examples of genres such as the novel, the short story, and the drama. All these genres were subsequently produced within the literary milieu of Arabic, although the chronology and pace of that process varied widely in different regions. However, as Arab literary historians endeavoured to trace the development of a modern literary tradition in different regions and as creative writers themselves strove to find indigenous sources of inspiration and modes of expression, a perceived need to incorporate the second category mentioned above—that of the linkage between the classical heritage of the Arab past and the creativity of the present—became more pressing and led in many regions to a reexamination of the balance between these two forces.

At the turn of the 21st century, the Arab creative writer operated at a local level within a social environment that, more often than not, constrained freedom of expression and indeed subjected literature to strict forms of censorship. Many prominent Arab authors spent large segments of their life in exile from their homelands for political reasons. More broadly, the confrontation between secularism and popular religious movements, which might in the best of circumstances provide for a fruitful interaction of opinions, instead—because of local, regional, and global factors—created an atmosphere of tension and repression that was often not conducive to creative thought. This confrontation also prompted Arab litterateurs to view the global environment with considerable circumspection.

The Qurʾān

The revelation of the Qurʾān to the Prophet Muhammad, beginning at some point early in the 7th century AD, is the foundational event in Islam. It separates the period before Islam (known as the Jāhiliyyah [“period of ignorance”]) from the Islamic era and provides the Muslim community with its most significant monument, the word of God revealed to humanity. Its message is conveyed in a language of great beauty, something that is regarded as an inimitable miracle. Its contents are the primary basis for the formulation of Islamic law and the designation of conduct by Muslims, both as individuals and as a community. However, beyond the Qurʾān’s central position within the Islamic faith, the aftermath of its revelation led to a lengthy scholarly process that traced its precedents and analyzed the Arabic language system; as such, its revelation also needs to be viewed as the event that marks the initial stages in the recording and study of the Arabic literary tradition.

The word qurʾān means “recitation,” illustrating a major difference between it and the sacred scriptural sources of Judaism and Christianity: the Qurʾān is primarily an oral phenomenon, something to be recited and intoned (the latter involving a highly elaborated skill known as tajwīd). The textual version of the Qurʾān was to become the focus of a vast repertoire of scholarship—devoted to the interpretation of the text and to the codification of the dogmas, regulations, and ethical prescriptions that it contains and the system of language that it represents—but from the beginnings of Islam to the present day the sounds of the Qurʾān have played a major part in the daily lives and practices of all peoples living within the dominions of Islam.

Revelation, compilation, and structure

Recite in the name of your lord who created— From an embryo created the human.

This opening verse from the 96th sura (chapter) of the Qurʾān is believed to be the first revelation to Muhammad (as translated by Michael Sells in Approaching the Qurʾan). God in the first person addresses Muhammad directly in the second person; those who listen to the revelations delivered in Arabic from Muhammad’s mouth are designated as “they.” During the course of Muhammad’s lifetime, these revelations were memorized and recorded in written form. This activity was carried out in Mecca until 622 CE and—following the Hijrah (the migration of Muhammad and his followers)—in the oasis town of Yathrib, later to be known as Medina, where Muhammad remained from 622 until his death in 632. But these revelations were not organized in any systematic fashion. It was only after Muhammad’s death, when many of those who had memorized the revelations were themselves dying, that the Muslim community realized the urgent need to establish a canonical version of the Qurʾān. That was achieved during the reign of the third caliph to rule after Muhammad’s death, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān. Thereafter the text of the Qurʾān that had been prepared under ʿUthmān was declared the only authoritative version, and all variant versions were ordered destroyed.

Apart from the short opening sura, Al-Fātiḥah (“The Opening”), which is regularly used by Muslims as a prayer and at the conclusion of contracts (including that of marriage), the suras of the Qurʾān are arranged in order of length: the longest (Al-Baqarah [“The Cow”], with 286 verses) is second while a selection of very short suras comes at the end of the Qurʾān, with the six verses of Al-Nās (“The People”) as the final—114th—sura. These short suras belong to the Meccan period of revelation, while the lengthier suras are made up of collections of revelations from both the Meccan and Medinan periods.

Each sura begins with a listing of its title, the number of verses it contains, the venue in which its particular revelations were received, and its placement in the order of suras. This method of compilation allows for certain sections and narratives to be presented as unified wholes; for that reason, Yūsuf (the 12th sura, the Qurʾānic version of the Joseph narrative) has long been a favourite object of study by Western scholars. However, in the context of a history of Arabic literature, it is important to recognize that the Qurʾān’s oral origins and its modes of compilation led to the emergence of a text in which revelations from different periods are interwoven. As a result, revelations devoted to a single topic may be dispersed among several different suras. Since the Qurʾān plays such an enormously important role as a model for Arabic literary discourse, this feature of the text is of central importance.

Message and impact

The primary message of the Qurʾān is the absolute and indivisible oneness of God, reflected in the first part of the shahādah (“statement of faith”): there is no deity but God. His attributes are reflected in the 99 “beautiful names,” adjectives used within the text: merciful, powerful, forgiving, great, and so on. The message imparted to humanity via his chosen prophet, Muhammad, is that this world is but a preparation for the next and that believers must live their lives with that fact in mind. God has provided clear “signs” (āyāt) regarding the fates of peoples, such as ʿĀd and Thamūd (sura 7, verses 65–79), who ignored this message. Muslims are urged to live their lives in such a way that on the Day of Judgment, when their deeds are weighed in the balance, they will earn a place in paradise.

The message of the Qurʾān is often illustrated with a variety of homiletic narratives. The most famous is the story of Joseph, in the middle of which he, while imprisoned, delivers a sermon on the oneness of God. Sura 18, Al-Kahf (“The Cave”), is also notable for its reference to the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (verses 9–26), who fall into a prolonged sleep and wake to find themselves in an era of Christian belief, and to the story of Moses (verses 60–83), who is severely tested by the strange behaviour of the mysterious, legendary figure al-Khiḍr (al-Khaḍir).

With the emigration of Muhammad to Medina and the establishment of a Muslim community, the revelations assume a somewhat different tone. The oral nature of the communication between Prophet and community is reflected in the many revelations on doctrinal and behavioral issues that take the form of responses to questions. These revelations incorporate the phrase “They will ask you about…” as part of the text itself. Such pronouncements provide the source for Islamic law regarding such matters as inheritance, usury, diet, gambling, and marriage and divorce.

The Qurʾān is thus the primary and central authority for the community of Muslim believers throughout the world, and, as such, its sounds are heard and its message is read by millions of people on a daily basis. Within the realm of Arabic literature, the Qurʾān has played a foundational role and continues to serve, much as the Bible does in the history of Western literatures, as the major stylistic yardstick for literary expression in the Arabic language and as a major source of intertextual reference. Today the availability of modern media has expanded still further the reach of the Qurʾānic message, with the muezzin’s call to prayer amplified across Islamic cities and with television and radio devoting significant portions of their broadcasts to recitations of the sacred text and commentaries on them.


“The register of the Arabs” (dīwān al-ʿArab) is the age-old phrase whereby Arabs have acknowledged the status and value that poetry has always retained within their cultural heritage. From the very earliest stages in the Arabic literary tradition, poetry has reflected the deepest sense of Arab self-identity, of communal history, and of aspirations for the future. Within this tradition the role of the poet has been of major significance. The linkage between public life and the composition of ringing odes has remained a direct one from the pre-Islamic era—when the poet was a major verbal weapon, someone whose verses could be invoked to praise the heroes of his own tribe and to pour scorn on those of their enemies—through the premodern period—when poetic eulogies not only extolled the ruler who patronized the poet but reflected a pride in the achievements and extent of the Islamic dominions—to the modern period—in which the poet has felt called upon to either reflect or oppose the prevailing political mood. In times of crisis it has always been, and still remains, the poet’s voice that is first raised to reflect the tragedies, the anger, the fears, and the determination of the Arab people.

The tribes of the Arabian Peninsula in the pre-Islamic period (pre-7th century CE) provided the social venue for the earliest examples of Arabic poetry. The poet’s performances of his odes were a powerful tool at the tribe’s disposal, arousing its heroes to battle against their enemies, extolling the chivalry and generosity of its men and the beauty of its women, and pouring scorn on the foibles of opposing tribes. Fallen heroes were commemorated in the marthiyyah, or elegy, and it is in this role that the voice of the female poet is prominently heard, as, for example, in the verses of the 7th-century poets al-Khansāʾ and Laylā al-Akhyāliyyah. Many of the earliest male poets became renowned as warriors and lovers, and around their careers (or, perhaps, their “personae”; the historical existence of several poets remains unverified) elaborate traditions of narrative developed, as, for example, with the pre-Islamic cavalier-poet ʿAntarah and the hapless love poet Majnūn Laylā (literally, “He Who Was Driven Crazy by Love for Laylā”). Such was the status of the poet as spokesman for the virtues of the tribal community that a kind of anticommunal persona was developed in reaction by the so-called ṣuʿlūk (“brigand”) poets, who were depicted as living a life of solitude and hardship in the desert accompanied only by its fiercest denizens (the snake, the hyena, and the wolf). Taʾabbaṭa Sharran (“He Who Has Put Evil in His Armpit”) and al-Shanfarā are among the best known of the ṣuʿlūk poets.

This tradition of poetry, composed by poets and passed on through the memories of bards from one generation to the next, emerged in the 7th century as the primary linguistic precedent to the Arabic of the newly recorded text of the Qurʾān. As such, it became the focus of a great deal of attention as scholars began the lengthy process of compiling, anthologizing, and analyzing the corpus of an oral tradition of poetry that stretched back several centuries to distant, unknown beginnings.

During the Islamic centuries (post-7th century), poetry came to occupy a central place within the courts of the caliph and of the sultans, emirs, governors, and other potentates who ruled over the various regions of the Islamic world following its breakup into smaller, more local dominions. Poetry by itself rarely, if ever, provided a sufficient living for even the most gifted crafter of verses, and that remains as much the case today as it did during the premodern period. A large percentage of poetry (especially panegyrics) was inspired and often commissioned by the ruling authorities for public recitation on many sorts of “state occasions,” and the poet would expect to be rewarded for such celebrations of the glories of Islam and its rulers. Furthermore, a number of prominent figures—caliphs (Al-Walīd ibn Yazīd, for example, and Ibn al-Muʿtazz), ministers, philosophers, and theologians—were prominent contributors to the poetic tradition. However, the variety of other genres and subthemes that have been preserved in collections of poetry make it clear that there were other occasions that were less public and more informal at which poetry of a less official stamp would be recited.

Metre and rhyme

The recording of the earliest-known Arabic poetry provided future generations with examples of recitations by bards of 7th- or 8th-century versions of poems whose original composition and performance date back perhaps centuries. The collections reveal an already elaborate prosodic system, the earliest phases in the development of which remain substantially unknown.

The various types of poem are marked by particular patterns of rhyme and syllabic pulse. Each line is divided into two half-lines (called miṣrāʿ); the second of the two ends with a rhyming syllable that is used throughout the poem. In order that the listening audience may internalize the rhyme that is to be used, the first line (which is often repeated) uses the rhyme at the end of both halves of the line; thereafter the rhyme occurs only at the end of the complete line.

The great 8th-century philologist al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad developed a system whereby the differing stress patterns that he heard in poetic recitations were subdivided into 15 separate metres (later expanded to 16). While al-Khalīl (who also wrote treatises on music and compiled an Arabic dictionary) clearly stated that his system merely set down one method for the metrical analysis of Arabic poetry and while later scholars have suggested different systems, it is remarkable that al-Khalīl’s prosodic system remained the standard—and, indeed, constituted one of the modes of defining what was poetic and what was not—until well into the 20th century.

