Arabic poetry

Arabic poetry usually refers to the poetry of the wider historic Arab empire from the 6th to the 14th Century, during which it attained great richness and versatility. Thus the term also includes work in Persian Arabic, in Turkic, and also from Andalucia in Spain. After the conquest of the Arab empire, and into the modern era, national languages predominate.

Poetry before Islam

The early desert society of the Bedouin tribes and their traditional encampment odes.

The influence of early Islam

The influence of the poetic forms of the early Koran.

The Medieval era

The flowering of Arabic poetry in Sufi traditions.

The flowering of Arabic poetry in Andalucia (Islamic Spain). In Andalucia, the corpus suffered large-scale destruction by fire at the orders of Cisneros, Archbishop of Granada. The burning, in 1499 or 1500, was apparently due to the 'indecent' nature of a large part of the poetry.

The nature of the beloved in the ghazel

In Persian poetry & Turkic poetry the gender is not distinguished by the third person pronoun. Many translations thus have 'she' instead of 'he'. By the context & subject-matter, however, one can determine that the beloved was a male. See: The Theme of Wine-drinking and the Concept of the Beloved in Early Persian Poetry (Studia Islamica, Vol.13, 1960)

The post Medieval period

The Influence of Britain on Persian court culture and its poets.

A taxonomy of the traditional styles and forms of poetry

• qasida (pre-Islamic ode)

• ghazel (love lyric)

• qitah (for jokes, word games and satirical squibs)

• roba'i (Persian, pre-Islamic quatrain)

• masnavi (Persian, rhyming couplets)

The difficulty of translation to English

The difficulty is not only in translation of difficult texts, but also that the gender of the beloved is frequently either obscured or made female by translators.

Selected poets

al-Khalil (8th Century)

Abu Tammam (9th Century)

Abu Nuwas (9th Century)

al-Mutannabi (10th Century)

Rumi

Hafez

Omar Khayyam

Further reading

• E.G. Browne. Literary History of Persia. (Four volumes, 2,256 pages, and twenty-five years in the writing)
• Philip F. Kennedy. The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition.. Open University Press, 1997.
• Khaled El-Rouayheb. The Love of Boys in Arabic Poetry of the Early Ottoman Period, 1500 - 1800. Middle Eastern Literatures, January 2005, vol.8, no.1.