The heir to the throne of the Qinda tribe based on the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Qais chose a life of travel, drinking, fighting-and poetry.

His masterpiece is the Muallaka, an ode so revered that it is written in gold on sheets of paper that are then hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s most revered shrine (its title translates to “hanging ode”).

Other poets may have their own famous works, but many consider Al-Qais to be superior because of his amazing metaphors and beautiful verses that reflect his desire to be a worthy lover, wise man, warrior, and master. The kind of work he perfected greatly influenced the writing of those who followed.

Al-Hansa (575-645)

Tamadir bint Amr, better known as al-Hansa, is one of the famous poets of the Arab world who converted to Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad.

Her masterpiece is her eulogy to her brother Sahr, a tribal leader who was seriously wounded and later died after an attack on the rival Bani Asad tribe.

Her poems are full of beautiful metaphors about loss, life, love, and departure. However, although four of her children were killed during the Muslim battles against the Romans and Persians, al-Hansa refused to write eulogies for them, saying that Islam taught her not to mourn for the dead.

Abu Nuwas (756-814)

Abu Nuwas’s reputation in the Arab world is based on his adoration of wine and as a poet of merry love.

Born in Ahwaz, in what is now Iran, he moved to Iraq at a young age, the ruling center of the then powerful Abbasid caliphate.

About 1500 of his poems survive, including several masterpieces that reflect his experience of cosmopolitan life in Baghdad, where people gathered in taverns, libraries, bazaars, mosques, and baths.

His works are abrupt, spontaneous and full of sharp turns as he loudly glorified pleasure, lovers, wine, music and good company while despising war and the clash of swords.

Al-Mutanabbi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabbi’s life is perhaps best described as an epic journey to fame, money, and power.

Through his nearly 300 poems, he mastered Arabic verse like no other and treated poetry as a craft to be studied and taught, through a work that spoke of wisdom, pride, courage, fighting the Romans, and worshiping his ego.

Many of his poems are used today as proverbs to reflect on life’s experiences of friendship, love, departure, war, and death.

Born in Kufa, Iraq, as Ahmed bin al-Hussein al-Qindi, his nickname translates to “the one who will be a prophet.”

He never rested in one place, traveling to Baghdad, Damascus, Tiberias, Antioch, Aleppo, and Cairo, among others, receiving income from emirs for his poetic praise of them.

Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri (973-1057)

When he was four years old, al-Ma’arri became blind due to smallpox. He remained housebound for most of his life: unlike his hero al-Mutannabi, al-Ma’arri did not leave his home for almost four decades, preferring solitude to socializing with people.

His poetry contains philosophy, contemplation, and pessimism: for many of his followers who flocked to his home, he was considered the poet of philosophers and the philosopher of poets.

Al-Ma’arri’s masterpiece is the Luzumiyat and Resalat al-Gufran (The Message of Forgiveness), which focuses on the poets’ experiences in hell and heaven more than 200 years before Dante’s Divine Comedy.

But opponents condemned al-Ma’arri for heresy because he ridiculed followers of all religions. Attacks occurred not only during his lifetime, but also long after his death: in February 2013, a thousand years after his active work, Syrian militants beheaded a statue of the poet-philosopher in his hometown of Maarrat al-Numan in Syria.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Considered a leading light of his generation, Darwish has been translated into English more than any other contemporary Arab poet.

He was born in the Palestinian village of Al-Birwa under the British mandate, but fled when Israeli authorities took control and expelled thousands of Arabs.

In most of his work, he mixed modern poetry with Arabic rhythmic meters: themes included the Palestinian Revolution of 1965-1993 and the 1948 mass exodus known as the Catastrophe or Nakba.

Darwish has received several prestigious international awards, including the Prince Claus Foundation in 2004.

Iman Mersal (1966 – present)

Mersal is an Egyptian poet who is currently a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta, Canada.

She writes free prose, a style of poetry that is not measured by Arabic rhythm: These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of her work was published in 2008.

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Although Europeans of the Middle Ages used Islamic treatises on medicine, geography, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, they were not familiar with the original literary works of the Muslim world. Even today, the rich heritage of Islamic literature is almost unknown in the West, with the exception of a few examples, such as the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam; the Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights; Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat; _ and the 20th century works of Khalil Jebran. This unfamiliarity is due in part to the fact that almost all of this literature was written in languages that were often quite difficult to translate, in part because they used the Semitic alphabet.

Difficulties of translation were especially true of Islamic poetry, which for centuries used traditional, rigid, and distinctive forms in a highly stylized way. Prose, in the Western sense of novels, short stories, and dramas, was not known in the Islamic world until the modern period. Prose also used specific forms, and often, like verse, it was rhymed. This emphasis on form and style dominated Islamic literature until the early 19th century, often to the detriment of content.

Classical Arabic poetry was built on the principle of monorhyme, and one rhyme was used throughout the poem, regardless of whether it was long or short. There were 16 basic sizes in the rhyme scheme in five groups, but the poet was not allowed to change the size during the poem.

The main literary types, all poetic forms developed in accordance with traditional rules, were qasidah, gazelle, qita, masnawi, and robai. In prose, the main genre was the maqama.

Poetry
Developed by pre-Islamic Arabs, the qasidah has survived in the history of Arabic literature to the present day. It consists of an elaborately structured ode of 20 to 100 verses and retains a single final rhyme throughout the work. The poem begins with a short prelude, usually a love poem, to attract the reader’s attention. This is followed by a narrative of the poet’s journey, describing his horse or camel, scenes and events in the desert. The main theme, in the end, is a tribute to the poet’s patron, his tribe, or even himself. After the advent of Islam, the qasidah served as an instrument of praise to God, eulogies of Muhammad, and songs of praise or lamentation for the saints. It was a type of poem that lent itself to demonstrating the poet’s own knowledge.

A love lyric of five to 12 verses, the ghazal probably originated as a development of the opening section of a qasidah. The content was religious, secular, or a combination of both.

QITAH
The qitah is a literary form used for less serious matters of daily life. Its main function was satire, jokes, word games, and codes.

MASNAVI
Masnavi originated in Persia, a country with its own ancient literary tradition. The term means “doubled” or rhymed verse. Masnavi became very popular because it allowed a poet to tell a long story by stringing together thousands of verses. It was the closest approach to an epic poem that developed in Islamic literature. The Arabs rejected the epic as a form of fiction that they considered to be akin to a lie.

ROBAʿI
Like the masnavi, the robai also has its roots in the pre-Islamic Persian poetic tradition. Its form is a qatrain (four-line poem) in which the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme. The most famous example of robai is Omar Khayyam’s Rubayat.

MAKAMA
The most typical expression of the Arab spirit in rhyming prose was the maqama. It was used to tell mostly simple and interesting stories in an extremely complex style. Because the maqama was often used to demonstrate the wit, education, and eloquence of the author, it often became entangled in intricate terminology and grammar that made it quite difficult to understand and thus almost impossible to translate. It was only in the late 19th century, under the influence of translations from European languages, that his style became commonplace, making it less artificial.

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The religious zeal of the early Muslims did inspire the beginning of two significant works, collections that were not completed until the following centuries. The most important was the hadith, a record of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad. The sudden death of the spiritual and political leader took the Islamic community by surprise, and for several decades it was deemed necessary to preserve all of Muhammad’s words and actions, as they were believed to be inspired. By the 9th century, the hadith had been reduced to a material to which no new traditions were added. Today, the hadith are revered as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the Qur’an.

Another collection, which was started at the same time, consists of the sayings of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law and the fourth caliph, whose followers later founded the main division in Islam, the Shiites. The collection, finally completed in the 10th century, is called The Way of Eloquence. It is a masterpiece of Arabic prose that has inspired numerous commentaries and imitations in other languages.

THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE
Islamic civil wars and growing sectarian rivalries fostered the emergence of poetry, which became a favorite means of expressing different points of view. Three of the greatest poets of the Umayyad period were polemicists who used their poems to support political factions.

Al-Akhtal, although a Christian, was a staunch supporter of the policies of the first Umayyad, Mu’awiyah I. Jarir and Tammam ibn Ghalib Abu Firas (al-Farazdak) were active in the courts of the Umayyad caliphs and their governors and were ardent supporters of the regime. However, the two were enemies and amused their warring tribesmen with their caustic satires of each other. The work of these two poets has provided historians with rich material on the social and political climate of Islam in the early eighth century. They used the traditional form of the qasidah to great effect, employing a rich vocabulary and imagination.

A remarkable poet from Mecca, Umar ibn Abi Rabia, contributed to the development of the ghazal as a love poem. His poems celebrate love affairs with ladies who have come to Mecca on pilgrimage. Using the same literary form, one of the last Umayyads, al-Walid ibn Yazid, gained a greater reputation as a poet than as a warrior. His poetry was characterized by lighthearted love poems and odes to the virtues of wine.

In Medina, very idealized love poetry was in vogue, similar to the chivalric romances of medieval Europe. Supposedly invented by Jamil, this genre celebrates lovers who become martyrs, dying completely surrendered to the power of true love.

THE ABBASID CALIPHATE
In contrast to the short 90-year period of Umayyad rule, the Abbasid caliphate lasted for more than five centuries. It was during the Abbasid rule, with its capital in Baghdad, that the golden age of Islamic literature began. In Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia), all the cultural currents of the ancient Middle East converged, and members of the Muslim community, concentrated in the court of the caliphs, began to adapt and process elements from all previous cultures.

The main poets of the Abbasid period were Abu Nuwās, Ibn al-Muʿtaz, Ibn Daud, al-Mutanabbi, and al-Maʿarri. The greatest of them was Abu Nuwas, who had an incomparable command of language and imagery. However, his witty, cynical poems and wonderful table songs caused a scandal among orthodox Muslims. One of his phrases, which is said to have been his motto, was: “Accumulate as many sins as possible”.

Al-Mu’tazz, in his Book of the Novel and the Strange, established literary rules governing the use of metaphors, similes, and verbal puns (see Figures of speech). His conception of poetry included the richest decoration of poems with all kinds of figures of speech and rhetorical devices. Later, thanks to his advice, poetry appeared, the content of which prevailed over style and phrases.

The theme of a lover who would rather die than achieve union with his beloved became central to ghazal poetry in the 10th century. The first exponent was Ibn Daud, a theologian, in his anthology The Book of Flowers. Although initially used in a completely secular way, the theme later became a core concept of religious mystical poetry. Soon it also became common in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry. Its influence was felt even in Spain, where another theologian, Ibn Hazm, drew on personal experience to create his Ring of the Dove, a prose work about pure love interspersed with poetry.

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