Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period

If it is the post-classical period of Arabic literature that has received the least scholarly attention of all eras of Arabic literature, it is undoubtedly the sub-field of ‘popular literature’ that has suffered the most neglect. While some of the gaps in our knowledge of popular literature in the modern period have, in recent years, been filled in, the earlier periods remain largely understudied. In this chapter we will briefly shift the focus to one segment of this most understudied area of Arabic literature, namely popular poetry of the post-classical period. From the outset the term ‘popular poetry’ requires some discussion and qualification. In the next few pages, while attempting to sort out some of the apparent problems with the use of this term, we will roughly delimit the area of poetic production that we are concerned with and defend the use of this term as the best of an inexact lot for what is in fact a very diverse area of Arabic poetic production.

Most of what we know as ‘Arabic poetry’ is, of course, poetry produced in fuṣḥā or classical Arabic by court poets or the poets of the rich and famous, in other words, the creative currency of a privileged sliver of society. Those who possessed sufficient power and wealth engaged the services of poets whose main activity was the creation of panegyrics in their honour intended to enhance their benefactors’ prestige. The classical qaṣīda, or ode, with its mostly predictable roster of motifs, was the conventional form that such tributes took. Colloquial Arabic, the language of everyday life, had virtually no role in these privileged settings. Unlike classical Arabic, prestiged as the descendant of the language of the Koran, colloquial Arabic, the language of the ῾āmma, or the common people, par excellence, and of everyday life, was excluded from these literary venues.

Indeed it is clear that the critics and historians of Arabic literature were strongly biased against preserving any material that did not conform to a narrowly articulated literary code. The Kitāb al-aghānī, for example, cites with disapproval the ninth-century example of the famous singer Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī (d. 235/850) who sang several lines that did not conform to the rules of Arabic grammar or prosody.¹ Even in Islamic Spain where, as we shall see, new strophic forms of poetry found freer rein than in the East, there was resistance to recording anything but the classically approved qaṣīda. The historian ῾Abd al-Waḥīd al-Marrākushī (d. 721/1321) states in his al-Mu‘jib fī talkhīṣ akhbār al-maghrib, ‘Were it not contrary to custom to adduce muwashshaḥāt in books of serious purport which are destined to last, I would have quoted some of [Ibn Zuhr’s] poems in this genre.’² Dīwān after dīwān disappoints in the lack of muwashshaḥāt among its contents, despite reference elsewhere to the existence of such compositions among the poet’s repertoire. If this was the case for the muwashshaḥ, we can amply gauge the treatment received by compositions that strayed even further than muwashshaḥāt from the linguistic and formal straight-and-narrow. Indeed, even when popular material did actually find its way to the scribe’s hand, it often had to survive the editorial interventions of its handlers. We need only think of the kind of amending and correcting that went on at various stages throughout the history of the text of A Thousand and One Nights and of the difficulty encountered by Gaston Maspéro in preventing native Egyptians from ‘correcting’ what they perceived as ‘bad’ Arabic as they recorded popular tales and songs,³ to understand that some degree of editing must always have taken place during the writing down of what had originally been oral poetry. Given even the best intentions of a scribe intent on preserving the colloquial flavour of a text, the lack of any agreed-upon method of transcribing colloquial Arabic was bound to create problems. Hampered by this and by our limited knowledge of pre-modern Arabic dialects, we are often left to guess at how to pronounce what was, to the scribe, a familiar vernacular. That the ‘common people’ were producing various kinds of verse of their own is clear. Indeed Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī claims that they often outshone the elite in the production of such poetry. While oral poetry emanating from an illiterate community that had been limitedly altered by written record and preserved for our consideration is what we would wish for in this context, we cannot expect such bounty given the cultural prejudice against recording such poetry and the tendency to hypercorrection by educated scribes when it was recorded. Chroniclers such as Ibn Iyās (d. c. 930/1524) have recorded snippets of poetry composed by ‘al-‘āmma’ on occasions such as the celebration of the departure of the pilgrimage litter (maḥmal),⁴ or the poetic taunts of children jeering an ousted Turkish governor,⁵ but these are mere titbits from what must have been a sumptuous table now beyond our reach.

In what sense, then, is the material we will be dealing with here actually ‘popular’? This adjective might reasonably be applied to literature on the basis of a number of interrelated features. Popular poetry might be defined as compositions produced by the common people, the under-represented lower classes of society. It might be expected that the subject of this poetry relates to the lives and concerns of ordinary people, as opposed to those of a more privileged elite. The targeted audience for the verse would be an equally valid criterion for assigning this designation, and poetry using other than the traditional verse forms of the qaṣīda or qiṭ‘a might reasonably be deemed popular. Most important in the case of Arabic, the linguistic register of the works might be used as the primary means of identifying popular texts. In fact, no single criterion among these can be relied on to the exclusion of all others, and linguistic register, subject matter and form alike will be our primary guides for the purposes of this chapter. Most of the texts we will be discussing here do not make exclusive use of the vernacular, but rather consist of an admixture of colloquial and standard Arabic. In other words, they are malḥūn, at the very least, eschewing desinential inflection, at the most containing colloquial expressions and structures.

The kind of material that we will be considering is a limited body of texts in hybrid Arabic produced by poets well known for their classical compositions, as well as by lesser lights with no exalted classical laurels to rest on. These poems are not exclusively the work of educated poets, as some have suggested. While it may not be the uncorrupted voice of the masses that is heard in this poetry, it is also not exclusively the voice of the elite of courtly society. Some studies of non-classical verse have been plagued by too rigid a view of pre-modern Arab society, suggesting that the cultural and social elite lived in an entirely separate world from the uneducated masses. In fact, these divergent classes shared much in the way of cultural paradigms and life experience, including the use of colloquial language in their everyday lives. It is this point of social and cultural intersection that is often conveyed in the poetry dealt with in this chapter. The total dominance of fuṣḥā poetry, which its unilateral preservation would seem to suggest, is misleading, for in fact a significant number of well-known poets were involved in the production of non-canonical poetry, and many among the elite were known to have enjoyed the products of their labours. At the same time, it is clear that diverse segments of society were involved with this type of poetry – at least the poetry that has survived – either as producers or as consumers. In addition, society was increasingly made up of various groups in the middle that shared some of the cultural prerogatives of both extremes of the social spectrum. In some instances the texts themselves provide fairly specific identification of patrons and consumers who hail, if not from the lower classes, at least from what might be considered a kind of petite bourgeoisie. From the twelfth century on, at least, Arabic popular poetry is nothing if not poetry that moved both up and down the social scale at various points, so that it might be described by Aron Gurevich’s expression as ‘that layer of medieval culture . . . which in one way or another belonged to all people but which among the elite was usually concealed by official theology, book learning and classical tradition’.⁶

Textual clues about the performance setting of the poetry are therefore extremely important in the effort to classify any given composition as ‘popular’ or not. Alas, though we often know a good deal about the nature of the performance context in the case of poetry in fuṣḥā, we sometimes know far less about the setting in which popular poetry was performed. This is because much of it was sung or delivered in informal gatherings much less accessible to history than the official occasions in which fuṣḥā poetry held the spotlight, as well as because of the cultural prejudice against popular poetry referred to earlier. On the other hand, a number of texts do contain significant clues about the impetus behind their composition, as well as the occasion for performance, and it is important to exhaust these clues in an effort to contextualize the poetry and situate it in its society. Indeed it is partly consideration of the performance setting that leads us to classify certain muwashshaḥāt as popular, for while the muwashshaḥ is primarily a fuṣḥā text, unlike the colloquial zajal, to which it is otherwise so clearly related, its use and presentation often distinguish it from classical poetry. In discussing the nature of the muwashshaḥ, S. M. Stern pointed out that although muwashshaḥāt often took up the same themes as the qaṣīda and were therefore delivered in the same court setting as the qaṣīda, the former was probably sung while the latter was recited.⁷ Though the muwashshaḥ will receive limited consideration in the context of this chapter, this should not be taken as a denial of the non-classical cloak it often wears.

Finally, any assessment of popular poetry must be shaped by an understanding of the prevailing expectations of poets and of changing patterns of patronage during the various periods of Arab history. The classical model of poetic patronage briefly alluded to above did not continue undisturbed over the course of the seven centuries covered in this volume. As the relationship of the ruling class to the classical Arabic tradition changed, so too did the concept of patronage and, accordingly, the role of all types of poetry within society. The fact that it is during the Mamluk and Mongol periods that popular poetry begins most boldly to come to light in written sources is surely due in part to the fact that the ruling elite played a much more limited role in setting cultural standards and literary taste and indeed used poetry less systematically as a means of purveying a legitimizing mythology, as was the case during the Abbasid era. To borrow Gurevich’s words again, ‘the veil of book learning and classical [poetic] tradition was so attenuated, so diminished in importance that this other level of poetic production, which had always been there, manage[d] to peek through more clearly’.⁸

Verses occurring within the epic context of the sīras will not be treated here, as they form the subject of other chapters in this volume. Likewise, the poetry of the medieval Arabic shadow plays will not be discussed, since the theatrical and narrative context in which it functions places it more appropriately under a different rubric. Before taking up the main forms of popular poetry during the post-classical period, it is important for us to consider the question of their origins, so although this chapter deals primarily with the Arab East, we will begin with a brief look at the heyday, if not the starting point, of non-classical strophic poetic forms in the Islamic West.

Though the origins of the two most important forms of non-classical Arabic strophic poetry, the muwashshaḥ and the zajal, remain obscure, it is beyond question that it was in Andalusia that they flourished and developed and reached their full glory. The muwashshaḥ is first mentioned by Ibn Bassām (d. 542/1147) in his Kitāb al-dhakhīra fī maḥāsin ahl al-jazīra, where he tells us that the form was invented by Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd al-Qabrī towards the end of the ninth century. However, the earliest muwashshaḥ that has survived, that of ῾Ubāda ibn Mā’ al-Samā’ (d. 421/1030), dates from the eleventh century.⁹ Although it is clear that the form had by then reached full maturity, the long period of development leading up to these fully evolved pieces remains the focus of many questions.

In general the muwashshaḥ consists of five stanzas and often, though not always, commences with an initial maṭla‘ or prelude, which introduces the binding rhyme common to the concluding lines, called simṭ/asmāṭ, of each stanza in the rest of the poem. In some cases the initial couplet serves as a recurring element throughout the poem, much as a refrain. Between the maṭla‘ and the simṭ or qufl are the lines called ghuṣn/aghṣān, containing a rhyme unique to each individual strophe. The poem ends with a line or two called a kharja or markaz sometimes composed, in contrast to the preceding body of the poem, in colloquial Arabic or, less often, Romance or a combination of the two.¹⁰ The rhyme scheme would thus be along the following lines: AA (or AB) ccc AA ddd AA eee AA, etc. The kharja, which most frequently provides a sharp contrast in language and tone with the preceding composition, is often introduced with verbs of direct speech, where the voice of the poet gives way to that of another, usually a female singer. But in this, as in almost every feature of the muwashshaḥ, it is difficult to generalize, and the kharja was frequently, like the rest of the poem, in the voice of the poet. Thematically, the muwashshaḥ hardly differs from classical poetry, for it includes the same topics as the qasīda, with madīḥ, khamriyya and in particular ghazal predominating, while elegy, invective, mujūn and zuhd are less frequently represented.

The muwashshaḥ undoubtedly flourished, as did all arts and letters, during the period of the mulūk al-ṭawā’if (‘party kings’) (c. 423–84/1031–91), but it was during the age of the Almoravids in Spain (484–540/1091–1145) that it reached its peak. It was during this time, known more for its continuation and refinement of earlier-established tastes and trends than for its innovation, that three important washshāḥūn – al-A ῾mā al-Tuṭīlī, Ibn Baqī and Ibn Bājja – all flourished. The period of the Almohads (c. 540–627/1145–1230) in turn saw the heyday of three of the most outstanding poets who composed in this genre – namely, Ibrāhīm ibn Sahl, Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb and Ibn Zumruk – but by this point Andalusia no longer reigned supreme in the production of this poetic form. The constant travel and intellectual and cultural exchange that was carried on between Andalusia and the Arab East naturally resulted in the muwashshaḥ finding fertile ground, first in North Africa and then in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere, so that by the thirteenth century these countries outshone Islamic Spain in the production of this type of poetry.

The zajal, the second of the two non-classical strophic forms that dominated in Andalusia, was similar to the muwashshaḥ but was composed in the vernacular. This verse reached its apogee in the work of ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Quzmān (d. 521/1160). Though he composed poetry and prose in classical Arabic, the majority of his work consists of azjāl in Córdoban Arabic. At a time when enduring patronage for poetry was not readily available, Ibn Quzmān was able to support himself by poetry, singing and dancing in diverse parts of Spain. Though the prologue to his dīwān, entitled Iṣābat al-aghrāḍ fī dhikr al-a‘rāḍ, is of limited use from a theoretical point of view, it is possible to glean a few important pieces of information from it. Ibn Quzmān acknowledges that he was not the inventor of the zajal, but simply its most skilled practitioner. In his poems he mentions one Yakhlif ibn Rāshid, of whose poetry only two fragments have been preserved.¹¹ He specifically praises the work of one Akhṭal ibn Numāra, whose poetry has not survived, and states that he was ‘the only one who ever approached [my] own perfection’.¹² Ibn Quzmān comments in this brief introductory piece that Ibn Numāra initiated a new style in the art of the zajal, that after him came ‘those other poets to whom I have alluded and they maligned [him]’,¹³ and that he thinks little of the skills of his contemporaries, who do not do a good job even at imitating him.¹⁴ While scholars have concluded on the basis of this prologue and the rhyme scheme of the quoted verses by Ibn Numāra that the zajal was in use about a century before Ibn Quzmān, no truly satisfactory reconstruction of the chronology of the development of this form in Arab Spain, tantalizingly hinted at in these sparse remarks, has yet to emerge. While a kind of ‘proto zajal’ vernacular poetry is attested in fourth-/tenth-century Andalusia,¹⁵ little is known about the origins of the zajal proper. It is, in any case, indisputable that it was due largely to the skill, cleverness and humour of Ibn Quzmān that azjāl came more and more to be recorded in anthologies and biographical dictionaries.

Stern and others have made the important distinction between two types of zajal, which he called the muwashshaḥ-like zajal and the zajal proper. While the former is a straightforward imitation of the muwashshaḥ in vernacular, with the same structure as the muwashshaḥ, the latter has certain distinctive features. In the zajal proper, the asmāṭ reproduce the scheme of only half rather than the whole maṭla‘, so that the rhyme scheme becomes AA bbbA cccA dddA or AB cccB dddB or ABAB cccAB, etc.¹⁶ These zajals are not limited to the five stanzas of the muwashshaḥ, and their subject matter extends beyond the familiar classical poetic repertoire.

The distinction between the two types of zajal is directly related to the thorny problem of tracing the origins of these non-classical forms. A number of important sources for the history of the non-classical poetic forms – including Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī (d. c. 685/1286) and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. c. 750/1349), the latter of whom we will return to shortly – claim that the zajal was derived from the muwashshaḥ. Although the dates of the texts that have survived would seem to correspond to this scenario, there is good reason to question this version of events, as indeed a number of scholars have done. Stern, Cachia, al-Ahwānī and Zwartjes, among others, believe that in fact the zajal, the closer kin to the folk tradition in its clear association with popular song tradition and the vernacular language, preceded the muwashshaḥ. Stern explains the muwashshaḥ-like zajals, which ‘came into being by the transposition of the muwashshaḥ into vulgar Arabic’, as corresponding to the time when the zajal acquired literary status. This would help account for comments such as Ibn Sa‘īd’s that, ‘The first to compose poems according to the method of zajal was Abū Bakr Ibn Quzmān. It is true that such poems had been composed in al-Andalus before, but the beauties of the form had not appeared.’¹⁷ In other words, the zajal existed prior to the time of Ibn Quzmān as a purely popular, colloquial form, and gained literary status only in the twelfth century when azjāl patterned after muwashshaḥāt were produced.

The mystery of how oral, colloquial verse found its way, albeit grudgingly, into the literary canon and what precisely the relationship between this proto-zajal and the later muwashshaḥ and zajal is, remains unsolved. The scenario envisioned by one scholar has it that a kind of hybridization occurred among the Arab and Spanish popular traditions and thereafter ‘some of the attitudes that ran through the original folk-literature worked themselves by osmosis even into the convention-ridden compositions of the élite’.¹⁸ It is certainly conceivable, as this scenario would seem to have it, that the muwashshaḥ evolved directly from this proto-zajal, but it is equally possible that a nascent classical Arabic strophic poetic form, which we will discuss in a moment, found fertile ground for growth in Andalusia where it coalesced with the popular song tradition.

The nature and extent of the various strands of this song tradition are impossible to tease out, largely because the indigenous tradition was itself deliberately shaped and influenced by Arab musical culture from a very early period. That there were two distinct traditions in the early years after the Muslim conquest seems clear from the comment of al-Tīfāshī in a chapter in his thirteenth-century encyclopedia, that when the early Andalusians sang, they sang ‘either in the manner of the Christians or that of the Arab camel-drivers’.¹⁹ Wright makes the important observation that the purpose of mentioning the song of the camel-drivers may have been ‘to imply that the only genres the first immigrants brought with them were those of folk song’.²⁰ Alas, little is actually known of performance practice in these early years. Early in the ninth century, Abū᾽l-Ḥasan ῾Alī ibn Nāfi ‘(d. 243/857), known by the nickname Ziryāb, arrived at the Umayyad court in Córdoba. Student first of Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī, and then of his famous poet-composer-singer son, Isḥāq, Ziryāb is presented in al-Maqqarī’s version of his biography as having outshone his teacher, the pinnacle of the Baghdad style of singing.²¹ Ziryāb became the arbiter of cultural affairs, including not just music, but also food, manners and dress. Most important, he was responsible for introducing new methods of voice training that were systematically passed on to younger generations of singers. The fact that in the early period of development of the non-classical forms an entire court infrastructure fostered the transfer of Arab cultural values and systems to Andalusian soil does not preclude the kind of exchange on the popular level that has been posited. First of all, the singers who by dint of talent found their way to the training sessions of Ziryāb or any of his protégés, must have hailed at least partly from the lower classes. Many, we know, were slave girls. Even the elderly female singers, whom al-Tīfāshī describes as having a monopoly on the training of slave girls in a repertoire of court music that included azjāl and muwashshaḥāt,²² need not have all been from the elite levels of society. Given the oral transmission of styles and repertoire that dominated this venue, the social status of its practitioners is of some significance. Finally, there is evidence that these early styles relied heavily on improvisation, and it is hard to imagine that this could have excluded styles and techniques of indigenous folk origin. Thus, any imported poetic form meant for singing would have to have undergone some degree of popular influence.

Certainly the Spanish environment offered a lifting of the restraints and prejudices that hindered the recognition and development of popular forms in the East, and resulted in their finding fuller rein and visibility in their new abode. While in a true sense these popular strophic forms came to life in Muslim Spain, they may well have been conceived in the Arab East as early as the Abbasid period. As early as the ninth century a number of muḥdathūn poets, most notably Abū Nuwās (d. 198/813), were experimenting with a form of strophic poetry called the musammaṭ, taken by many to be the precursor of the Andalusian muwashshaḥ. This form was named after the simṭ (‘tie’ or ‘cord’), that is, the line containing the poem’s common rhyme. The musammaṭ par excellence is a poem of a number of stanzas, each with the same number of lines, usually four or five. If four, the poem is a murabba‘, five, a mukhammas. The last lines of the stanzas share a common rhyme, which is usually distinct from that of the preceding lines in each stanza, which share a different rhyme. The rhyme scheme of a simple murabba‘, therefore, would be aaaA bbbA cccA, etc.

This form is supposed to have developed from the muzdawija, which is a poem consisting of rhymed couplets resulting from dividing up the lines of the classical qaṣīda with internal rhyming as normally occurs in the first line of a qaṣīda,²³ or perhaps from rajaz poetry. The next development was presumably to a longer stanza of five lines without common rhyme, leading ultimately to the ‘standard’ type described above, with common rhyme. Some musammaṭāt have two lines at the beginning of the piece, with a common rhyme that is repeated throughout as the common rhyme, which resemble the maṭla ‘of the muwashshaḥ.²⁴ Though Ibn Khaldūn tells us that the musammaṭ was widely used, especially by muwalladūn poets, few have in fact been preserved, as they were routinely excluded from anthologies because of their non-classical nature.²⁵ In addition to the specimen by Abū Nuwās, a tenth-century musammaṭ by the Egyptian poet Tamīm in praise of the Fatimid caliph al-‘Azīz bi-Allāh has been preserved, along with two such poems by the eleventh-century Andalusian Ibn Zaydūn.²⁶ Since all but one of these poems can be either presented as qaṣā’id or arranged in strophic form, the very existence of the latter presentation, along with the natural implications of the abundant rhyme, would readily call to mind vocal performance.

By way of argument in favour of the musammaṭ as precursor of tawshīḥ poetry, the striking similarity between this form and the zajal has been pointed out by Stern and others.²⁷ Stern also pointed to the preponderance of musammaṭāt among the Hispano-Hebrew poets as early as the tenth century. In his words, ‘it would be very strange indeed if those men who set out to introduce Arabic metrics into Hebrew poetry should hit precisely on the musammaṭ if this genre were not current in the contemporary Arabic poetry of al-Andalus’.²⁸ Actually, the most persuasive aspect of this connection is the fact that, though the Hispano-Hebrew poets never gave up the musammaṭ, the muwashshaḥ became much more prevalent in the later period. This suggests that this body of poetry may indeed have preserved a bit of the elusive early chronology of the development of tawshīḥ poetry. This would especially make sense if, as is suspected despite the testimony of many of the sources, the zajal actually predated the muwashshaḥ. By now the preponderant opinion regarding the possible Arabic origins of the non-classical poetic forms in Andalusia is that the musammaṭ almost certainly played an important role in shaping the zajal proper, probably during the fifth/eleventh century. The details of this influence are as yet unknown. While some claim for it the entire ancestry of these non-classical forms, others, like García Gómez, view the muwashshaḥ as a hybrid form derived from the musammaṭ with the added indigenously Spanish element of the kharja,²⁹ although even this particular element may have its roots in the musammaṭāt of poets like Abū Nuwās, where direct speech put into the mouth of a female Baghdadi singer is introduced by a verb announcing speech or singing.³⁰ Certainly the jury is still out on the question of the origins of the muwashshaḥ and the zajal, and indeed it will probably long remain so.

The muwashshaḥ and zajal forms reached Egypt, via the Maghrib, in the eleventh century.³¹ By the fourteenth century, the zajal was being widely employed by court poets and others in Mamluk and Mongol regions. By the thirteenth century, the muwashshaḥ was flourishing in the Arab East, biographical dictionaries were providing samples of muwashshaḥāt instead of passing over them with brief mention, and theoretical treatises on the non-classical forms started to appear. Perhaps the figure most instrumental in propagating the muwashshaḥ in the East was Abū’l-Qāsim Hibat Allāh ibn Abī᾽l-Faḍl Ja‘far ibn al-Mu‘tamid ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk (d. 608/1212), discussed by Jayyusi in Chapter 1. This Cairo-born qāḍī wrote the first thoroughgoing theoretical treatment of the muwashshaḥ, a form he was obviously fond of, entitled Dār al-ṭirāz fī ‘amal al-muwashshaḥāt. Indeed, the author explicitly states that his work, intended to help popularize the form in the East, is the first of its kind. Thoroughly educated in the Arabic linguistic arts of grammar and prosody, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk composed not only classical qaṣā’id, but also a collection of muwashshaḥāt, which he included in his book after his analytical presentation and his compilation of western and eastern muwashshaḥāt. According to Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s poems stood out among those of eastern washshāḥūn because of their unforced language and freedom from affectation. Interestingly, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk laments the fact that he never had the opportunity to travel to Andalusia and hear the muwashshaḥāt performed or to learn this art directly from Andalusians.

Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk informs us that these poems were meant to be sung by men or, more frequently, women and that they were performed not only at wine parties, but also at weddings.³² The origins of the muwashshaḥ, he states, were in Andalusia, and the poets of the East imitate those of the West in this art.³³ He also provided a detailed set of diverse criteria for classifying muwashshaḥāt, ranging from issues concerning rhyme to prosody to theme. Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk identifies muwashshaḥāt that conform to classical Arabic metres, but claims that many more do not. In addition, he says, there are those that seem to have ‘no pattern and no beat other than [what is imposed on them by] the music’.³⁴ Perhaps because of his lack of experience with actual performance of some of the poems in his work, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk did not always account for the lengthening and contracting of syllables required by the musical context, with the result that some pieces that he identifies as not conforming to classical Arabic metre can in fact be scanned. According to Stoetzer, most Arabic poetry, both classical and colloquial, can be scanned on the basis of quantitative patterns, while stress patterns account for poems that cannot.³⁵ Because of his ignorance of Andalusian Arabic, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk often composed the kharjas of his own muwashshaḥāt in Persian, the next best thing to the Romance of the Andalusian compositions, for in all cases the kharja, according to Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk, should provide the spice of the poem in language and tone contrasting distinctly with the body of the poem. Despite a general tendency to over-schematize and suggest regularity where little could actually be found, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s work has been an important source regarding the muwashshaḥ and its place in society, both East and West, up to the beginning of the thirteenth century.

The fourteenth century saw the appearance of one of the most important sources we possess for reconstructing the history and development of the non-canonical forms of Arabic poetry in the Arab East, namely, the manual by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349) entitled al-‘Āṭil al-ḥālī wa’l-murakhkhaṣ al-ghālī. In this ‘first poetics of Arabic dialect poetry’,³⁶ written some time after 723/1323, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī describes what the predominant non-classical poetic forms in the Mashriq were at that time and how they originated and evolved. This work is also an important source for early specimens of poetry, including poems by Ibn Quzmān that are not in his dīwān as we know it today. As a result, this work – along with the dīwān of Ibn Quzmān itself and that of the Sufi poet Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Alī ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Shushtarī (d. 668/1268–9), which is the only other surviving dīwān from the formative period of the zajal – is the most important source for the early poetry.

A merchant by trade who was forced to leave his native Ḥilla because of the factional rivalries that had put his life in jeopardy, al-Ḥillī spent most of his adult life at the court of the Turcoman Artuqids of Mardin. His poetic corpus includes encomia in honour of al-Malik al-Manṣūr Najm al-Dīn Abū’l-Fatḥ Ghāzī and his son al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Shams al-Dīn Ṣāliḥ, for whom he was court poet and favoured member of the inner circles. He also composed panegyrics in honour of the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Nāṣir Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn, whom he contacted on his way back from the pilgrimage, as well as the overlord of Hama, al-Malik al-Mu’ayyad Abū᾽l-Fidā’ Ismā‘īl. His poetic prowess, however, extended far beyond praise poetry, which he instinctively shunned at the outset of his career, and included virtually all the major and minor modes of poetry in the Arabic corpus, including complaint poems, reproof poems and apologies, riddles, light verse and ascetic poetry. His 145-line poem in praise of the Prophet, al-Kāfiya fi’l-madā’iḥ al-nabawiyya, in which each line illustrates at least one rhetorical figure, though not the first of its kind, is generally credited with initiating this new genre of poetry.

His mastery of the dominant modes of poetry, as well as the theoretical apparatus at their heart, was so thoroughgoing that we should perhaps not be surprised that Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī chose to extend his creative attention and academic examination even to the non-classical styles of poetry among the so-called ‘seven arts’. In addition to an extensive discussion of zajal, which Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī describes as being the ‘most exalted in rank and noblest in origin’³⁷ among the non-canonical types of poetry, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī also discusses the mawāliyyā, the kān wa-kān and the qūmā – this last peculiar to Baghdad. The discussions of the various arts are amply illustrated with poetry by al-Ḥillī and others. Despite the not infrequent use of vernacular language in the muwashshaḥ, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī classes it with al-shi‘r al-qarīḍ and the dūbayt as being mu‘rab and hence belonging to the domain of fuṣḥā and beyond the focus of the work at hand.³⁸ The zajal, the kān wa-kān and the qūmā are always uninflected, while the mawāliyyā may be either inflected or not, though the latter is preferable.

Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s attitude towards his material is decidedly ambivalent. While on the one hand he sometimes speaks admiringly of the popular forms and even of colloquial language, he feels the need to defend his having composed such poetry. He describes his own mawāliyyās and azjāl as the product of his youth, and states that he did not see fit to record the former until charged to do so, though he provides no information about the origin of this commission.³⁹ Indeed, he claims never to have intended to compose in the popular styles, but changed his mind when he observed its practitioners’ preference for them over classical forms and their insinuation that anyone outside their ranks was little more than an intruder. He then decided to compose a limited amount in order to demonstrate his abililty and banish the suspicion that he could not handle the non-classical forms, all the while careful not to indulge too much in vernacular poetry, lest it have a deleterious effect on his language as happened to Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk.⁴⁰ He warns that his popular compositions were not more abundant only because his contact with the practitioners of these arts was limited. Thus, we get a clear sense that Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī was responding to a certain demand for this type of poetry, but that despite some contact and even competition with the zajjālūn and others, he continued, for the most part, to run in different circles from them. It is noteworthy not only that there was this class of poets exclusively dedicated to the composition of azjāl, but also that a classical poet of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s stature should feel the need to mingle with them and seek their acceptance.

Al-Ḥillī makes it clear that in preparing this manual he had recourse to both oral and written sources, including reliable transmitters and copies of the dīwāns of Ibn Quzmān, Madghallīs (or Mudghalīs) and others. He claims that the inferior Maghribī manuscript copies he possessed were verified against a reliable one that a well-known copyist and ḥadīth scholar from Damascus had compared to the original. He also checked his conclusions with a group of masters in the field of zajal with whom the scribe arranged a meeting. In this text, he tells us, he relied mainly on the work of living poets and poets who had died recently, and in some cases had copies made of their works. These are the ‘moderns’ Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī refers to throughout the text and with whom the work of the early Andalusian masters is consistently contrasted.

The zajal, according to Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, was invented by the Andalusians. Some said Ibn Quzmān invented it, while others claimed Ibn Ghurla, who was a contemporary of the Almohad caliph ‘Abd al-Mu’min ibn ‘Alī al-Kūmī (reigned 527–58/1133–63), derived it from the muwashshaḥ.⁴¹ The chronology of this last claim, obviously, does not work. Others gave the distinction to Yakhlif ibn Rāshid who, with his elegant, strong poetry, had been the imam of the zajal before Ibn Quzmān came along and seduced people with his easy, accessible poems. Al-Ḥillī even quotes the opening verse of a zajal by Ibn Quzmān in which he mocks the style of his predecessor: ‘Your zajal, oh Ibn Rāshid, is strong and solid / [But] if it were strength [we wanted], it’s porters [we’d turn to].’⁴² Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī rejects the view espoused by some that the zajal was invented by Madghallīs, since he found a zajal in his dīwān composed as a mu‘āraḍa to one by Ibn Quzmān, suggesting he was his contemporary or his successor.⁴³ The originators of the zajal, al-Ḥillī reports, categorized it not only on the basis of language and form, but also on the basis of subject matter, so that love poetry, wine poems and poems about flowers, gardens and things associated with them are called zajal; poems relating to jest, wantonness and diversion (iḥmāḍ), bullayq; those which contain blame, invective and backbiting (thalb), qarqiyy; and those which contain moral exhortation and wise counsel, mukaffir.⁴⁴ In contrast, the ‘moderns’ of the Arab East are content to designate all strophic poetry that is inflected muwashshaḥ, that which is uninflected zajal, and that which mixes the two muzannam. In reality, the terminology of this content-based typology persisted and was inconsistently applied even in regions that, in theory, did not observe this method of distinguishing azjāl. The term bullayq, in particular, appears frequently and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī himself cites a number of poems he designates in this manner.⁴⁵ Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī emphasizes the point that the rigidity the moderns adopted regarding the mixture of inflected and uninflected speech in one composition, which they have attributed to Ibn Quzmān, is a standard that the Andalusian master never actually articulated or practised. The use of inflected speech is not absolutely prohibited in the zajal; on the contrary, it is the deliberate effort to use it that is inappropriate. While Ibn Quzmān did state that the closer the zajal was to the colloquial, the better, his own poetry is replete with inflected speech. Despite his correction of his contemporaries’ claims about Ibn Quzmān’s standards, it is their demand for linguistic consistency that Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī chooses to follow in his own compositions, and the delicateness of their poetry that he prefers. Al-Ḥillī’s discussion of the origins of the zajal is followed by a detailed comparison between classical poetry and zajal, including an enumeration of those features of diction, rhyme and metre that are permitted in the former and forbidden in the latter and vice versa. The strictures regarding rhyme are unquestionably more stringent for the zajal than the qaṣīda. Among the features that are permitted in qarīḍ poetry but prohibited in zajal are the use of hamza as the rhyme letter, the use of two distinct weak letters as the letter before the rhyme letter, and repetition of the rhyme word after seven lines of a poem.⁴⁶

The zajal, according to Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, developed from the qaṣīda zajaliyya, which differed from the classical qaṣīda only in its use of uninflected speech. Authors of these poems would even at times contrive errors in i‘rāb (desinential inflection) or spelling – such as writing the indefinite accusative word ‘rajulan’ as two words, ‘rajul an’ – in order to distinguish them from their fuṣḥā predecessors. A number of examples of such poems composed by Madghallīs have been preserved.⁴⁷ The evolution of the form, in his view, was directed by the music, so that, for example, the kharja resulted from the need to extend the length of the poetry to match the music it was paired with. This supposed ‘add-on’ was necessary because the Arabs did not possess the vocal modulation techniques that the Persians did to reconcile the poetry to the music. Likewise, it was the demands of the music that resulted in the evolution of numerous new metres beyond the Khalilian system, some of which only aficionados of the form could recognize. Specialists in fuṣḥā poetry were often stumped and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī proudly refers to his own triumph when tested in the metres and the rhymes of the non-canonical forms.

The great historical value of this text does not derive solely from the delineation of the rules of these arts that it provides, but also from the numerous examples of them that it offers. These illustrations stem from diverse geographical regions, east and west, and represent a wide selection of styles and themes. A case in point is Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s presentation of a bullayq ‘in the style of the Egyptians’ immediately followed by one ‘in the style of the Baghdādīs’.⁴⁸ The first of these, consisting of a maṭla ‘and seven stanzas, is a lament by a man tormented by his urgent sexual needs; the second, with a maṭla‘ and five stanzas, is a rebuke addressed by a father to his wayward daughter. Both of these poems conform to the pattern of a ‘zajal proper’ with three lines with a common rhyme punctuated by a binding rhyme matching that of the maṭla‘ in each stanza, and a kharja echoing one-half of the maṭla‘. Treating, as they do, subjects relating to sexuality and dissolute behaviour, the pieces are closely related to mujūn poetry, which was an established feature of the corpus of fuṣḥā poetry by at least the fifth/eleventh century. The Egyptian poem most particularly conforms to the expectations of mujūn, not only because of its more graphic reference to body parts and their demands, but also because of the essentially light-hearted quality of the piece. Here a man complains of the physical release his penis demands, saying: ‘How can I change my ways / when God created my penis with a hole in it.’ He proceeds to complain of the length of his organ, which has left him ‘a disgrace among people’, and wishes ‘God had created [it] clipped off / or, like my finger, sealed off’. Personifying the insistent member, he says, ‘If I excuse myself on some pretext / It says to me: Don’t give me an argument / [It’s] either that vile thing or masturbation.’ The conclusion of the piece culminates in the self-mockery of the poem, as the afflicted man gets what he has been praying for:

The self-mockery that permeates the poem is thus concluded with lighthearted, if pathetic, irony and, in true khalā‘a style, a swipe at the strictures of society that demanded of him sexual impotence as the price for its regard.

In the Baghdadi bullayq, a father upbraids his daughter for her licentious behaviour. ‘I am not your father and you are no longer my daughter’, he begins. The reason for this disownment is that every evening she goes out and sells herself with the help of a pimp.

While this poem, like the Egyptian one, has sexual behaviour as its topic, it is far less graphic. Furthermore, it is more tragic than light-hearted and conveys no mocking of sexual mores as in the Egyptian sample. The difference in tone between the two poems is probably as much a factor of their subjects and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s selection, as it is of any consistent difference in taste of a regional nature. Linguistically, the Baghdadi poem is similar to the first, for both use simple, uninflected diction with passing reference to features of everyday life. While both are rhetorically plain, the Baghdadi piece does contain a nice paronomasia (bābā as ‘Daddy’ and bābah as ‘shadow-play text’) and a clever double entendre in the word ‘qumāsh’ (cloth), used as a euphemism for the errant girl’s ‘goods’, here being peddled by a dallāl (‘middleman’ – in this context, ‘pimp’) instead of the culturally familiar ‘dallāla’ who goes from door to door selling kerchiefs and cloth on the instalment plan. Thus, with this one figure, the poet suggests the overall message of the poem, namely that his daughter has substituted the innocent and familiar world of ordinary women with the degradation of the pimp’s universe. The paucity of rhetorical embellishment in these poems is suggestive, since al-Ḥillī points out that the earlier azjāl did not employ jinās, tawriya (double entendre) and other figures of speech as the moderns do. Alternatively, the diction of these two poems may have been determined by the class they emanated from or merely by the nature of the subject matter. This is supported by the use in the Egyptian poem of the word ‘ṣulgah’ meaning ‘masturbation’. This word, which is mentioned in Tāj al-‘arūs but not in most of the other standard lexicons, is used in Abū Dulaf’s tenth-century Qaṣīda sāsāniyya⁴⁹ and hints of a fairly vulgar origin.

The diversity of which the non-canonical forms were capable is further illustrated in al-‘Āṭil by a bullayq al-Ḥillī himself composed that complains of the difficulty of fasting during Ramadan.⁵⁰ As if to emphasize his own and the various forms’ versatility, al-Ḥillī also offers the example of a zajal intended for use by the musaḥḥirūn of Mardin to awaken the sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ al-‘Āmil Shams al-Dīn,⁵¹ which might be read in contrast to the separate form specifically associated with this activitity, the qūmā, which al-Ḥillī discusses later in his text.

The second type of non-canonical poetry that Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī discusses is the mawāliyyā. This form, he states, consists of four lines – originally hemistichs – in the basīṭ metre, sharing a single rhyme. Together they are called a ṣawt. Eloquent, declamatory poetry is composed in this form using the traditional poetic modes of classical Arabic – ghazal and madḥ – along with virtuosic rhetorical display and verbal tricks. The form was well established by the sixth/twelfth century, though it is likely that some form of it was in circulation even earlier. Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī makes no mention of the various multi-rhyme patterns that evolved later, and all the surviving early mawāliyyās are in fact monorhyme quatrains (rubā‘ī). From around the eleventh/seventeenth century, variations on the original rhyme patterns appeared in the mawāliyyā, produced by insertions after the first three lines. These ranged from the insertion of a single unrhymed line after the first three (aaaxa . . . ), rendering the poem ‘a‘raj’, to the insertion of sestets of alternating rhymes after the first three (aaa bcbcbc zzz a). The ‘sab‘ānī’ or ‘nu‘mānī’ form has the rhyme scheme aaa zzza. Less frequently internal rhymes were added to some of the lines.⁵² In an effort to explain the origin of the term ‘mawāliyyā’, which is later transformed into ‘mawwāl’, in certain regions, al-Ḥillī tells the fanciful story that this name derives from the slaves of the Wāsiṭīs, the supposed inventors of the form, who learned and circulated the poems. The slaves would sing these short and simple poems from the tops of palm trees and water wheels, and at the end of each ṣawt, they would sing out: ‘yā mawāliyyā’, indicating their masters – and the name stuck. Although the people of Wāsiṭ invented the form, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī tells us, the Baghdadis took it over and refined it and removed i‘rāb from it. They composed both serious and light verse in this form and became so widely known for it that they were wrongly credited with its creation. Although either inflected or uninflected speech may be used in the mawāliyyā, the Baghdadis felt about the mawāliyyā, the kān wa-kān and the qūmā as Ibn Quzmān did about the zajal: the further they were from fuṣḥā, the better.

Although al-Ḥillī provides far fewer illustrations of the mawāliyyā than he does of the zajal, he does provide a contrast between ‘grandiloquent poems in the style of the ancients’ and ones that are ‘smooth and accessible, in the style of the moderns’.⁵³ Most of the former type differ little from formal poetry: their modes and motifs are the same as those of the qaṣīda, and they differ only in their rhyme pattern and their occasional lack of inflection. The latter type contain simpler diction and some tend more towards colloquial usage. One four-liner by al-Khabbāz al-Baghdādī in praise of al-Ṣāḥib ibn al-Dabāhī, mentioned by al-Ḥillī as being ‘among their best’, describes a unique justification for praise and gives us a glimpse of how popular poetry may at times have conveyed the perspective of a wider swathe of society than classical poetry:

What is immediately striking about these four lines is the forthright comparison between the city and the countryside and the fact that the praise of the poem depends on the premise that the towns are more prosperous than the villages. The patron is then praised for having altered this basic socio-economic reality. In other words, the voice of the poem is from the perspective of the countryside. A traditional metonymy indicating generosity is used – slaughtering the she-camels – and the patron is praised for his bravery as a warrior, as he would be in a classical panegyric. What is interesting about the poet’s use of the word ‘usd’ (‘lions’) is that the metaphorical sense of the word that is traditionally used in the classical Arabic poetic corpus (lion = brave man), serves as one of the terms of a double entendre (tawriya), which here encompasses the classical perspective and the popular voice of the countryside at one and the same time. In this tawriya, the word ‘usd’ must be understood in both the literal and the figurative sense in order for the figure to work. In the second line of our quatrain, the word for ‘lions’ is understood, in the traditional metaphorical sense, to refer to brave men. Thus the patron is praised for his ability to completely defeat the fiercest of enemies. At the same time, however, the literal meaning of the word ‘lions’ must be understood and contrasted with the word ‘oxen’, in the last line, thus fixing the hyperbole in an image related to the countryside. The patron is so brave that he not only defeats his enemies, he tames them completely, turning fierce beasts into domesticated farm animals. The imaginative basis for this praise replicates what we find in classical Arabic poetry: the patron is lauded for being so powerful he could change the natural order of things in the world. Here, it is claimed, he can choose not only to change the familiar roles of animals based on their known natures, but implicitly also to render the world a peaceful place, where the now powerless enemy lions perform farm labour. The heroic universe of the classical praise poem here gives way to the insistent presence of village life and its exigencies. The closing image of an unthreatened countryside thus confirms the statement of the first verse regarding the prosperity the patron has brought to the villages. It is common in classical Arabic panegyric to praise the patron for having brought prosperity to his subjects; it is unusual to find this idea associated specifically with the improved situation of the countryside, as in this piece. This poem is thus a good example of one way in which popular poetry expands the boundaries imposed by classical poetry. Linguistically, this mawāliyyā is not particularly colloquial – indeed, the only vernacular feature about it is its partial lack of desinential inflection. Otherwise, it employs classical motifs, vocabulary and syntactic structures and a regular basīṭ metre. It is in the coupling of a unique perspective – one not commonly found in canonical poetry – with a versatile rhetorical figure that exploits the traditional motif and this novel voice at one and the same time, that this poem establishes its point of view and distinguishes itself from the canon. It manipulates a traditional metaphor in order both to call attention to its own newness and to shift the perspective underlying the metaphor. Its relationship to the canon is thus at once dialectical and synergistic.

Another example of the mawāliyyā provided by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī gives ample proof that the non-canonical forms were not immune to the prevailing taste for rhetorical trickery in formal poetry, for it brought together five different rhetorical embellishments: for every word in the piece, the same letter is used as the first and last letter; each verse consists of four words; each verse consists of twenty-four letters; the number of dots used in each is thirteen, and, finally, each one has an internal rhyme in bā’.⁵⁵ Over time, the assiduous pursuit of paronomasia became virtually de rigueur in mawāliyyā compositions, giving the lie to the frequently voiced presumption that rhetorical embellishment was solely the prerogative of elite poets and poetry.

The mawāliyyā became a universally popular form of poetry across the Middle East and North Africa. In Egypt, where, somewhat transformed, it is still popular today, it flourished during the eighth/fourteenth, ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries at the hands of practitioners such as Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad Shihāb al-Dīn, known as al-Ghār al-Shaṭaranjī, who was alive in 737/1336, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ‘Alī, known as al-Ḥijāzī al-Anṣārī (d. 836/1432), al-Shaykh Aḥmad ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Dumyāṭī, known as al-Shaykh Ḥuṭayyiba (d. 808/1405), ‘Abd Allāh ibn Abī’l-Faraj ibn Mūsā al-Qibṭī (d. 840/1436) and Badr al-Dīn al-Zaytūnī (d. 924/1518).⁵⁶ One well-known author of mawāliyyā was al-Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Ḥā’ik al-Mi‘mār (d. 749/1348), who composed the following piece:

Love poetry about males was in fact a frequent subject of mawāliyyā, and, indeed, the form was used for all the known poetic topics, including elegy, such as ‘Alī Ibn Muqātil al-Ḥamawī’s (d. 761/1359) elegy on al-Malik al-Afḍal Ismā‘īl ibn ‘Alī of Hama, who died in 742/1341.⁵⁸

In Syria, too, mawāliyyā were composed by the likes of al-Shaykh Amīn al-Dīn ibn Mas‘ūd al-Dunaysarī (d. 680/1281), ‘Izz al-Dīn Abū Isḥaq Ibrāhīm Muḥammad Ṭarkhān, known as Ibn Suwaydī of Damascus (d. 690/1291), Muwaffaq al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭarābulsī al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 884/1479) and the Egyptian-born Ibn al-Nabīh (d. 619/1222) and al-Shābb al-Ẓarīf (d. 688/1289).⁵⁹ Tunisia, too, had its murabba ‘kāmil, which is very similar in structure to the mawāliyyā.⁶⁰ In Iraq, the sabā‘ī mawāliyyā form, with one slight difference – the inclusion in the seventh qufl of a verse from the Koran, an aphorism or a traditional Arab saying – became known by the name ‘al-zuhayrī’.⁶¹ This name may be derived from one Mulā Jādir al-Zuhayrī, who was famous for this type of composition and admired for his singing of it.⁶² It has also been suggested that it is derived from the word ‘zahr’, which refers to the wordplay based on paronomasia that is typical of this poetic form.⁶³ This same term, ‘zahr’, with the same connotation, is used by popular mawwāl singers in Egypt today.⁶⁴

Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī describes the third of the four non-classical types of poetry, the kān wa-kān, as employing one metre and one rhyme, where the first hemistich is longer than the second and the rhyme letter is preceded by one of the weak letters. Although Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī describes the kān wa-kān as having one metre and one rhyme, and cites only single-stanza poems of this type, al-Shaybī includes examples contemporaneous with Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī that employ more than one rhyme, and it is clear that later kān wa-kān poems often consisted of multiple stanzas, each with four hemistichs, with the rhyme pattern bcda, efga, hija . . ., where the last ends in a consonant preceded by a long vowel. The kān wa-kān was an innovation in the late fifth/early sixth (twelfth) century of the ‘āmma of Baghdad that was passed on to people in other regions of Iraq and then to Cairo in the eighth/fourteenth century. None, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī claims, could outstrip the originators of the form. The name, which means ‘there once was . . .’ or ‘once upon a time . . .’ derives from the fact that the form was initially used for composing stories, legends and dialogues. The form spread and evolved to include diverse themes and was ultimately employed by such as Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201), Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Wā‘iẓ, Abū Manṣūr ibn Nuqṭa al-Muzaklish (d. 597/1200) and Shams al-Dīn ibn al-Kūfī al-Wā‘iẓ (d. 675/1276) in their exhortatory sermons and their ascetic poetry, as well as for aphorisms and wisdom tales, which became widely dispersed and a memorized part of the communal currency. The nine specimens of this form that Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī includes, several of which are of his own composition, amply demonstrate how diverse it had become by the fourteenth century: they include ghazal, about women and men, a poem about the villages around Mosul, and a poem built around twenty verses of poetry by unknown ancient poets that are widely used by Baghdadis as virtual proverbs. Several of these pieces employ rhetorical figures such as tawjīh (where groups of words related in a technical sense as terminology within a particular field of knowledge are used) and murāja‘a (repartee in the form of a reported conversation – ‘I asked . . .’, ‘He answered . . .’, etc.), which were popular in fuṣḥā poetry of the time.⁶⁵

In addition to the practitioners of this poetic art named by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, a number of other poets and preachers composed in this form, including Muḥammad ibn Abū’l-Badr al-Malīḥī al-Wāsiṭī al-Wā‘iẓ (d. 744/1343), Badr al-Dīn al-Zaytūnī and Ibrāhīm al-Ḥā’ik al-Mi‘mār. Both al-Zaytūnī and al-Mi‘mār also composed other types of popular poetry, as indeed did ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731), the renowned polymath, who composed poetry, mostly on Sufi topics, in all the non-canonical forms, alongside qarīḍ poetry. Riḍā Muḥsin al-Qurayshī uncovered a particularly interesting manuscript,⁶⁶ later more fully presented by his successor, Kāmil Muṣṭafā al-Shaybī,⁶⁷ which reveals the extensive use of the kān wa-kān among women in poems dealing with celebratory occasions, such as poems of ‘congratulations on donning the [ascetic’s] wool’ and, especially, numerous occasions of a personal, family nature and certain rites of passage. Among these are poems of congratulations on the following occasions: a child’s teeth coming in, successful weaning of a baby, successful weaning by a wet-nurse in the sultan’s household, the dyeing of a bride’s dress, and the ritual bath taken by a woman forty days after giving birth (‘ḥammām al-arba‘īn’). The poems, which are attributed to one ‘Fāṭima al-Jamāliyya, shaykhat al-firqa al-miṣriyya al-nisawiyya li-Iḥyā’ al-munāsabāt al-ijtimā‘iyya wa’l-dīniyya’, thus offer a unique window on the generally private world of women and children in the tenth/sixteenth century.⁶⁸ Furthermore, as al-Shaybī points out, the inclusion within the poems of spaces marked ‘fulān’ or ‘fulāna’ to be filled in with the name of the person being celebrated, makes clear the formulaic nature of these poems and the fact that they were composed for use by professionals.⁶⁹

While the kān wa-kān fell out of vogue in Egypt in the eleventh/seventeenth century, it seems to have endured somewhat longer in its place of origin. Al-Qurayshī suggests that the reason more poems of this type have not survived is because the form, focusing as it does on moral counsel, lectures and story-telling, did not lend itself to singing, and because it remained unique to Baghdad for a long time before being transferred to Cairo. Both are plausible explanations, and indeed the detrimental effects of geographic isolation are clear in the case of other regional poetries in the vernacular. While some kān wa-kān poems were composed by common people, many were composed by highly educated preachers who used them to preach to the ‘āmma. As such, they represent an interesting point of intersection between popular culture and the edifying goals of the religious establishment, and the dialectic between the requirements of persuasion and the didactic agenda of their authors deserves closer study.

The final form, the qūmā, which was invented by the Baghdadis during the Abbasid caliphate to be used by the musaḥḥirūn to wake people for the dawn meal during the month of Ramadan, has two patterns. The first consists of four lines (‘aqfāl’, in al-Ḥillī’s usage), the first, second and fourth of which share the same metre and rhyme, while the third is longer and has no rhyme. In the second pattern, each line consists of three aqfāl, which share one rhyme but use different metres, with the first shorter than the second and the second shorter than the third.⁷⁰ Over time this type of poetry spread and became more diversified, until it became used for reproof and love poetry and all the other modes familiar from formal poetry. Ibn Nuqṭa is credited with having invented the form for the caliph al-Nāṣir (reigned 572–622/1180–1225), though al-Ḥillī claims that it predated that time. Nonetheless, the form was associated with Ibn Nuqṭa, who was generously reimbursed by al-Nāṣir each year. His son followed him in this occupation, even waiting a year until the month of Ramadan to announce to the caliph in a qūmā that his father had died.⁷¹

As valuable as al-Ḥillī’s book is as a source for information about popular poetry in the Arab East, it is, after all, a written source subject to all the limitations we alluded to in the introduction to this chapter. Throughout his book, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī contrasts the elite among contemporary producers of popular poetry (fuṣaḥā’ al-muta’akhkhirīn) with the common people who also compose in these vernacular forms (‘awāmm al-muta’akhkhirīn). While it is impossible specifically to identify these groups, the former would seem to refer to specialists in literature who also make use of these non-classical forms. The latter group would refer to zajjālūn and others of a more limited culture who compose only in these forms. It is possible that these terms refer more to a putative class distinction and imply no substantive difference in composition practices. The author does explicitly point out that the ‘awāmm al-muta’akhkhirīn, following the model of the petty craftsmen, established certain customs and rules relating to both the compositions themselves and the social practices surrounding them that were not observed by earlier generations. These include the zajjāl mentioning his own name with abundant praise at the end of the zajal and the zajjālūn’s practice of gathering together in circles on a specified day for competitive exchange of azjāl. Both groups participated in competitions that involved betting, and it is clear from other sources that some of the customs explicitly attributed to the common people were practised also by the elite. The actual poetry that Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī presents, as well as the communal consensus about proper form that he uses as his reference point, seem to stem primarily from the former group, though there is only occasionally the implication that the latter’s standards differ to any noteworthy extent. Al-‘Āṭil was clearly written for a specialist audience, some of whose members might not be familiar with the popular poetic forms at all. For this reason, the author takes pains to defend his choice to compose poetry in the non-canonical forms. Having chosen to transcribe words as they would be pronounced in an actual recitation or performance and not necessarily as correct Arabic orthography would require, thereby attempting to soften the borders between the written and the oral realms, al-Ḥillī also warns his readers not to take his unorthodox spelling as mistakes.

The four forms discussed above were not the only types of popular poetry in existence in the post-classical period. In the Arabian peninsula, the vernacular twin of classical Arabic poetry that eventually came to be known as ‘nabaṭī poetry’, continued to thrive throughout the pre-modern period and until the formation of modern centralized states. This body of poetry shared many stylistic, prosodic and thematic features with classical Arabic poetry composed in fuṣḥā, including the use of classical Arabic metres, and monorhyme on the second hemistich of each line. It also featured the traditional crying over the abandoned campsite of the departed beloved and a riḥla section of the poem, complete with a description of the mount and the rigours of the trek. Nabaṭī poetry was roundly ignored by medieval Arab scholars until Ibn Khaldūn – perhaps because Arabia was cut off from the rest of the Islamic world geographically and culturally, or perhaps because nabaṭī poetry’s very affinity to classical Arabic poetry made it more threatening to those intent on preserving the privileged position of this cultural icon. Though we cannot trace the beginnings of this vernacular poetry, by the sixteenth century a number of names emerge of poets whose work is extant in manuscript. These include Rāshid al-Khalāwī – perhaps the most famous of nabaṭī poets – well known for his particularly long pieces, Abū Ḥamzih al-‘Amrī and Giṭan ibn Giṭan. The poetry of ‘Abdallāh Ibn Rashīd, who, with the help of his younger brother, founded the Rashidi dynasty in Hayil in 1835, has also survived. Like much nabaṭī poetry, many of these works served to exhort the people of Hayil to revolt against their weak leader; after the brothers were expelled from Hayil by this same amir, their poetry was full of expressions of sadness, on the one hand, and unabashed political ambition, on the other. Nabaṭī poetry also tended to focus on the details of raids conducted between the various tribes, the migration of the pasture-seeking tribes, bravery in battle, honour and hospitality, including detailed descriptions of the ritual of serving coffee.⁷²

