An Introduction to Arab Poetics

Sajʿ was the first form of poetic orality, that is poetic speech following a single pattern.

Song was a body whose joints were metre, rhythm and melody.

In later times poets would imitate the costumes of their pre-Islamic forbears and so affirm the unbroken link between past and present.

Some poets dressed up to perform, as if the occasion were a celebration like a wedding or a feast.

like the poetess al-Khansā’ (sixth–seventh century) who, it is said, rocked and swayed, and looked down at herself in a trance. Thus in orality there is a ‘meeting in action’ of voice, body, word and gesture.

Kitāb al-Aghānī (The Book of Songs) by Abu’l-Faraj al-Iṣfaḥānī (897–967), which consists of twenty-one volumes and took fifty years to compile, is the most striking proof that poetry in the pre-Islamic period was synonymous with recitation and song.

The critic Ibn Rashīq maintains that song was at the origin of rhyme and metre,2 and that ‘Metres are the foundations of melodies, and poems set the standards for stringed instruments.’3

This explains the significance of the claim that the Arabs ‘measure poetry by song’ or that ‘Song is the measure for poetry.’1

organic link that existed between poetry and song in the pre-Islamic period.

famous verse:
Sing in every poem you compose
That song is poetry’s domain.