An Experiment On the Metrics of Arabic Oral Poetry

Difficulties seeing beyond the structures of Classical Arabic poetry of the high, literate tradition have long blinded scholarly ears to the formal realities and aesthetics of oral, popular poetry. A sort of print-bound myopia has caused us to cling to the 16 metres devised by Khalil b. Ahmad al-Farahidi (8th c.) to describe the oral poetry of the Jahiliyya' and subsequently made the canon of all Arabic poetry. While this system of metrics ('arid ) may work to describe the prosody of written court poetry composed in the literary, inflected idiom, it severely restricts our understanding of orally composed poetry and, indeed, misrepresents and obscures the prosodic principles of oral poetry. Our certainty that this is the case arises from several experiments we have been conducting on the poetry of Sirat Bani Hildl, the texts of which exist in several forms: (1) manuscripts dating from the early 19th century; (2) printed editions; and (3) oral versions performed by musician-poets in Egypt and other parts of the Arab Middle East today. Scholars approaching the manuscripts and printed editions of this epic are beset with problems. In its written forms, the fictive chronicle of the migrations of the Hilali tribe has never really been understood. The long narrative unfolds in poetry interspersed with prose summary. The language of the texts has no vocalization, as is the case with normal Arabic script. Consequently, we don't know how to pronounce the words. This presents obvious for any discussion of the metre of the poetry. The texts seem metrically chaotic with no organizing principle immediately apparent. Few scholars have attempted to study the epic's formal features

Arabic · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Oral poetry · Poetry · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy