Maroc: Ustad Massano
Tazi -- Musique classique andalouse de Fes (Ocora
records, 1987 recording)
Pre-Islamic
odes: oral poetry, monorhyme, tribal setting
- Nostalgia for a lost dwelling or meeting place
- love affairs
- descriptions of nature
- honor and fame of the poet and tribe
- notable poems "selected" (mu`allaqa) as classics of Arabic
literature, turned into legend of poems "suspended" at the pilgrimage
festival in Mecca
- poems became the subject of research by
specialists in Arabic language, who spent time with Bedouin tribes
researching "pure" Arabic language, to assist in the study of the Qur'an
- modern controversy over historical
authenticity of these poems (Taha Husayn)
- J. Stetkevych
Court poetry of the high caliphate
- stories of poets and singers, collected in
the Book of Songs of
al-Isfahani
- praise of kings by court poets
- distance from the nomadic lifestyle, new
urban sensibility (Abu Nuwas)
- extensive poetry on love and wine
- poetry also used for scholarly and
religious subjects ("as a rule, not very good"! -- Ibn Khaldun, 449)
Arabic Prose
- history develops out of hadith, pre-Islamic
Arab martial tales, Persian dynastic history, etc.
- courtly literature of the scribes
- 1001
Nights and story-telling
- cultivated by non-Arab peoples (Persians,
etc.), who use their skill in Arabic to claim superiority over the
Arabs (Shu`ubiyya)
- vast literature on multiple subjects and
localities
Ibn Khaldun
443-59
54.The Craft of poetry
- cola (="lines," plural of colon)
- qasida or
ode: erotic, laudatory (praise), elegiac (mourning)
- [add the shorter ghazal, probably drawn from the
erotic prelude of the qasida]
- retention of meter and rhyme
- "We say: poetry is eloquent speech built
upon metaphoric usage and descriptions; divided into lines [cola]
agreeing in
meter and rhyme letter, each line being independent in purpose and
meaning from what comes before and after it; and using the methods of
the Arabs peculiar to it." (447)
- the need to know the poetic tradition
- memorize, then forget, then create
- optimal conditions for creating poetry
55. Poetry and prose work with words, and not
with ideas
56. The linguist habit is obtained by much memorizing. The
quality of the linguistic habit is the result of the good quality of
the memorized material
- eloquence versus scholarly style
- impact of the Qur'an on Arabic literature
57. An explanation of the meaning of natural
and contrived speech. How contrived speech may be either good or
deficient
58. People of rank are above quoting poetry
- the "suspended" ["hanged"] poems in the
market of Mecca
in pre-Islamic times
- poetry at the caliphal courts
59. Contemporary Arab poetry, Bedouin and urban
- New poetic forms in Arabic (and Hebrew):
Andalusian muwashshah and zajal, containing stanzas with
refrain
- non-Arab elements in the
latter, i.e., Castilian Spanish: