ʿAlī b. Khalaf al-Kātib , Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (fl. 437/1045), was the Egyptian Fāṭimid author of an Arabic manual for secretaries or chancery officials. Virtually nothing is known about his life. Al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418), in his encyclopaedia for secretaries, Ṣubḥ …
Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Wakīʿ b. Khalaf al-Ḍabbī (d. 393/1003), known as Ibn Wakīʿ al-Tinnīsī , after his ancestor, a famous judge (qāḍī) , was an Arabic poet and literary critic. He was born in Tinnīs in the eastern Nile delta and died there on 23 Jum…
Abū l-Ḥusayn Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm b. Sulaymān Ibn Wahb al-Kātib (middle of the fourth/tenth century), the author of an important Arabic work on rhetoric, was an obscure member of a famous family of officials and wazīr s. Almost nothing is known of his life. His rhetorical work was f…
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan al-Qayrawānī, called Ibn Rashīq (b. 390/1000, d. 456/1063–4 or 463/1071), was a North African Arabic-language poet and literary critic. The son of a Byzantine goldsmith, he was born in Masīla (also called al-Muḥammadiyya), near Constantine, in present-day Alger…
Bahāʾ al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Rustum b. Hardūz (553–604/1159–1208), known as Ibn al-Sāʿātī , was an Arabic poet of the Ayyūbid era. He was born in Damascus to a father of Khurāsānian origin, who was a famous clockmaker (sāʿātī) ; his brother Fakhr al-Dīn Riḍwān be…
Abū l-Muʾayyad Muḥammad b. al-Mujallī (sometimes wrongly al-Maḥallī) Ibn al-Ṣāʾigh al-Jazarī al-ʿAntarī (d. after 560/1180–1) was a physician and poet active in Iraq. He is listed among the physicians of Iraq by the biographer Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (d. 668/1270), who explains that he…
Hijāʾ (invective, lampoon, satire) is one of the principal modes or genres of traditional Arabic poetry; it is synonymous with the less frequent hajw (the preferred term in Persian), muhājāt , and tahājī (the last-mentioned specifically meaning “mutual lampooning”), all derived …
The nearest Arabic equivalent of “ epigram ,” a short poem with a witty turn of thought, is maqṭūʿ or maqṭūʿa (lit. “fragment,” pl. maqāṭīʿ ), but this is a misleading word, because it suggests that the poem was originally part of a larger whole. The same is true of the terms qi…
Arabic didactic poetry , taken in a broad sense, intends to instil morals or impart information. By this definition much of Arabic poetry is didactic, such as the gnomic verse found at the end of the Muʿallaqa poem of the pre-Islamic poet Zuhayr b. Abī Sulmā and the aphorisms th…
Debate literature in Arabic , in a strict sense, is a text in which two or more inanimate things (objects, substances, abstract concepts) are personified or humanised and vie for precedence. It is already found in older Middle Eastern literatures such as Sumerian, Babylonian, an…
Congratulations (Ar. tahānī , sing. tahniʾa ) can be conveyed formally as a literary subject in Arabic prose or poetry. According to Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī (d. after 395/1005), congratulation was not practised as an independent genre before Islam and whatever resembles it in early…
City panegyric poetry in Arabic is less common than that devoted to persons; cities are praised more often in prose than in poetry. Poetry in praise of cities was not recognised as a genre in its own right in traditional poetics, but such poetry is nevertheless found, sometimes …
The concept of a canon , derived from debates in Christianity about which parts of the Old and New Testaments should be accepted as authentic and authoritative, can be applied to any literary tradition, religious or secular. In Islam there is a broad consensus on the canonical t…
Banquets (communal meals) usually have several functions, apart from feeding the hungry: to dispose of superfluous and perishable food (necessary in a society of hunters), to enhance the status of the generous host, to accompany a religious sacrifice, to strengthen the bonds bet…
A badīʿiyya is a poem illustrating the various figures of speech and stylistic embellishments collectively known as badīʿ and usually takes the form of an ode on the prophet Muḥammad. Many of these poems were composed in specific emulation of the badīʿiyya by the Iraqi poet Ṣafī…
Backgammon , or trictrac, a board game for two persons, played with dice, of the race-game type, was known in the central Islamic lands as nard , a Persian word of uncertain origin, said to be a shortening of nardashīr , in turn derived from Ardashīr (Artaxerxes, r. 224–41 C.E.)…
Apology (Ar. iʿtidhār) is often recognised as one of the themes of Arabic poetry, closely related to, or forming a sub-genre of, panegyric poetry (madīḥ) . Thaʿlab (d. 291/904) lists it as one of the “branches” of poetry, illustrating it with two lines from a poem (the ʿayniyya)…
Ancients and Moderns is a topic in Arabic literary history dealing with the merits of, on the one hand, the early poets (al-qudamāʾ, al-mutaqaddimūn) , including the pre-Islamic (jāhilī) and early Islamic poets until around the middle of the second/eighth century, and, on the ot…