Categories and forms

One of the earliest methods by which poems were categorized was that of rhyming syllable. Thus, the famous pre-Islamic ode of the brigand poet al-Shanfarā was known as Lāmiyyat al-ʿArab (literally, “The L-Poem of the Arabs”). Even when, beginning about the 9th century, the works of poets were habitually collected under different categories, it was still common to refer to famous odes by their rhyming syllable; thus the Nūniyyah (“N-Poem”) of the 11th-century Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydūn and Al-Tā’iyyah al-kubrā (“The Great Ode on T”) by the 13th-century Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ. However, the pioneer compilers of the earliest poetry soon developed further modes of categorization based on length and, from that, on segmentation. Poetry in general was referred to as qarīḍ, but within that framework poetry was subdivided into two types. The first was the qiṭʿah (“segment”), consisting of a relatively short poem devoted to a single theme or else composed and performed for a particular occasion; the marthiyyah, mentioned above, is an example of such a poem. While many qiṭʿahs suggest that they are complete in and of themselves, the structure of others (as well as what is now known about the nature of oral performances and the processes of recording them) points to the possibility of their being the favourite memorized examples of typical segments from a lengthier poetic performance.

That lengthier type—the second type of qarīḍ—is the qaṣīdah, a polythematic poem that might extend to 100 lines or more and that constituted an elaborate celebration of the tribe and its way of life. The critical tradition—exemplified most famously by the 9th-century writer Ibn Qutaybah—analyzed such long poems within a tripartite structure. In an opening section, called the naṣīb, the poem’s speaker comes across a deserted encampment and muses nostalgically about times past and especially about his absent beloved. Via a transition, a second section (the raḥīl) recounts a desert journey, thus affording the opportunity for descriptions of animals—especially the camel and horse as primary riding beasts—that are among the most famous and beloved within the entire tradition of Arabic poetry. A section in praise of the tribe (the madīḥ) comes third, in which one of several possible “purposes” is proclaimed: boasts concerning the heroism and endurance of the tribe’s fighters, the generosity and hospitality of its people, the beauty of its women, or the feats of its animals. Descriptions of wine drinking, gambling, jousts, and horse races all contribute to the overall picture through which the performance of the qaṣīdah presents a ritualized liturgy in praise of community.

Initially 7, and later 10, of the longer examples of the qaṣīdah were early recognized as outstanding representatives of the large corpus of longer poems that had been recorded in written form. They were collected as Al-Muʿallaqāt (also known variously as the 7 (or 10) “long poems” and the Seven Long Odes). The opening of the muʿallaqah of 6th-century poet Imruʾ al-Qays is probably the most famous line of poetry in Arabic:

Halt, you two companions, and let us weep for the memory of a beloved and an abode mid the sand-dunes between Al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal.

While certain segments of each muʿallaqah are especially famous—Ṭarafah’s elaborate description of the camel, for example, and Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā’s depictions of tribal wars— each of the poems invokes the imagery of the desert and its way of life to re-create a mythical past. To this day this collection is prized as a supreme poetic representation of the essence of Arab culture and its values, with chivalry, generosity, endurance, and hospitality as major components. (As a counter to the length of these classics of early Arabic poetry, the 9th-century philologist al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī compiled a collection of shorter ancient poems, initially for pedagogical purposes, that came to be known as Al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt.)

These two subcategories of qarīḍ were the predominant forms of expression in the history of Arabic poetry up to the conclusion of World War II, but they were not the only ones. As part of the unrecorded earliest periods in the development of Arabic poetry, the metre and genre of rajaz provided another form of the poetic (possibly emerging out of the earlier category of sajʿ, or rhyming prose). This form of poem served several functions, as is evident in, for example, camel drivers’ songs, known as al-ḥidāʾ. The urjūzah (a poem composed in rajaz) was also utilized for verbal display and other types of didactic and even obscene poetry.

Later critics subsumed the overall category of qarīḍ within a listing of what they termed “the seven types” (al-funūn al-sabʿah) of poem. To the two major forms discussed thus far, qarīḍ and rajaz, were added several that utilized the colloquial form of the Arabic language (the qūmā, for example, and the kān wa kān). But the two additional forms that have occasioned the most interest among scholars originated in the Iberian Peninsula: the zajal and the muwashshaḥ. There is a great deal of controversy regarding almost every aspect of these two forms—their early history, their performance practices, their metrics, and their linkage to the early history of Western lyric poetry. What is clear, however, is not only that they provide a wonderfully accurate picture of the rich multicultural environment found in Al-Andalus during the Islamic period (8th–15th centuries), but also that, following their migration across North Africa to the Mashriq (as the eastern regions of the Islamic world were termed), they contributed significantly to both the elite and popular traditions of Arabic poetry.

A major change in the form of the Arabic poem occurred in the late 1940s, when two Iraqi poets, Nāzik al-Malāʾikah and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, almost simultaneously decided to abandon the system of prosody that the critical establishment had for centuries imposed as a principal method of identifying the poetic, choosing to adopt in its place a system that used variable line length and patterns of assonance and repetition in place of end rhyme. While it should be noted that there had been previous attempts to break out of the rigid strictures of traditional metrics (especially in colloquial poetic genres that were for the most part ignored by critics), it was this gesture in the 1940s that ushered in a new era for Arabic poetry, one that moved beyond the notion of variable metre and line length to the prose poem and other experiments in form and poetic discourse. With all that, however, the traditional form of the qaṣīdah continued at the hands of certain poets to hold an important place in the hearts of those many Arabs who still enjoyed listening to the form. In the latter half of the 20th century, Al-Akhṭal al-Ṣaghīr (pen name of Bishārā al-Khūrī), Badawī al-Jabal (pen name of Muḥammad al-Aḥmad), and Muḥammad al-Jawāhirī were notable qaṣīdah poets.

Genres and themes

Alongside these methods of categorizing poetry and poets, some classical critics identified three principal “purposes” (aghrāḍ) for the public performance of poetry: first, panegyric (madḥ), the praise of the tribe and its elders, a genre of poetry that was to become the primary mode of poetic expression during the Islamic period; second, praise’s opposite—lampoon (hijāʾ)—whereby the poet would be expected to take verbal aim at the community’s enemies and impugn their honour (most often at the expense of women); and third, praise of the dead, or elegy (rithāʾ).


Panegyric’s function as a means of extolling the virtues of the tribe and its leaders was easily transferred, albeit within a very different political and social context, from the pre-Islamic period to the Islamic. Hyperbolic expressions of satisfaction and delight with the ruler were intended to bolster the ruler’s sense of self-esteem; this goal, the poet hoped, would not only illustrate the prestige of the Muslim community as a whole but also, on a more practical level, encourage the presentation of largesse to the poet. The great master of the genre, and arguably Arabic’s most illustrious poet, al-Mutanabbī (“He Who Claimed to Be a Prophet”), is quite unsubtle in making this point in a famous ode in praise of the great 10th-century ruler of Aleppo, Sayf al-Dawlah:

To you belongs the praise regarding the pearls that I pronounce;You are the giver, but I am the arranger.

The very continuity of the repertoire of imagery in this genre can be gauged by comparing two lines written more than three centuries apart. The first is by the pre-Islamic poet al-Nābighah addressing his ruler:

You are the sun itself, other monarchs are stars.When your light shines bright, the other stars vanish.

The second is another of al-Mutanabbī’s lines, written after Sayf al-Dawlah was restored to health after illness:

Light is now returned to the sun; previously it was extinguished,As though the lack of it in a body were a kind of disease.

Panegyric was adopted immediately in the cause of Islam. The 6th- and 7th-century poet Ḥassān ibn Thābit, often referred to as “the Prophet’s poet,” composed panegyrics in praise of Muhammad, recording his victories in strident tones and initiating a tradition of poems in praise of the Prophet of Islam that continued throughout the ensuing centuries. With the first dynasty of caliphs, the Umayyads, panegyric became a major propaganda device. The Christian poet al-Akhṭal, for instance, extolled figures who were now not merely spiritual but also temporal rulers:

When nobility and number are taken into account, you hail from a house that has no peer.

This widespread use of panegyric to glorify Islam and its successes through public performances of poems that record the policies and victories of rulers continued into the ʿAbbāsid period. Indeed, with the gradual fragmentation of central authority beginning in the 9th century, the process was enhanced: rival caliphates and dynasties flourished in widely scattered parts of the Islamic world, and around them courts provided venues for the stentorian boasts of poets. The Andalusian poet Ibn Hāniʾ undoubtedly enraged the ʿAbbāsid caliph in Baghdad when he referred to the capture of Cairo by the Fāṭimid dynasty:

“Has Egypt been captured?” the sons of Al-ʿAbbas will ask. Inform themthat indeed the entire matter has been concluded.

As an important source of patronage, the panegyric—now assuming a more bipartite structure, extolling both the state of the people ruled and the glory of the ruler’s own personage—became the major mode of expression in qaṣīdah form until the 20th century. The volumes of collected poetry (divans) of all the greatest poets contain sections devoted to madḥ; beyond those poets mentioned above, a short list of other great classical figures would have to include Bashshār ibn Burd, Abū Tammām, al-Buḥturī, and Abū Firās. With Abū Tammām in particular the panegyric genre became the supreme (or, some critics claimed, the extreme) manifestation of a trend in poetic creativity toward elaboration in imagery and diction that was subsumed under the heading of badīʿ (innovative use of figurative language), a development that rapidly became a primary focus of critical debate.

During the ensuing centuries poets carried on this tradition, and it was not until the second decade of the 20th century that a severe critical analysis by the Egyptian critic ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād of an ode by Egypt’s most illustrious modern poet, Aḥmad Shawqī, suggested that the forms, functions, and imagery of the occasional poem, not to mention the role of the poet, were themselves in a process of change.


Critical analyses of the Arabic poetic tradition point out that the vigorous practice of lampooning is the obverse of panegyric: by verbally flattening one’s foes, the ground is open for the glorification of one’s own tribe or community. The themes of hijāʾ (“lampooning”) and fakhr (“boasting”) thus often occur together, and poets noted above for their contributions to the panegyric were equally at home with the lampoon. Al-Mutanabbī, in particular, is also famous for his withering attacks on Abū al-Misk Kāfūr, the Ethiopian slave who was regent in Egypt in the 10th century. Having quit the court of Sayf al-Dawlah, the poet arrives full of hope and hyperbolic praise:

O father of musk, the visage for which I have been yearning,The precious moment that is my dearest wish.

But, when those hopes are dashed, the poet leaves behind him a set of lampoons that are bywords for the lampoon genre:

Never did I expect to witness a timeWhen a dog could do me ill and be praised for it all the while.

The ability of words to hurt and to shame is present in the Arabic poetic tradition from the outset. The pre-Islamic poet ʿAmr ibn Qamīʾah is specific on the point:

Many’s the tribal bard loaded with hatred whom I have tamed,So his folk have felt belittled and ashamed.

While defeat in battle is, of course, a primary focus of derision in this type of poetry, the honour of the community and the family has resided to a major extent in the protection of its women. Al-Ḥārith ibn Ḥillizah’s contribution to the tribal and poetic joust between himself and ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm, recorded in Al-Muʿallaqāt, demonstrates one form of insult within such a context:

We turned our attention to the Banū Tamīm tribe. As we marked the truce month,Their daughters were our maidservants.

During the Umayyad caliphate, a number of poets indulged in a series of poetic jousts in Al-Mirbad, the central square of the city Al-Baṣrah (Basra). Collected as Al-Naqāʾiḍ (“Flytings”), these contests—involving principally Jarīr and al-Farazdaq but also al-Akhṭal and al-Ṭirimmāh—took the level of invective to new heights (or depths):

Al-Farazdaq’s mother gave birth to a fornicator; what she produced Was a pygmy with stubby legs.

As with panegyric, the instinct for lampoon found no shortage of targets in the ensuing centuries. The great poet Abū Nuwās seems to be aware of the risk he can take when he even teases the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd over a scandal concerning the caliph’s sister:

If you get some pleasure from the removal of some rascal’s head,Do not kill him by sword; marry him to ʿAbbāsah!

While such poetic barbs may have been part of the cut and thrust of political life in the premodern period, the realities of life in the Arabic-speaking world during the 20th century rendered most attempts at lampoon a life-threatening exercise. This, however, did not prevent a courageous figure such as the Iraqi poet Muẓaffar al-Nawwāb from taking potshots at the rulers of Saudi Arabia:

The son of Kaʿbah is having sex.The world’s prices are on hold…

The celebration of the life and courage of a tribal comrade fallen in battle is the occasion for the earliest elegies in Arabic. After an account of the death itself, these elegies include an appreciation of the hero’s virtues, thus providing yet another occasion for the community to express its unifying principles. In her contributions to the genre, al-Khansāʾ mourns the loss of two of her brothers, one named Ṣakhr:

On that day when I was forever parted from Ṣakhr, Ḥassān’s father,I bade farewell to all pleasure and converse.Ah, my grief for him, and my mother’s grief!Is he really consigned to the tomb morning and night?

This combination of personal grief and communal mourning, with its underlying currents of pride and aspiration, survived in the early schisms within the Muslim community during the Islamic period, which came to replicate the conflicts of earlier times. In the elegies of those poets who adhered to groups such as the Shīʿites or the Khārijites can be found much the same spirit. A 7th-century Khārijite poet, for instance, laments Zayd, one of the group’s fallen heroes:

To God I protest that, from every tribe, battle has destroyed the cream of men.So long as the sun shines to the East, may God quench Zayd’s thirst,And grant him a haven in the gardens of Paradise.

Like panegyrics and lampoons, the elegy was adaptable to the expectations of the ever-expanding Muslim community and itself became a further means of public affirmation—mourning the dead, to be sure, but also finding solace in the strength of Islam and its rulers. Poetic divans of all eras are filled with elegies of rulers and important figures. A particular topic of communal mourning is the fall of an entire city to enemy forces. The renowned elegy of the 9th-century poet Ibn al-Rūmī on the fall of Al-Baṣrah to an army of slave labourers is a case in point:

My heart is seared with grief for you, dome of Islam, a grief that extends my agony,My heart is seared with grief for you, haven from distant lands, one that will lingerFor years to come.

The great philosopher-poet Abū al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarrī combines his grief over the loss of a relative with observations on the ephemerality of this life:

Soften your tread. Methinks the earth’s surface is but bodies of the dead,Walk slowly in the air, so you do not trample on the remains of God’s servants.

As human conflicts continued unabated through the 20th century and into the 21st, so the elegy continued to fulfill its generic purposes as an expression of personal sorrow and broader communal grief and steadfastness. Wa-ʿāda…fī kafan (1964; “And He Came Home…in a Shroud”), by the Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh, is a modern example:

In our land they relate,In grief they relate,How my friend who departedCame home in a shroud.His name was…No, don’t mention his name.Leave it in our hearts,Don’t allow the wordTo be swept away by the wind…like ashes.

To these three poetic genres—panegyric, lampoon, and elegy—was added at an early stage another category that was quite different in focus and yet reflected a very vigorous aspect of the Arabic poetic tradition from the outset: description (waṣf). Analysts of the earliest poetry chose to devote particular attention to the ways in which poets depicted animals and other aspects of nature and often indulged in complex patterns of imagery that likened attributes of one animal to those of another. The images of camels and horses—the two mainstays of the tribe’s mobility—of the pre-Islamic poets are justifiably well known. Imruʾ al-Qays describes his horse:

He has the loins of a gazelle, the thighs of an ostrich; he gallops like a wolf and canters like a young fox.

Ṭarafah’s camel is

Sure of foot and firm, as thin as the planks of a bier; I quicken herPace over paths long-trodden, as varied as a striped shirt,Able to outpace the swiftest camels, even of noblest stock,With her hindlegs speeding behind her forelegs along the beaten path.

The scenes and images that are so characteristic of the earliest poems—animals, storm clouds, evenings of revelry, places of recollection of the beloved—linger within the Arabic poetic tradition as a whole, to be invoked by Arab poets in quest of links to a nostalgic, idealized view of the past. In 11th-century Spain, for example, Ibn Khafājah could still return to the images of the Arabian Peninsula for inspiration:

O oryx of Najd, through destiny’s decrees many are the hardships, but few indeed are the loyal.

Spain provides the poet with a very different environment from that of Arabia, of course, and the same Ibn Khafājah could also depict the kind of gardens for which Andalusian palaces (including the Alhambra) are still renowned:

In a garden where the shade was as dark as ruby lips and blossoms grew, as white as pearly teeth.

The strong link in Islam between the garden and paradise ensured that elaborate descriptions of attempts by temporal rulers to replicate within their own palaces the pleasures of the life to come would remain a prominent theme of Arabic poetry. The theme and the imagery were later adopted by the romantic poets of the 20th century, as in ʿAlī Maḥmūd Ṭāhā’s poem Ughniyah rīfiyyah (“Rustic Song”):

As water plays with the shade of the treesAnd clouds flirt with the moonlight…There in the darkness stands a willowAs though unnoticed in the dusk.
Later genres

As the ceremonial qaṣīdah during the Islamic centuries became more and more the realm of panegyric, other themes within the pre-Islamic tradition—wine, hunting, love, and maxims—emerged as separate genres in their own right. At least by the time of Abū Nuwās, who wrote during the 8th and 9th centuries, the collected works of a poet would contain sections that included, among other categories, khamriyyāt (wine poems), ṭardiyyāt (hunt poems), zuhdiyyāt (ascetic poems), and ghazal (love poems).

Wine poetry

The earliest poetry in Arabic contains much description of wine and revelry. The opening lines of the muʿallaqah of ʿAmr ibn Kulthūm are a famous instance:

Up there, maiden, and bring us a morning draught in a goblet;Do not hold back on the prize vintages of ʿAndarīn!

The pre-Islamic poet al-Aʿshā was especially recognized for his wine poetry. As such he became a focus of special attention in a famous work composed by al-Maʿarrī in the 11th century, Risālat al-ghufrān (“The Epistle of Forgiveness”; Eng. trans. Risalat ul GrufranGhufran: A Divine Comedy), in which a sheikh travels to paradise to ascertain the treatment of prominent pre-Islamic figures in the light of Islamic codes of behaviour, and Al-Aʿshā and other pre-Islamic poets are made to justify their graphic depictions of pre-Islamic revelry and wine drinking. The Qurʾān’s injunctions against wine drinking—e.g., sura 5, Al-Māʾidah (“The Table”), verse 90—provide the context of such discussions. These firm injunctions are an expression of Islamic orthodoxy, but the very number of poetic divans that contain sections devoted to wine poetry illustrates the extent to which poetry could be used to confront such religious attitudes. One of the Umayyad caliphs, al-Walīd ibn Yazīd, was a notable wine poet, and the spirit of challenge to orthodoxy reached its height with Abū Nuwās, who, far from concealing his bibulousness, was determined to flaunt it:

Ho, pour me a glass of wine, and confirm that it’s wine!Do not do it in secret, when it can be done in the open.

With Abū Nuwās, the wine poem (khamriyyah) acquires a set of actors—the publican, the companions, the wine pourer (sāqī), the curvaceous wine bottle—all of whom tilt against the fates. The poetry of Abū Nuwās and his successors is a clear challenge to Islamic orthopraxy (correctness of practice), and at the same time it offers a revealing glimpse of the private proclivities of the ruling elite.

This same set of images within the wine poem provides the framework for poetry of an entirely different purpose: that of the Sufi (mystical) poets. While the Persian tradition, with world-renowned figures such as Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī and Ḥāfeẓ, provides peerless examples of the genre, the Egyptian poet and Sufi master Ibn al-Fāriḍ also utilizes the imagery of the genre to great effect. The opening line of his mystical khamriyyah mentions not only wine (now acting as a symbol for the achievement of a transcendent state) but also the ancient theme of the absent beloved. However, the vintage of this particular wine precedes human awareness:

In remembrance of the beloved we drank a wine,Through which we were drunk before the vine was ever created.
Hunt poetry

The many hunt scenes to be found in the earliest Arabic poetry—one of the most notable is in Imruʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqah—illustrate the love of this sport among the Arabs of the desert, one that continues to the present day. As the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah continued to furnish poets during the Islamic period with themes for separate categories of poem, it is to be expected that a separate type of hunt poem (ṭardiyyah) would emerge. Indeed, such were the leisure interests of many of the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid caliphs that the new genre thrived.

In these poems the scene of the morning departure is still present, having been carried over from the opening section (naṣīb) of the qaṣīdah, and the speaker’s companions are the saker falcon (ṣaqr) and the hunting dog. Both are often portrayed in luxuriant detail and often become the poem’s heroes. Abū Nuwās’s divan contains many examples of this category:

When a fox emerges at the foot of the mountain, “Up!” I yell to my hound, and he rushes away like a hero.Brave-hearted he is, a splendid worker, well trained,And perfect in every way.

The caliph, poet, and critic Ibn al-Muʿtazz clearly reflects his personal interests and experience in his own contributions to the hunt poem:

The trainer brought out a lithe saluki-hound that he had often used…,She snatches her prey without hesitation,Just as a mother hugs her children.
Ascetic poetry

The pre-Islamic muʿallaqah poet Zuhayr finishes his long poem recounting tribal warfare and attempts at reconciliation with a series of reflections and maxims:

Life’s experience has taught me the happenings of yesterday and today;As for the morrow, I admit to being totally blind.

The proclivity, often indulged in by the Arab poet, for homiletic advice and contemplation found a fruitful source in not only the Qurʾān’s pointed comments on the ephemerality of this life in comparison with the next (as in, for example, sura 11, Hūd, verses 15–16) but also the Islamic community’s quest for a more individual mode of access to the transcendent. As is the case with other religions, the latter is closely linked to the advocacy of an ascetic life, a call in which the Qurʾānic message is proclaimed by the life and sayings of a figure such as al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī. While many poets contributed to the repertoire of the ascetic poem (zuhdiyyah), it is Abū al-ʿAtāhiyah whose name is most closely associated with the genre. In poem after poem he concentrates on the mortality of humanity; as part of that theme there is frequent allusion to the ubi sunt (Latin: “where are”) motif, asking what has happened to the great historical figures of yesteryear and pointing to their common abode in the grave:

Note well! All of us are dust. Who among humanity is immortal?

With the poetry of al-Maʿarrī, the homiletic aspect is blended with philosophical contemplation and pessimism. For him life is not merely a brief period of preparation for what is to come but an experience of sheer misery. In one of his most famous lines he states:

Would that a babe could die at the hour of its birthAnd never suckle from its mother in her confinement.Before it can even utter a word, it says to her: All you willGlean from me is grief and trouble.

With al-Maʿarrī these expressions of asceticism and rejection of this world and its values were coupled with a vigorously iconoclastic attitude toward Islamic orthodoxy of his time and toward those who advocated its tenets.

Like the hunt poem discussed above, the ascetic poem as a distinct genre seems to have been the product of a particular era in the development of Islamic thought and its expression in literary form. That is not to say, of course, that its motif—an exhortation to abandon the ephemeralities of this world—has not retained its homiletic function in Arabic poetry to the present day, but rather that the theme of humankind’s mortality is now subsumed within poems with a variety of purposes. The modern Egyptian poet Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr, for instance, depicts a rural preacher in his Al-Nās fī bilādī (1957; “The People in My Country”):

So-and-so constructed palaces for himself and raised them up…But one weak-echoed evening arrived the Angel of Death…And down into Hell rolled the soul of So-and-so.
Love poetry

The theme of love has been present in the Arabic poetic tradition since the earliest poems committed to written form. The bulk of the love poetry that has been preserved was composed by male poets and expresses love and admiration for women. (Whatever early tradition there may have been of women’s poetry has not survived, although women have always played a major role in funeral rituals, including the composing and reciting of elegies, for which al-Khansāʾ and Laylā al-Akhyāliyyah are best known.) The examples of a homoerotic tradition of love poetry that have been preserved belong in the main to the later centuries of the classical period, beginning in the 9th century.

The earliest Arabic poems reveal distinctly different attitudes to the theme of love. The desert environment, the nomadic lifestyle, and the need for constant travel all contribute to a poetic vision that focuses on absence, departure, lack, and nostalgia. In the majority of poems the beloved is absent; memories of her belong to the past, and future encounters are dependent on the dictates of fate. During the Islamic period, this desert-inspired approach to love was adapted and transformed into a strand of love poetry called ʿUdhrī, named for the tribe to which the poet Jamīl, one of its best-known practitioners, belonged. In these poems the lover spends a lifetime of absence and longing, pining for the beloved who is tyrannical and cruel (aiming arrows at the heart and eye) and yet remains the object of worship and adoration. ʿUdhrī poetry belongs to a courtly love tradition, and indeed many scholars have suggested it as a precedent to the development of a similar strand in Western literatures during the Middle Ages. The early centuries of recorded Arabic poetry are replete with collections of poetry written by ʿUdhrī poets, all of whom are known by a name that incorporates their beloved’s: Jamīl Buthaynah, Majnūn Laylā, Kuthayyir ʿAzzah; the story of Majnūn in particular became the subject of folkloric narratives and other artistic media, such as miniature painting, drama, and song.

Alongside this attitude to love in early poetry, however, there is in the muʿallaqah of Imruʾ al-Qays a much different one, in which the poet’s persona is engaged in encounters with the fair sex that are considerably different:

One day I entered ʿUnayzah’s camel-litter:“Damn you!” she protested, “you’ll force me to dismount.”The litter kept swaying all the while. “You have hobbled my camel, Imruʾ al-Qays,” she said, “so dismount now!”

Imruʾ al-Qays poem is a clear precedent to another strand of love poetry that emerged in Arabia’s urban centres (including the city of Mecca) early in the Islamic era. It is termed ʿUmarī, named for the poet ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿah, whose poems reveal much closer contact with the beloved and reflect a strongly narcissistic attitude on the part of the poem’s speaker.

With the passage of time, elements from these two strands were blended into a unified tradition of the Arabic love poem (ghazal); images from the ʿUdhrī repertoire were particularly favoured by the Sufi poets in their mystical verses. Al-Bashshār ibn Burd’s divan contains love poems of both types, but it is once again Abū Nuwās who makes major innovative contributions. His love poetry affords insight into the tolerant approach of ʿAbbāsid society to varying sexualities, as he composes verses involving homosexual and bisexual relationships:

“Hello,” said the Devil swooping down. “Greetings to onewhose penitence is sheer delusion!…What about a sensuous virgin-girl with wonderful breasts?”….“No!” I replied. “Then what about a beardless youth, onewhose plump buttocks are all aquiver?”….“No!” I replied again….

The genres of zajal and muwashshaḥ that originated in Muslim Spain had love as their primary theme. Often blending both ʿUmarī and ʿUdhrī themes with songs and popular poems in Romance dialects, they present a blend of images and motifs that is representative of the cultural environment in which they were created.

Unlike some of the other genres already mentioned, the ghazal has remained popular into the modern period. While the romantic movement in the early 20th century provided an impetus for many poets, the quest for new identities in postindependence societies and, in particular, the increasing prominence of works by women produced significant change in Arabic love poetry. The Syrian diplomat and poet Nizār Qabbānī managed in a single career to become the Arab world’s primary love poet and a commentator on political controversies:

Ah, my love!What is this nation of ours that can treat love like a policeman?

The Kuwaiti poet Suʿād al-Ṣabāḥ expresses her frustration with the continued echoes of the earlier tradition:

I’m bored by ghazal of the dead… Sitting down for dinner each night…With Jamīl Buthaynah…Please try to deviate from the text just a littleAnd invent me.
Modern Arabic poetry

The penetration of poetry into the fabric of Arab-Islamic society in the premodern era was a major factor in the continuing vigour that the neoclassical school was to display well into the 20th century. Al-ʿAqqād’s criticism of an ode by Aḥmad Shawqī (see above Genres and themes: Panegyric) and the popularity of the odes of Badawī al-Jabal and Muḥammad al-Jawāhirī reflect a trend that retained its position alongside the new initiatives in imagery and mood fostered by romantic poets such as Khalīl Jubrān (more commonly known in the West as Khalil Gibran), Īliyyā Abū Māḍī, Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābbī, and ʿAlī Maḥmūd Ṭāhā.

The major break with tradition and, many critics would maintain, the onset of a genuine sense of modernity came in the aftermath of World War II. The quest for independence and the creation of the State of Israel were two political factors that, along with many others, stimulated a cry for a more “committed” approach to literature, with poetry fulfilling a central social function in such a context. The metrical experiments undertaken by the Iraqi poets Nāzik al-Malāʾikah and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb in the 1940s, combined with the translation into Arabic of the Middle Eastern segments of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, were more aesthetically based stimuli to the development of an entirely new outlook on the form and content of the poem and the role of the poet.

The Palestinian people were a continuing source of inspiration for politically committed poets across the Arab world during the second half of the 20th century, especially for Palestinian poets. Tawfīq Zayyād, Fadwā Ṭūqān, Samīḥ al-Qāsim, and Rāshid Ḥusayn all addressed themselves to the injustices they saw in Palestinian daily life. But Maḥmūd Darwīsh’s poetry, penned during a lengthy career that continued into the 21st century, best encapsulates the fate of his fellow Palestinians through vivid depictions of their losses, their defiance, and their aspirations. Other poets, such as the Iraqi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī, expressed their commitment to the cause of revolutionary change on a broader canvas, a posture that led al-Bayātī (like so many other modern Arab poets) to a life of exile far from his homeland.

The 1950s in the cosmopolitan city of Beirut witnessed the creation of the poetry group Shiʿr (“Poetry”), whose magazine of the same name was an influential organ of change. At the core of this group were Yūsuf al-Khāl and Adonis (the pen name of ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd), arguably the most influential figure in modern Arabic poetry. In its radical approach to poetic form (including the prose poem) and its experiments with language and imagery, this group was emblematic of the many new directions that Arabic poetry was to follow in the latter half of the 20th century. Poets such as the Lebanese Khalīl Ḥawī and the Egyptian Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr, both as well acquainted with the classical canon of Arabic poetry as they were with recent trends in the West, left behind them divans that, like that of al-Sayyāb, are already acknowledged as 20th-century classics of Arabic poetry.

While Adonis continued with his experiments in every aspect of his art, an entire generation of poets across the Arabic-speaking world at the turn of the 21st century were taking poetry in a variety of new directions. Among the notable poets were the Syrian Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ, the Moroccan Muḥammad Bannīs, the Iraqi Saʿdī Yūsuf, and the Egyptians Muḥammad ʿAfīfī Maṭar and Amal Dunqul. In the 21st-century world of global communication and of television, video, and the Internet, Arabic poetry struggled to find a place within the public domain, but, when political crises loomed, it was the voice of the poet that continued to express the conscience, the agony, and the aspirations of the Arab people.

Belles lettres and narrative prose

As has been the case with many world cultures, the emergence of a tradition of belles lettres in Arabic is closely linked to the bureaucratic class and its quest for professional identity. In the case of Arabic literature, that process finds its beginnings in the Umayyad caliphal court during the 8th century. Earlier “nonpoetic” texts do, of course, exist, but for a number of reasons they are best considered as precedents to the tradition that was to develop.

The revelation of the Qurʾān not only involved a process of recording, compilation, and verification but also established a clear textual boundary; it was neither poetry nor prose but the inimitable Qurʾān. The fact that the Qurʾān showed most of the features of a characteristic form of pre-Islamic discourse known as sajʿ (usually translated as “rhyming prose” but almost certainly a very early form of poetic expression) complicated matters considerably, in that some of the earliest extant Arabic materials consist of the utterances of soothsayers (kuhhān) couched in precisely the same form of discourse. The similarities between the suras, particularly the earlier ones, of the Qurʾān and these other types of homiletic texts were tactfully ignored for several centuries, leaving the phenomenon of sajʿ in a kind of critical limbo—heavily utilized but historically unanalyzed.

Alongside these earliest examples of “prose,” a number of official documents have also survived in the form of treaties and the like. Also recorded were accounts of the pre-Islamic peninsular tribes and especially of their great battles. These latter accounts, the so-called Ayyām al-ʿArab (“Battle Days of the Arabs”; the term is also applied to the battles themselves), were couched in a particular format that was an indigenous characteristic of the anecdote, the generic title of which is khabar (“report”). The first segment in this format consisted of the isnād (“chain of authority”), which used a variety of verbs to register the type of narrative involved and, most significantly, established the level of the report’s veracity by listing the names of transmitters back to the source. This initial segment was then followed by the matn (“backbone,” or the content of the report). As the community of Muslims set itself to record not only the Qurʾān itself but the deeds and sayings of Muhammad, reports of this kind were collected, categorized, and sifted, thus initiating a vast exercise in history, genealogy, critical analysis, and anthologizing.

The most authentic reports were gathered into collections of Ḥadīth, accounts of the Prophet’s sayings and actions. The best-authenticated reports became part of two collections, both called the Ṣaḥīḥ, compiled by al-Bukhārī and Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, which together are the second most important source of Islamic law and practice after the Qurʾān itself. These reports also became part of the collections of maghāzī (accounts of the Prophet’s raids during his lifetime) and sīrah (biographies of the Prophet). Beyond these specific genres, however, the logical structure of the khabar was replicated in a wide variety of other generic contexts. It is even possible to see the maqāmah genre (see below The concept of adab: Narratives of the imagination) as a pastiche of the khabar’s narrative principles.

The concept of adab

A major feature of premodern prose literature in Arabic was adab, a term that in modern usage is translated as “literature” but that in origin is closely connected with the English concept of “polite letters” and the French term belles-lettres, both of which imply a close linkage between the act of writing and the manners and norms of a community. In the case of Arabic, that community consisted of a number of functionaries of the Islamic court and, especially, bureaucrats and chancery officials. With the elaboration of caliphal and other varieties of court life, the adīb (“litterateur”), the practitioner of adab, joined forces with the nadīm (“boon companion”) and the ẓarīf (“arbiter of taste and fashion”) in providing both enlightenment and entertainment for the ruler. In the particular case of adab, the initial priorities involved the preparation of codes of conduct and practice for the increasingly large secretariat, which was growing in conjunction with the administrative needs of the ever-expanding Islamic dominions, and of useful (and often diverting) materials with which they could fulfill the demands of their profession. A major part of the resulting repertoire of works is a tradition of practical manuals, monographs, and compilations of information of every conceivable type. All these genres combined into the development of a field of study that was to become extremely influential in the educational life of the Muslim community.

Alongside these trends there was also an ongoing process whereby speakers and writers of other languages who became Muslims and worked in the various offices of the court translated works into Arabic. A major early contributor to this process was an 8th-century Persian scholar, Rūzbih, who adopted the Arabic name Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. He translated from the Persian a collection of animal fables about kingship, the Panchatantra (a work of Indian origin), which he titled in Arabic Kalīlah wa Dimnah (“Kalīlah and Dimnah”); its narrative method and its particular style were among its contributions to the development of a new secretarial mode of composition. He also composed a manual for secretaries, Kitāb ādāb al-kabīr (“The Major Work on Secretarial Etiquette”). At a later date, another translation movement, much encouraged by the ʿAbbasīd caliph al-Maʾmūn, rendered much of the Hellenistic heritage from Greek, often via Syriac, into Arabic, the products of which were stored in the great Baghdad library Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”). The beginnings of a tradition of epistle composition are associated with ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, known as al-Kātib (“The Secretary”), who in the 8th century composed a work for the son of one of the Umayyad caliphs on the proper conduct of rulers.

The intellectual issues reflected in the varied compositions of the secretarial class, all of which were vigorously debated within the new multicultural environment of the caliphal court, were to be brought to new levels of sophistication in the 9th century by one of Arabic literature’s greatest figures, ʿAmr ibn Baḥr, whose physical ugliness led him to be forever known by the nickname al-Jāḥiẓ (“The Man with Boggling Eyes”).

Al-Jāḥiẓ and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī

Al-Jāḥiẓ earned a reputation in his own lifetime as a prodigious polymath, and the breadth of his learning is reflected in the listing of his works. He compiled anthologies of poetry and anecdote about animals (Kitāb al-ḥayawān) and misers (Kitāb al-bukhalāʾ), and he wrote essays (rasā’il) on every conceivable topic (on theological controversies, on race and colour, on envy, on food, on speech, and so on). He also wrote a highly influential work of early criticism, Kitāb al-bayān wa al-tabyīn (“Book of Clarity and Clarification”). Apart from sheer erudition and a delight in controversy, what sets al-Jāḥiẓ’s works apart is, first, his total mastery of a clear and concise Arabic style that reflected the new influences on the Muslim community and, second, a great predilection for digression—a reflection, no doubt, of the apparently limitless nature of his curiosity and memory. The following brief extract illustrates some of these aspects of his craft:

Discourse, just like people, can be subcategorized. It may be serious or trivial, elegant and fine, or else crude and nasty, either amusing or the opposite. It is all Arabic…. As far as I am concerned, no speech on earth is as enjoyable and useful, as elegant and sweet to the ear, as closely linked to sound intellect, as liberating for the tongue, and as beneficial for the improvement of diction as a lengthy process of listening to the way that eloquent, learned, and intelligent Bedouin talk.

Even during al-Jāḥiẓ’s lifetime the extent of his erudition and genius was widely recognized, and his achievements were deemed virtually unattainable. In later generations one prominent figure, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, whose turbulent life is an apt reflection of the vicissitudes of court patronage during the 10th and 11th centuries, provides another example of virtuosic prose and breadth of interest. His extreme self-criticism led him to destroy some of his writings, but his renowned anthology of anecdotes, Kitāb al-imtāʾ wa al-muʾānasah (“Book of Enjoyment and Bonhomie”), and his often scurrilous commentary on cultural and political infighting, Kitāb mathālib al-wazīrayn (“Book on the Foibles of the Two Ministers”), provide ample justification for his reputation as one of Arabic’s greatest stylists.

Varieties of adab: compilations, anthologies, and manuals

While al-Jāḥiẓ and al-Tawḥīdī represent the higher achievements of those who practiced the arts and subgenres of adab, many other court officials, bureaucrats, and arbiters of public discourse contributed to a continuing process whereby information, opinion, and entertainment were placed at the disposal of the educated elite of the courts within the Islamic dominions. Ibn Qutaybah followed the early example of ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in preparing manuals on scribal practice and etiquette, but he also played a major role in laying the groundwork for further research in a number of fields, including the meaning of the Qurʾān, orthodoxy, and the principles of historical writing. In the context of compilation, his most notable achievement is the multivolume work Kitāb ʿuyūn al-akhbār (“Book of Springs of Information,” or “Book of Choice Narratives”), which, as its title implies, intended to make available to its readers information and anecdote on a wide variety of topics (eloquence, for example, as well as friendship, asceticism, and a final section on women). This large anthology is one of the earliest examples of compilations of the curious yet engaging variety of materials that was characteristic of the literary salons (majālis) gracing the life of the court. It is an apt reflection of the enormous demand for enlightening and entertaining information that was a feature of the lifestyle of the educated elite within the urban communities of the Muslim world. Through the ensuing centuries, such works continued to constitute a primary activity for the community of litterateurs. Among the major contributors to the genre were al-ThāʿalibīThaʿālibī, al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, and Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmud ibn ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī. Another major contributor, al-Tanūkhī, also compiled a collection that is an example of the al-faraj baʿd al-shiddah (“escape from hardship”) genre, which involves sequences of anecdotes in which people find release from difficult situations, often at the very last minute and as a result of the generosity of others. A still later work by al-Qalqashandī, the 15th-century Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (“The Dawn of the Blind”), approaches Ibn Qutaybah’s in its compendiousness, but its practical bent makes it a kind of comprehensive summary of the secretarial manual genre.

The same instinct for compilation can be seen in a number of famous collections that focus in particular on the “literary” genres of poetry and anecdotal narrative. An early example is the Andalusian Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih’s Al-ʿIqd al-Farīd (“The Unique Necklace”), in which each section is named after a precious jewel, and, most celebrated of all, the Kitāb al-aghānī (“Books of Songs”) of Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (al-Iṣfahānī), a major source on Arabic poetry and poets as well as performance practice.

There were also rasāʾil (essays) devoted to particular topics. In addition to his works on animals and misers, for example, al-Jāḥiẓ also took singing girls as his topic in Risālat al-qiyān (The Epistle on Singing-Girls of Jāḥiẓ). Other topics ranged from complex discussions of theology and philosophy to the ethics of begging and gate-crashing social events. The theme of love was especially popular, and a wide variety of intellectuals focused their attention on it. The Andalusian jurist and poet Ibn Ḥazm, for example, wrote his Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah (“Dove’s Neckring”), a charmingly intimate portrait of social intercourse within the Islamic community of the 11th century, while Ibn al-Jawzī contributed his Dhamm al-hawā (“Condemnation of Passion”), a preacher’s warning concerning the perils of passion. Sheikh al-Nafzāwī’s Al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir fī nuzhat al-khāṭir (“The Perfumed Garden Concerning the Heart’s Delights”) is, thanks to the interest of Sir Richard Burton (who translated it under the title The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui), widely known in the English-speaking world as a classic among sex manuals.

As is the case within the Western literary traditions, the category of “literature” in the premodern period of the Arabic heritage was not restricted to belles lettres alone; it also included such genres as biography and history. Indeed, the presence of such “nonliterary” genres is a distinct characteristic of the phenomenon of adab. At the turn of the 21st century, research into the textual functions of narratives increasingly subjected these genres to types of analysis that had traditionally been reserved for literary works. Some categories of historical and geographical writing (particularly annalistic versions of the former, for example, and urban topographies within the latter) remained beyond the attention of narratologists, but they too are works that clearly fall within the boundaries of adab. Especially notable among historical writing is al-Masʿūdī’s Murūj al-dhahab wa maʿadin maʿādin al-jawāhir (“The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems”), in which he traces the history of the world up to his own time and shows remarkable knowledge of myth, geography, and history. The tradition of writing histories of enormous scope continued throughout the ensuing centuries, with famous contributions by Ibn Miskawayh, Ibn al-Athīr, Ibn Kathīr, and the world-renowned Ibn Khaldūn, whose introduction to his history Al-Muqaddimah is generally acknowledged as a major milestone in the theorization of historical studies. His geographical works range from the listing of postal routes to detailed descriptions of countries and, at a later stage, cities.

The institution of the journey is, thanks to the institution of the pilgrimage (hajj) that is enjoined upon all healthy Muslims at least once in their lifetime, the inspiration for a school of travel narrative, a genre for which the Arabs are well known (and of which the series of tales recounted by Sindbad the Sailor, a late addition to The Thousand and One Nights, is an apt reflection). In 921 Ibn Faḍlān was dispatched by the caliph in Baghdad to visit the peoples of the Volga River region, but the records of two travelers from the Maghrib best reveal the hardships of such lengthy travels. Ibn Jubayr traveled from Granada to Mecca to perform the pilgrimage; his Riḥlah (“Travels”; Eng. trans. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr) is a somewhat hyperbolic account of the curiosities he encountered. Ibn Baṭṭūṭah initially traveled from Tangier to Mecca for the same purposes but, after spending a period in Mecca, decided to continue on. He traveled all the way to China before making his way back to his native city. His Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾib al-amṣār wa ʿajāʾib al-asfār (“Beholder’s Delight Concerning Strange Cities and Incredible Travels”), commonly known by the title Riḥlah, is thus not merely a treasure trove of information and insight but a thoroughly engaging narrative.

Narratives of the imagination

A number of prominent Arab litterateurs composed narratives involving travel into the worlds of the imagination. The 11th-century Andalusian poet Ibn Shuhayd, for example, utilized his Risālat al-tawābiʿ wa al-zawābiʿ (“Epistle on Familiar Spirits and Demons”) to converse with the spirits of his poetic forebears, and his contemporary al-Maʿarrī adopted the same narrative strategy in the Risālat al-ghufrān. On a more philosophical and mystical plane, another Andalusian writer, Ibn Ṭufayl, followed the lead of his illustrious predecessor Ibn Sīnā (known in the West as Avicenna) by writing the allegory of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Wakeful”; Eng. trans. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓan by Ibn Ṭufayl), concerning a man who is born on an island by spontaneous generation, learns to appreciate the natural world he lives in, and, having traveled to another island where he encounters other humans and their various systems of living and believing, decides to return to a life of contemplation on his own island.

One narrative genre that is specific to the Arabic literary tradition is the maqāmah, a form of narrative that emerged out of several already existing trends. Following the works of al-Jāḥiẓ, one strand in Arabic prose style, influenced by the same aesthetic principles as had driven the badīʿ trend in poetry, relished elaboration and its concomitant patterns of repetition and assonance. During the 10th century, at the court of Rayy, in Iran, the celebrated minister and arbiter of taste al-Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād gathered around him a remarkable cluster of great writers in numerous fields; the prolific and versatile al-Tawḥīdī could manage only the lowly rank of scribe in such a coterie. A notable practitioner of this new trend was Abū al-Faḍl ibn al-ʿAmīd, but it was another visitor to this court, al-Hamadhānī, who managed to combine the new aesthetics of style—especially the adoption of sajʿ, the ancient form of rhyming prose—with attractive vignettes of social and intellectual life into a totally new genre, the maqāmah, earning for himself the title of “Badīʿ al-Zamān” (“Wonder of the Age”). Developed by his great successor al-Ḥarīrī into a vehicle for tremendous feats of stylistic virtuosity, the maqāmah genre was a much-favoured mode of prose expression for the intellectual elite of the Arabic-speaking world until the latter half of the 20th century.

Popular narratives

To a Western world for which The Thousand and One Nights has long since become a classic of world narrative, it is something of a surprise to learn that attitudes within Arab societies toward appropriateness of language use and performance mode have excluded that collection and a host of other huge compilations of narrative from the Arabic literary canon. Intense Western interest in the collection followed its translation into French by Antoine Galland (published between 1704 and 1717) and resulted in the addition of numerous tales to the original collection, which includes fewer than 170, and in the subsequent publication of “complete” versions. But it was only in the late 20th century that the advent of social-scientific modes of research moved beyond questions of “sources” and engaged in serious investigation of the narrative features of these collections.

Until the advent of broadcast media, the ḥakawātī (storyteller) remained a major fixture of Arabic-speaking countries, choosing a select spot either in the open air of evening or in a café from which to recite episodes from some of the great sagas of Arab lore (in Arabic, siyar shaʿbiyyah). These include the exploits of the legendary poet-cavalier ʿAntar (see Romance of ʿAntar), the much-traveled tribal confederacy of the Banū Hilāl, the warrior-princess Dhāt al-Himmah, and the wily ʿAlī Zaybaq. In the context of such a public tradition of multi-episodic storytelling, the status of The Thousand and One Nights within Arabic literature is difficult to assess, since it seems to have started as a much shorter contribution to the “mirror for princes” genre—collections of exemplary fables intended to illustrate the principles of proper kingship—before Western interest led to its rapid expansion into its current form.

Whatever attitudes may prevail regarding the canonical status of these enormous collections of narrative, they have served as inspiration and as models not only for writers of modern fiction but also for numerous experiments in drama. While the public function of the storytellers may have disappeared from most countries of the Arabic-speaking world, the collections of tales that they performed remain as a remarkable treasure trove of world narrative.

Modern fiction

The development of modern Arabic fiction took place within a cultural context in which two major forces were in play and sometimes in confrontation. The first of them is what has been termed “the rediscovery of the West”—more particularly, an interest in the products and critical methods of Western literary traditions. The second is a search for inspiration in the Arabic literary heritage. At different phases of the long process generally referred to as al-nahḍah (“the renaissance”; see Arabic literary renaissance), which began at different times within the large area that is the Arab world, the relative importance of these two forces shifted, but both were (and remain) constants.

During the earliest phases, the influence of Europe and its literary heritage was very strong, with Arab writers impelled by the need to address the realities of European colonization in large portions of the Middle East. Inhabitants of the region initiated or renewed contacts with the countries to the north and west: Italy first and then France. Missions of students sent to study language and technology returned and commenced the process of translating texts into Arabic. At first those texts were mostly of a practical nature (such as military and engineering manuals), but the proclivities of many of the translators insured that works of literature were soon added to the repertoire of available texts. The process of introducing these new genres to an Arab world readership from the outset relied to a substantial extent on publication opportunities afforded by the press: daily newspapers (especially the Friday edition) and specialized weekly and monthly journals.

The short story

While the short story was not the first fictional genre to make its appearance during the course of the 19th century, it certainly was the first to adapt itself to a new cultural environment, as writers set about using it as a means of illustrating social problems. The pages of the press permitted early Egyptian pioneers in short narrative such as ʿAbd Allāh Nadīm and Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī to publish vignettes in which they cast a critical eye on the habits and foibles of their fellow countrymen, while in Lebanon Khalīl Jubrān (Khalil Gibran) and later Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿaymah analyzed the problems of family life and broader societal issues—the role of the clergy, problems of emigration, the crushing effects of city life, and so on.

A major advance in short-story writing occurred in the early and mid-20th century with a group of Egyptian writers who became known as Jamāʿat al-Madrasah Ḥadīthah (“New School Group”). The pioneer figure of the school, Muḥammad Taymūr, died at an early age, but the other members of the group elaborated on his efforts and brought the genre to a level of real maturity: if Muḥammad’s brother Maḥmūd Taymūr was certainly the most prolific, both Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī and Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Lāshīn were the most accomplished craftsmen.

While Egyptian writers continued to advance the generic prominence of the short story, writers in other regions—albeit with differing chronologies—developed their own local traditions; these include the Palestinian Khalīl Baydas, the Tunisian ʿAlī al-Duʿājī, the Iraqi Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb, and the Lebanese Tawfīq Yūsuf ʿAwwād. With the increasing emergence of women into the public domain (once again a variable phenomenon across countries), women writers began to contribute short stories that provided new insights into issues of family and society; among such pioneers are Suhayr al-Qalamāwī of Egypt, Ulfat Idilbī of Syria, and Samīrah ʿAzzām of Palestine.

Two writers, by their concentration on the art of the short story, have come to be widely acknowledged as genuine masters of their craft: Yūsuf Idrīs of Egypt and Zakariyyā Tāmir of Syria. Beginning a writing career in the 1950s with an outpouring of story collections, Idrīs—who wrote plays and novels, as well as publishing many more story collections in the last half of the 20th century—managed to recount in his vignettes the realities of the life of the poor, primarily in the Egyptian countryside but also in the ancient quarters of Cairo. As political oppression began to impinge upon the daily life of Egyptians, Idrīs added to his authentic visions a series of new and symbolic portrayals of oppression and alienation that encapsulated an entire era in contemporary Arab societies. Zakariyyā Tāmir’s contributions to the genre tend to be concerned with a highly terse and symbolic representation of the callous indifference of authority and bureaucracy, often expressed through nightmarish visions of violence, both verbal and physical.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the short story was by far the most popular literary genre in the Arab world; for nonprofessional writers it was a relatively short-term project with the prospect of many publication outlets, and for readers it provided an opportunity to interpret a brief expression of contemporary concerns, both social and political. The short story was also on frequent occasions readily adaptable to the more lucrative and increasingly available alternatives of film and television. A very short list of distinguished contributors to the genre would include Aḥmad Būzufūr (Būzfūr) of Morocco, Ḥasan Naṣr of Tunisia, Ḥaydar Ḥaydar of Syria, Fuʾād al-Tikirlī and Muḥammad Khuḍayyir of Iraq, Laylā al-ʿUthmān of Kuwait, and Yaḥyā al-Ṭāhir ʿAbdallāh, Muḥammad al-Bisāṭī, Salwā Bakr, and Ibrāhīm Aṣlān of Egypt.

The novel

Through the popularity of early translations into Arabic of works of European fiction (Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, Père, and Jules Verne père being especially popular) and imitations of them by Arab writers, the novel rapidly established a place for itself within the currents of intellectual change during the 19th century. Among the earliest examples of the novel in Arabic were Ghābat al-ḥaqq (1865; “Forest of Truth”), an idealistic allegory about freedom that was published in Syria by Fransīs Marrāsh, and Al-Huyām fī jinān al-shām (1870; “Passion in Syrian Gardens”), a work set during the 7th-century Islamic conquest of Syria, by Salīm al-Bustānī. The latter work appeared in serial form in the Bustānī family’s journal, Al-Jinān, and this publication mode established a pattern that was to be followed by writers of Arabic fiction for many subsequent decades. Premodern history also came to be frequently invoked in the Arabic novel. This trend found a notable exponent in Jurjī Zaydān, who used the pages of his own journal, Al-Hilāl, to publish a series of novels that educated and entertained generations of readers by setting key events in Islamic history against local backgrounds.

Alongside these early efforts in novel writing, a neoclassical strand of narrative became evident, one that focused in particular on the classical genre of the maqāmah. Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī’s Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn (1856; “The Meeting Place of the Two Seas”) is a conscious revival of the style and generic purpose of earlier examples, but Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s Al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq sāq fī mā Huwa huwa al-Fāryāq (1855; title translatable as “One Leg over Another ,” “The [or The Pigeon on the Tree Branch,” or “Concerning ], Concerning al-Fāryāq [Fāris al-Shidyāq”Shidyāq]”), which contains a set of maqāmāt, looks to the future in its use of the autobiographical travel narrative (and its incorporation of a female voice) as a means to compare and criticize contemporary societies. Those critical features are even more marked in another neoclassical and transitional narrative, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (1907; "Īsā ibn Hishām’s Tale”), a highly sarcastic account of turn-of-the-century Egypt under British occupation.

As is to be expected, the importation and adaptation of the novel genre in the Arabic-speaking world involved a longer process than that of the short story. While the developmental sequence was relatively similar within each subregion, the chronology was not. Thus, an important moment in the Egyptian tradition was the initially anonymous publication in 1913 of a novel, Zaynab (Eng. trans. Mohammed Hussein Haikal’s Zainab), by “a peasant Egyptian.” It presents the reader with a thoroughly nostalgic picture of the Egyptian countryside, which serves as the backdrop for the fervent advocacy of the need for women’s education. The author, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, had written the work while studying in France, and the influence of a variety of European Romantic narrative traditions is very clear. Elsewhere within the region, novel writing was initiated at a later date: in Iraq by Maḥmūd Aḥmad al-Sayyid with Fī sabīl al-zawāj (1921; “On the Marriage Path”); in Algeria by Aḥmad Riḍā Hūhū with Ghādat umm al-qurā (1947; “Maid of the City”); and in Morocco by ʿAbd al-Majīd ibn Jallūn with Fī al-ṭufūlah (1957; “In Childhood”).

The confluence of a series of political, social, and critical trends in the Arab world—the development of nationalist ideas, which gave rise to a quest for independence from colonial occupation and a new sense of identity, coupled with developments in education and a concomitant interest in other literary traditions—resulted in a concentration of creative energy on the novel during the 1930s. The process may be seen as beginning with the appearance of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s fictionalized autobiography, Al-Ayyām (3 parts, 1929–67; The Days), and the republication of Haykal’s Zaynab in 1929. The following decade saw the appearance of works by Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (notably ʿAwdat al-rūḥ [1933; Return of the Spirit] and Yawmiyyāt nāʾib fī al-aryāf [1937; “Diary of a Country Prosecutor”; Eng. trans. The Maze of Justice]), Ibrāhīm al-Māzinī, ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād, Maḥmūd Taymūr, and Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Lāshīn. Much influenced by these important literary figures, a young philosophy graduate from Cairo University began to explore the novel genre, and in 1939 the first novel of Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb Maḥfūẓ) appeared, a historical novel set in ancient Egypt entitled ʿAbath al-aqdār (“Fates’ Mockery”).

Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is acknowledged as the writer who brought the Arabic novel to a stage of complete maturity and acceptance within the Arabic-speaking world. Over his lengthy career he experimented with technique in a variety of ways. He started with the social realism of his “quarters” novels, each one set in a different section (quarter) of the old city of Cairo, which culminated in the justly famous Cairo Trilogy of the late 1950s (1956–57). He then turned to a more symbolic mode in his novels of the 1960s (with examples such as Al-Liṣṣ wa al-kilāb [1961; The Thief and The Dogs] and Thartharah fawq al-Nīl [1966; “Chatter on the Nile”]). Thereafter he participated with the members of a younger novelistic generation in a variety of explorations of newer modes and styles while still casting a critical eye on developments in his own homeland and reflecting on the major issues confronting the citizens of the Third World.

Like the short story, the novel genre now flourishes throughout the Arab world; the demands of time and expense in both creation and publication may make the novel somewhat less plentiful than the short story, but to the Egyptian critic Jābir ʿUṣfur, the beginning of the 21st century marked “the era of the novel,” to cite the title of his book Zamān al-riwāyah (1999). (For a list of notable novels that have been published in English, see Sidebar: Arabic Novels in English Translation.)


As the most public of genres, drama always presents the literary historian with a rich blend of exemplars and issues. When the textual forms, language levels, and publics are as varied as those of the Arabic-speaking world, the topic becomes particularly complex. One might begin by pointing out that, in the first decade of the 21st century, theatre was not present in some Arab-world countries governed by conservative regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, and was a new phenomenon in others, such as the countries of the Persian Gulf. In many other countries where drama was permitted, every aspect of production was subject to the closest scrutiny by censorship authorities (known as lajnat al-qirāʾah). These practical issues aside, modern Arabic drama continued to exist in a cultural milieu in which there was ongoing tension between the perceived tastes (and concomitant financial support) of elite and popular audiences and between the differing aesthetic criteria applied to productions in the standard written (literary) language and the colloquial dialects. Drama and its practitioners also found themselves confronted with the popularity and global reach of rival media—film, television, and video, all of which tended to have recourse to the same set of performers. If drama in the West found itself similarly challenged, this was much more the case in a number of Arabic-speaking regions where a tradition of literary drama was barely a century old.


It has become customary to trace the beginnings of modern Arabic drama entirely to Western influence, as part of the process of al-nahḍah (“the renaissance”) noted above. Any search for a library of textual precedents in Arabic drama that would be analogous to the Western canon—from Greek tragedy, via William Shakespeare and the French tragedians Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, to such 20th-century playwrights as Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht—would be in vain, as would any attempt to identify a tradition of theatre buildings and companies that would parallel that of the West. However, in the history of Western culture, drama’s performance boundaries also extend beyond such a canon, which is limited to those texts performed within a theatre and reliant on the expectations and conventions of such a space; one need think only of the cycles of religious plays associated with many European cities (such as the Chester plays and York plays of England).

Within this more comprehensive view of the history of drama, the premodern era offers many examples of similar public performance genres in Arabic. The storyteller (ḥakawātī) regularly performed extracts from a whole series of popular narrative sagas on the street, often accompanied by musical instruments; his tales related, for example, the chivalry of ʿAntar or the migration of the Banū Hilāl tribe and its hero, Abū Zayd, or the victories of the sultan Baybars against the Crusaders. During the Shīʿite holy month of Muharram, Muslims processed through the streets, reenacting the events of the Battle of Karbalāʾ (680 CE), during which the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī was killed. Cafés and other public places also provided venues for shadow plays (khayāl al-ẓill), which regularly poked fun at the foibles of politicians and bureaucrats. Especially during the period of Ottoman control over large portions of the Arabic-speaking world, the Karagöz puppet show was a prevalent popular source of public entertainment, much like its Western analogue, the Punch-and-Judy play. All these different types of public dramatic events retained their popularity throughout the premodern era and remained a source of inspiration for playwrights into the modern period, particularly for those who endeavoured to combine some of the effects of Brechtian dramatic theory with a search into the heritage of the Arab past for inspiration.

In addition to all the above manifestations of the dramatic in the premodern era, the written texts for a series of 13th-century plays by the Egyptian oculist Ibn Dāniyāl have survived. Because the author’s preface notes that these “new” plays were intended to replace a series of other scripts that had become hackneyed, it seems likely that the performance tradition into which they were intended to fit had been in existence for some time. Ibn Dāniyāl’s examples probably reflect the general spirit of the genre in that they are bawdy farces, full of slapstick incident and scatological reference; the chief character in one of the plays, Ṭayf al-Khayāl, is al-Amīr Wiṣāl, translatable as Prince Intercourse.

Literary drama

In 1847 Mārūn al-Naqqāsh, who had recently returned from a stay in Italy, obtained permission from the Ottoman authorities in Syria to produce in his house Al-Bakhīl, a play inspired by Molière’s drama L’Avare. Most of the actors involved either were members of his family or were friends. While there are reports of earlier performances by visiting European theatre troupes, this performance is generally regarded as the beginning of the modern Arabic tradition of staged performance of text-based drama. These early beginnings in Syria were among the many social and cultural phenomena in that region that were disrupted by the civil war that erupted in the 1860s. The Naqqāsh family troupe and others moved to Egypt, where the cultural and political atmosphere was more conducive to theatre; prominent among the other troupes was that of Abū Khalīl al-Qabbānī, whose performances in Damascus had been censored and even canceled after complaints from the conservative Islamic establishment. The theatrical scene that these Syrian émigrés encountered in Egypt was both lively and varied. To perform his dramas in the colloquial dialect, the Egyptian Jewish playwright Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿ had assembled a troupe that attracted the attention of the khedive of Egypt, Ismāʿil, who encouraged Ṣannūʿ to produce more—until, that is, he discovered that he himself was the butt of some of the humour. Alongside such popular fare, the translator Muḥammad ʿUthmān Jalāl “Egyptianized” several plays by Molière, including, most famously, a version of Tartuffe, Al-Shaykh Matlūf. The Egyptian public thus found an evening’s entertainment might consist of a serious text-based drama based on the fabled Arabian past, a popular farce with strong political overtones, or even the performance of an opera by Giuseppe Verdi at the newly constructed opera house.

In fostering this performance tradition, Egypt served a pioneer role in the Arabic-speaking world after the earlier but aborted initiatives in the Syrian region. Drama spread to other regions through the visits of troupes from both Western countries and Egypt itself. This was particularly true for the countries of northwest Africa (the Maghrib), where such visits to Tunisia in 1908 and Morocco in 1923 led to the appearance of local troupes, while the famous actor Jūrj Abyaḍ—a Christian from Syria—took his renowned troupe from Egypt to Iraq in 1926.

Because of the popularity of slapstick forms and the increasingly prevalent role of singing and dancing in performances, Arab audiences maintained an ambiguous understanding of the essence of drama—whether, in short, it was “literature” or entertainment. In response there arose a perceived need for plays that would underline the literary and textual aspect of drama. The fulfillment of that project was the enormous achievement of the Egyptian writer Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, who, because of the theatre’s reputation, felt constrained to publish his earliest plays under the pseudonym Ḥusayn Tawfīq.

Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm

Beginning in the 1930s, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm composed a series of lengthy plays based on themes culled from Greek legend, the Qurʾān, and Middle Eastern history in order to create a dramatic literature that was acceptable to the critical establishment in Egypt and beyond, particularly with regard to its merit as “literature.” The first of the plays was Ahl al-kahf (Eng. trans. Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s The People of the Cave), based on the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who emerge from a prolonged period of sleep to find themselves living in the Christian era. Ahl al-kahf is probably based on the interpretation of this story in sura 18 of the Qurʾān. Attempts to perform this play onstage in the 1930s revealed at once a tension between, on the one hand, a quest for a “literary” tradition of Arabic drama based on the form of the language that is standard throughout the Arab world and, on the other, the natural desire to employ colloquial dialects and other local cultural phenomena to portray the immediate and pressing social and political issues of the day—a tension that has continued to dog Arabic drama ever since (although, it must be said, with a host of intermediate positions between these two poles). Other plays by al-Ḥakīm, such as Shahrazād (1934; “Scheherazade”), Pijmalīyūn (1942; “Pygmalion”), and Al-Malik Ūdīb (1939; “King Oedipus”; Eng. trans. in The Arab Oedipus), all involve a minimum of action onstage and dialogues between characters in which philosophical positions are argued at length. Initially, al-Ḥakīm responded to criticisms regarding the actability of these plays by resorting to the notion of a “theatre of ideas” and the argument that these were plays intended for reading only. However, as al-Ḥakīm’s career proceeded, he undertook a number of experiments in an attempt to reconcile the tensions that his pioneering works had provoked and illustrated. In the 1940s he penned a number of one-act plays, initially for newspaper consumption, many of which succeeded through a necessarily more concentrated medium in lending greater movement to the dramatic action; Ughniyat al-mawt (1950; “The Song of Death”; Eng. trans. in Fate of a Cockroach, and Other Plays) is particularly noteworthy in this regard.

Later full-length plays, such as Al-Sulṭān al-ḥāʾir (1960; “The Sultan’s Dilemma”; Eng. trans. in Fate of a Cockroach, and Other Plays), suggest that al-Ḥakīm was more aware of the need for action and event, and several of his later plays were acted onstage with notable success. However, the other area in which his ongoing experiments were most noteworthy, if not always successful, was that of dramatic language. Ironically, one of his most successful plays (and productions) was an Absurdist drama, Yā ṭāliʿ al-shajarah (1962; The Tree Climber), where the usage of the standard literary language in dialogue helped contribute to the “unreal” nature of the play’s dramatic logic. Al-Ḥakīm also wrote a few plays in the colloquial dialect of Egypt, but his most memorable experiment was his attempt to forge what he termed a “third language,” which achieved a cleverly crafted level between the literary and the colloquial through the use of syntactic and lexical elements common to both. The result allowed a play to be read on the page as a literary text and to be acted onstage as a somewhat lofty version of the colloquial.

Modern Arabic drama

Al-Ḥakīm was one of the favourite authors of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power during the revolution of 1952, and he was perhaps the major Egyptian cultural figure in the following decades. The enormous process of social and political change in Egypt provided a rich backdrop for the development of a new tradition of theatre, and the cultural apparatus of the government provided abundant funding for that process. Theatre was apparently regarded as one of the few allowable outlets for the expression of public concerns and doubts that were rigorously controlled elsewhere. In retrospect, the two decades after 1952 have come to be regarded as a kind of “golden era” for not merely Egyptian drama but Arabic drama as a whole. Virtually every aspect of the theatrical community—the cultural apparatus of the state, a relatively large cluster of playwrights, a cadre of producers and directors (many of them trained in Europe and, most notably, the Soviet Union), and a group of well-qualified and involved critics—seemed to be working toward common goals. Beginning in the 1950s and ’60s with Nuʿmān ʿĀshūr, who used a series of plays to present the Egyptian public with insightful analyses of its own class structure and values, a series of dramatists, among them Saʿd al-Dīn Wahbah, Maḥmūd Diyāb, and ʿAlī Sālim, penned in the colloquial dialect of Cairo dramatic texts that were highly successful on stage. Another contributor to this rich period in Egyptian theatrical life was Yūsuf Idrīs, whose celebrated play Al-Farāfīr (1964; The Farfoors, or The Flipflap) combined elements of traditional comic forms of dramatic presentation with such Brechtian effects as the presence of an “author” as a stage character and the use of theatre-in-the-round staging. Alfred Faraj took a somewhat different course, invoking tales and incidents from history and folklore (and especially from The Thousand and One Nights) in order to illustrate contemporary political and social realities. Faraj chose to follow al-Ḥakīm in selecting as his language medium a more literary level of Arabic than that adopted by his fellow dramatists and yet one that was readily adaptable to acting onstage. This gave him the additional advantage of affording his plays a broader audience throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Even within the less-fertile environment of the 1980s and ’90s, a younger generation of Egyptian dramatists made notable contributions to the genre. Of these, Muḥammad Salmāwī and Lenīn al-Ramlī were the playwrights whose works were most often performed.

These patterns of development in Egypt were echoed elsewhere in the Arab world, albeit within differing time frames. Following the early stages that have been sketched above, further developments were, more often than not, tied to the processes of nation building that followed the achievement of independence during the 1950s and ’60s. In Syria Saʿdallāh Wannūs made use of his strong interest in the theory of drama, and particularly in the relationship of stage to audience, to compose a series of works that made important contributions to the development of experimental theatre in the Arab world. Staged in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of June 1967, Ḥaflat samar min ajl al-khāmis min Ḥuzayrān (1968; “Soirée for the 5th of June”) was a devastating commentary on the Arab defeat and on the Arab leaders who for several days had used the media to claim that victory was at hand (leading, almost automatically, to the play’s being banned). Mughāmarat raʾs al-mamlūk Jābir (1971; “The Adventure of Mamlūk Jābir’s Head”) and Al-Malik huwa al-malik (1977; “The King’s the King”) continued his ongoing experiments with theatre dynamics through what he termed masraḥ al-tasyīs (“theatre of politicization”). Because Wannūs was such a crucially important figure, other Syrian and Lebanese dramatists of the latter half of the 20th century operated somewhat in his shadow, but Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ, ʿIṣām Maḥfūẓ, and Mamdūḥ ʿAdwān wrote significant plays that were successfully performed at theatre festivals.

The lot of the Palestinian literary community, which reflected the turmoil that affected the larger community throughout the second half of the 20th century, was such that the promotion of a dramatic tradition proved extremely difficult and often impossible. However, there were plays that reflected the trials and conflicts that were part of daily life, such as Muʿīn Basīsū’s Thawrat al-Zanj (1970; “The Zanj Revolt”) and the poet Samīḥ al-Qāsim’s Qaraqāsh (1970). The tightly controlled circumstances in which the Palestinians lived their lives also led to the appearance of one of the most interesting and creative theatre troupes in the Middle East, the Ḥakawātī troupe (named for the ḥakawātī, or traditional storyteller), which emerged from an earlier group known as Al-Balālīn (“Balloons”). An itinerant troupe established in 1977, Ḥakawātī toured villages and performed its own plays in a variety of public spaces through the turn of the 21st century.

Tunisia and Morocco provide some of the best examples of a thriving theatre tradition. The Tunisian writer ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Madanī, one of the most fruitful contributors to the history of modern Arabic drama during the 20th century, composed a series of plays that were both experimental and popular; they included Thawrat ṣāḥib al-ḥimār (1971; “The Donkey Owner’s Revolt”) and Dīwān al-Zanj (1973; “The Zanj Collection”). Moroccan theatre was represented at the turn of the 21st century primarily by the multitalented al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī, who adapted textual materials culled from the heritage of the past, as in Dīwān Sīdī ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Majdhūb (1966; “The Collection of Sīdī ʿAbd al-Raḥman al-Majdhūb”), and produced them with his own troupe, often casting himself in a role in which he would exhibit a unique comic flair.

The theatre movement in Iraq was also constricted by political circumstances, but the dramatic tradition continued even so through the 1990s; an Iraqi play won first prize at the prestigious Tunisian Carthage Festival in 1999, for instance. Most prominent among 20th-century Iraqi playwrights was Yūsuf al-ʿĀnī, whose Anā ummak yā Shākir (1955; “Shākir, I’m Your Mother”) graphically portrays the misery of the Iraqi people in the period before the downfall of the monarchy in the revolution of 1958. Elsewhere in the Arabian Gulf, theatre remained, where it existed at all, a very young cultural phenomenon, and efforts in the early 21st century to foster a dramatic tradition vied with the popularity of forms of entertainment readily available via television, CDs, DVDs, and the Internet.

Arabic drama seemed likely to remain a problematic genre in the 21st century, but one fulfilling an important cultural function. By daring to raise issues of political and social importance in a public forum and by testing the limits of the local and the pan-Arabic worlds through experiments with language, it showed signs of illustrating many of the larger areas of concern within the Arabic-speaking countries. While the status of drama and its practitioners varied widely across the region, it remained an invaluable outlet for popular sentiment and creative energy.

Literary criticism

As part of annual tribal festivals during the pre-Islamic period, poets would compete against each other in jousts, and a master poet would be asked to judge who was the winner. In other words, criticism in Arabic literature is as old as the literary tradition itself, and a remarkable feature of many Arab societies today is the extent to which public performances by poets can still be subject to the instantaneous assessment of their audience; upon request, particular lines that appeal to the mind and ear are repeated.


The process of recording the text of the Qurʾān in written form, of sifting the different versions of the revelations into a single canonical version, of continuing the quest for linguistic precedents in the oral tradition of pre-Islamic poetry, and of authenticating transmitters involved the making of critical judgments and the establishment of principles of value. The earliest texts of literary criticism in Arabic thus involve the process of “ranking” poets, that being part of a larger process of establishing ṭabaqāt (“classes,” or “levels”). Two such early works belong to al-Aṣmaʿī and his student Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī; the latter’s Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ (“Classes of Champion Poets”) categorizes poets by both period and theme without providing any principles for his judgments. It fell to their successors to provide such criteria and the theoretical justification for them. Ibn Qutaybah, for example, wrote a famous introduction to his own 9th-century compilation of poets, Kitāb al-shiʿr wa al-shuʿarāʾ (“Book of Poetry and Poets”), in which he suggested that ancient poetry could not be deemed superior merely because it was old. The 9th-century grammarian Thaʿlab of al-Kūfah organized his Qawāʿid al-shiʿr (“The Rules of Poetry”) along syntactic principles, thus illustrating the continuing linkage between the philological demands of textual research and the study of the corpus of early Arabic poetry.

Emerging poetics

The emergence of a system of Islamic education and increasing contacts with other cultures led to an increasing concern with the modes of textual analysis. Poetry proved a rich field of exploration in this endeavour, and two scholars made important contributions to the analysis of poetry; their works were to have a major impact on the Arabic poetic tradition for centuries. Late in the 9th century, Ibn al-Muʿtazz, who was both poet and critic (and who, as a member of the caliphal family of the ʿAbbasids, died after only one day as caliph), emulated his predecessors by assembling his own Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ (“Classes of Poets”). But by then Ibn Qutaybah’s suggestion that older poems were not necessarily better than newer ones seems to have taken hold, insomuch as Ibn al-Muʿtazz concentrated his work on his own contemporaries. However, he is most famous for his Kitāb al-badīʿ (The Book of Tropes), in which he provides a list of five major poetic devices (including metaphor and simile) and then lists a further group of “discourse embellishments.” While his goal was to demonstrate that these devices were present in Arabic writing from the outset and that their utilization by poets was primarily a matter of good (or bad) taste, his listing became a kind of challenge to future writers on poetics, who managed to compile ever longer lists. The second of these scholars was Qudāmah ibn Jaʿfar, whose Naqd al-shiʿr (“Evaluation of Poetry”) provides specific criteria for assessing the quality of poetry; he defines it as “discourse with rhyme, metre, and intention.” What is perhaps most remarkable is that this specific definition of poetry based on both rhyme and metre was to remain the predominant criteria criterion in any definition of the poetic in Arabic until the mid-20th century.

The positioning of criticism within the context of an ever-expanding system of Islamic education and research was, not unnaturally, the trigger for a series of debates. A large number of studies were devoted to discussions of the merits and faults of two poets in particular, Abū Tammām and al-Mutanabbī; efforts to place both these preeminent figures of the 9th and 10th centuries into a balance raised questions of principle and application that were widely debated. On a more general plane, the central position of the Qurʾān within the Islamic community as a whole and the “challenge” (taḥaddin) that it posed to would-be imitators led to the development of another critical approach whereby the achievements of poets were measured against the Qurʾān’s miraculous qualities (Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, or the “inimitability of the Qurʾān”). At the hands of al-Bāqillānī, the odes of Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Buḥturī were examined for their moral and stylistic qualities and found wanting. However, with ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, a paramount figure of the 11th century in Arabic and world criticism, the comparison of the tropes of the Qurʾānic text with other types of text became a highly sophisticated exploration of the nature of meaning. His Dalāʾil al-Iʿjāz (“Proofs of Iʿjāz”) and Asrār al-balāghah (“Secrets of Eloquence”) are major monuments of classical Arabic critical thought.

Compilations and manuals

In addition to these particular features of the critical tradition in Arabic, the premodern period was also characterized by the same trend toward the categorization of textual materials and their organization into anthologies, specialized manuals, and other types of compilation that was occurring in the Islamic courts (see above Belles lettres and narrative prose: The concept of adab). One of the earliest such works was Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī’s 10th-century Kitāb al-ṣināʿatayn, al-kitābah wa al-shiʿr (“The Book of the Two Skills, Scribal Arts and Poetry”), the title of which notes what was for al-ʿAskarī the relatively recent placement of textual analysis devoted to artistic prose alongside the traditionally prestigious genre of poetry. While al-ʿAskarī joined his predecessors in collecting, indeed increasing, the list of poetic devices, his primary aim was to compile a manual that would explain the basic elements of balāghah (“correct style”), including such topics as grammatical accuracy and plagiarism. Al-ʿAskarī’s work was carried on and expanded in another important piece of synthesis, Ibn Rashīq’s Al-ʿUmdah fī maḥāsin al-shiʿr wa adabihi wa naqdihi (“The Mainstay Concerning Poetry’s Embellishments, Correct Usage, and Criticism”). The comprehensive coverage that this work provided of previous writings on the various subfields of poetics—prosody and poetic genres and devices, for example—and the critical insights that Ibn Rashīq himself inserted into his discussion of the critical controversies of his time made it a primary reference work to which scholars referred for many centuries.

The increasingly prominent role that belles lettres came to occupy in the life of the court and its patronage system was reflected in a later work of compilation, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ibn al-Athīr’s Al-Mathal al-sāʾir fī adab al-kātib wa al-shāʿir (“The Current Model for the Literary Discipline of the Scribe and Poet”), where the sequence of functions found in the title very much reflects the author’s own career as an accomplished writer of belles lettres. Ibn Rashīq’s Al-ʿUmdah also provided the evaluative basis for Al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lughah wa anwāʿihā (“The Luminous Work Concerning the Sciences of Language and Its Subfields”), a huge work of compilation by the 15th-century Egyptian polymath Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, in which he examined every conceivable aspect of the compositional process, starting at the level of the syllable, and in the process expanded the listing of poetic devices to some 236.

The tenacious longevity of this manual tradition is well illustrated by the late 19th-century work Al-Wasīlah al-adabiyyah ilā al-ʿulūm al-ʿArabiyyah (“The Literary Method for the Arabic Sciences”), in which the Egyptian scholar Ḥusayn al-Marṣafī returned to the classical heritage (and particularly to al-ʿAskarī’s Kitāb al-ṣināʿatayn) in order to provide a study of prosody, the syntactic function of words, and the varieties of poetic devices. The result was a genuine exercise in neoclassicism, whereby the contents of manuals compiled by his forebears over many centuries were revived for a later era.

The 20th century and beyond

At the beginning of the 20th century, literary criticism remained very much in the tradition of the premodern period, with emphasis still firmly placed on the analysis of texts and their functions, linguistic and aesthetic. As was the case with the literary genres themselves, this critical heritage now came into contact with the traditions of European literature. Students from the Arab world were sent to Europe to study, and they returned to their homelands bringing with them impressions of an entirely different cultural environment, new literary genres (novel, short story, and literary drama, for example), and different approaches to the evaluation of literary creativity. The Europe that these Arab visitors encountered was one that was very much influenced by Romanticism and the schools of thought that followed it, and the enhanced role that such an aesthetic provided for the expression of the individual voice gave Arab poets a golden opportunity to break from the straitjacket of panegyric poetry, with its penchant for hyperbole and its accompanying system of patronage. The social role of the poet underwent a gradual process of change, and the increasing expression of nationalist sentiment, whether pan-Arab or local, within the political life of the region gave further stimulus to these trends.

Such tendencies were at their most vigorous among the writers of the mahjar (the name given to émigré writers in the Americas), but similar movements emerged in the Arabic-speaking world itself, albeit at a slower pace. The period between the two world wars (1920–39) saw the heyday of romantic poetry in Arabic. While critics such as ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn began their careers as diehard opponents of the principles of premodern criticism, they both maintained a careful watch on experimentation in literature and were swift to condemn younger writers who adopted too radical a stance toward tradition. It was surely a sign of the pace of change in the 20th century that later in their careers both these eminent modern Egyptian critics become reactionary figures, tilting against the results of processes of change following World War II and the culmination of prolonged struggles against colonialism that took the form of independence for many Arab nations during the 1950s.

These processes of profound political transformation were accompanied by equally significant changes in criticism. After World War II numerous critics urged a totally different approach to literature; the fact that French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1947; What Is Literature?)—with its call for literature at the service of the people—was translated into Arabic during this period is very significant. Among the more prominent voices in urging a move away from an isolated “ivory tower” attitude toward literature (of which romantic and symbolist writers were accused) were Luwīs ʿAwaḍ, Maḥmūd Amīn al-ʿĀlim, Ḥusayn Muruwwah, and ʿUmar al-Fākhūrī. This push toward a literature of “commitment” (iltizām) became a constant of Arabic literary criticism; Al-Ādāb, one of the most prominent literary journals founded in the Arabic-speaking region in the latter half of the 20th century, was established by the Lebanese writer Suhayl Idrīs specifically to forward such an approach. Beginning in the 1950s, a great deal of committed literature was penned by Arab writers; topics such as the Palestinian people provided a natural focus for such writing, but the goals of the Arab peoples and their individual nation-states—establishing a sense of identity, for instance, and developing balanced relationships with Western countries—involved, more often than not, the active involvement of creative writers and critics within the cultural apparatus of the different regimes. The linkage between politics, literature, and literary criticism remained a direct one.

Two particular concerns seemed to characterize much literary criticism in the Arabic-speaking world during the late 20th century: the definition of modernity and the issue of “particularity.” The Syrian-born Lebanese poet Adonis (ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd) devoted much attention to the question of “the modern” in Arabic literature and society. His most comprehensive exploration of the topic took the form of the four-volume study Al-Thābit wa al-mutaḥawwil (1974–78; “The Static and the Dynamic”), in which he surveys the entire Arabic literary tradition and concludes that, like the literary works themselves, attitudes to and analyses of them must be subject to a continuing process of reevaluation. Yet what he actually sees occurring within the critical domain is mostly static and unmoving. The second concern, that of particularity (khuṣūṣiyyah), is a telling reflection of the realization among writers and critics throughout the Arabic-speaking world that the region they inhabited was both vast and variegated (with Europe to the north and west as a living example). Debate over this issue, while acknowledging notions of some sense of Arab unity, revealed the need for each nation and region to investigate the cultural demands of the present in more local and particular terms. A deeper knowledge of the relationship between the local present and its own unique version of the past promises to furnish a sense of identity and particularity that, when combined with similar entities from other Arabic-speaking regions, will illustrate the immensely rich and diverse tradition of which 21st-century litterateurs are the heirs.