From the eighth/fourteenth century up until the present day, Yemen has known a rich tradition of strophic poetry called ‘ḥumaynī’ poetry. While the term itself is used to contrast ‘mu῾rab’ in reference to poetry in general, ḥumaynī poetry offers a hybrid corpus of classical, colloquial and mixed-register compositions. The first poet known to have composed such strophic poetry in Yemen was Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī, known as Ibn Falīta (d. 731/1331), who served as kātib during the Rasulid reign in Yemen. Other prominent ḥumaynī poets in the pre-modern period include Abū Bakr ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Mazzāḥ (d. 830/1427), the Sufi poets Abū Bakr al-‘Aydarūs (d. 914/1508) and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-‘Alawī (d. 920/1514), Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sharaf al-Dīn (d. 1016/1607), ‘Alī ibn Ḥasan al-Khufanjī (d. 1180/1767) and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ānisī (d. 1250/1834). Ḥumaynī strophic poetry is of two main types: the mubayyat, and the muwashshaḥ, of which there are three forms. Structurally, there is a close connection between Yemeni strophic poetry and the Andalusian muwashshaḥ, and indeed D. Semah has concluded that inasmuch as ‘the mubayyat takes its structure from the musammaṭ and . . . the musammaṭ is definitely of Arabic origin’, the analysis of the Yemeni forms ‘is likely to give indirect support to the “Arabic theory” in the one-century-old controversy over the origin of the strophic form of Hispano-Arabic poetry’.⁷³

In Morocco, in addition to a poetic form that is structurally a type of zajal but is referred to as a ‘mawwāl’, a popular poetic form called ‘iyṭa exists, which is essentially the same as a mawāliyyā rubā‘iyya.⁷⁴ The zajal is, by far, the most widespread of the non-canonical forms in Morocco – which is not surprising, given the role that country played as the conduit of popular verse forms from Andalusia to the East – and is known there by numerous other names, such as al-ayyūbī, maksūr al-janāḥ and al-mushabshib.⁷⁵

The Sudan has two prominent popular forms, the dūbayt and the ḥārdallu. The former refers to the mawāliyyā rubā‘iyya, and not the fuṣḥā poetic form; the latter, which derives its name from the Sudanese poet Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Abū Sinn (fl. second half of the nineteenth century and d. after 1917) from the Shukriyya tribe, is similar to the mawāliyyā and may indeed have been preceded by some form of it. The dūbayt has known great popularity in Sudan, even transcending the lines of demarcation between individual tribes, which sometimes have their own unique poetic forms, and has found an audience in both desert and city.⁷⁶

For centuries after it was written, Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s al-’Āṭil al-ḥālī wa’l-murakhkhaṣ al-ghālī remained the basis for subsequent manuals dealing with popular poetry. Although he changed some of his terminology, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) relied largely on al-Ḥillī’s work in his treatment of non-classical poetry in his Muqaddima. The ninth-/fifteenth-century treatise on the non-canonical verse forms by Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī (d. 837/1434), Bulūgh al-amal fī fann al-zajal, which focuses primarily on the zajal, is derived mainly from al-‘Āṭil al-ḥālī wa’l-murakhkhaṣ al-ghālī. Ibn Ḥijja plucked text verbatim from his predecessor and claimed it as his own. At other times, he made slight alterations to the original text. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he makes bold to name Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī and to find fault with him on trivial points. His work has the merit of providing additional samples of poetry from Egypt and Syria, as well as information about the zajal competitions that were conducted between poets from Damascus and Hama. One anecdote apparently related by Ibn Ḥijja⁷⁷ conveys how important a position zajal held in fourteenth-century Syria. The story has it that the zajal rivalry between Damascus and Hama reached such a pitch that the sultan al-Malik al-Nāṣir Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn had to intervene by appointing a commission of experts to judge between ‘Alī ibn Muqātil, who represented Hama, and Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ‘Uthmān al-Amshāṭī, who spoke for Damascus. The commission consisted of some of the most eminent zajal specialists of the period, including Jamāl al-Dīn Ibn Nubāta (d. 768/1367), Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf ibn Ḥayyān Athīr al-Dīn al-Gharnāṭī and Fatḥ al-Dīn ibn Abī’l-Fatḥ, known as Ibn Sayyid al-Nās (d. 734/1334). The decision in favour of ‘Alī ibn al-Muqātil, needless to say, did not please the Damascenes, who received it with vocal opposition and anger. Ibn Ḥijja himself produced numerous azjāl, and consistently gives himself credit for surpassing his models in his numerous contrefacta (imitative poems), but there is some indication that he may have plagiarized some of the zajals he attributed to himself. Riḍā Muḥsin al-Qurayshī has identified two manuscripts, one Iraqi, the other Tunisian, containing a zajal in which the istishhād – identification of the author that occurs in the last or penultimate verse of the poem – names one Ibn Yūsuf in the Iraqi manuscript and Ibn Ḥijja in the Tunisian. In al-Qurayshī’s view, the Iraqi text is the correct one, and he attributes this zajal to Jamāl al-Dīn ibn Yūsuf al-Banawānī.⁷⁸

It is to this same Banawānī that al-Qurayshī, making reference to an Iraqi manuscript, and not the Turkish one that Hoenerbach used, attributes the text entitled Daf ‘al-shakk wa’l-mayn fŋ taḥrīr al-fannayn, which Schoeler,⁷⁹ following Hoenerbach,⁸⁰ attributes to an anonymous author. This seems to be the one work dealing with non-classical poetic forms that diverges from the path set by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī to express independent views about the two arts of zajal and mawāliyyā. Indeed, the author seems even to have criticized Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī and his contemporary, Ibn Ḥijja al-Ḥamawī, outright.⁸¹ In contrast, the work of the Egyptian anthologist Shihāb al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Ibshīhī (d. c. 850/1446), al-Mustaṭraf fŋ kull fann mustaẓraf – which is a compilation of anecdotes, poetry and pietistic material arranged by subject matter – derives its definition of the popular poetic forms entirely from al-‘Āṭil al-ḥālī wa’l-murakhkhaṣ al-ghālī, while providing additional poetic specimens beyond what al-Ḥillī’s text offers. Likewise, Hoenerbach reports that the still unpublished Kitāb al-jawhar al-maknūn by ‘Īsā ibn Muḥammad al-Maqdisī (ninth/fifteenth century) relied on al-Ḥillī indirectly via Ibn Ḥijja, but is a ‘treasure-trove’ of original zajals and mawāliyyās.⁸² Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ‘Umar al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1659), author of Shifā’ al-ghalīl fī mā fī kalām al-‘arab min al-dakhīl, like many others, makes use of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s text without referring to him by name. Finally, in the compendium of Muḥibb al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Amīn ibn Faḍl Allāh al-Muḥibbī (1061–1111/1651–99), Khulāṣat al-athar fŋ a‘yān al-qarn al-ḥādi ‘ashar, the author takes his description of the seven arts, unattributed, from al-Ḥillī.⁸³

Al-Ibshīhī’s Mustaṭraf, which is a Mamluk distillation of Arab cultural wisdom and literary taste, contains a zajal that is a tour-de-force specimen of this type of popular verse composition. The author of this piece is Abū ‘Abd Allāh Khalaf ibn Muḥammad al-Ghubārī, an Egyptian poet and scholar who was prominent during the reign of the Qalawunids. Al-Ghubārī, who was alive in 741/1341, was renowned for his learning in ḥadīth and Shafii fiqh as well as poetry,⁸⁴ and was actively sought out by students. He is best known for his poetry that celebrates events that took place during the rule of al-Ashraf Sha‘bān (764–78/1363–76) and al-Manṣūr ‘Alā’ al-Dīn (778–84/1376–82). He has the distinction of having composed an entire dīwān of azjāl,⁸⁵ only fragments of which have survived in works such as Ibn Iyās’ (852–c. 930/1448–c. 1524) Badā’i ‘al-zuhūr fī waqā’i ‘al-duhūr and ‘Uqūd al-la’āli fi’l-muwashshaḥāt wa’l-azjāl by Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ḥasan al-Nawājī (d. 859/1455).⁸⁶

The zajal under discussion⁸⁷ employs the standard rhyme pattern of the ‘zajal proper’, the only deviation being that the rhyme of the first ghuṣn is used twice, as is that of the third, resulting in the following pattern: AAbbbAA bbbAA cccAA cccAA dddAA eeeAA fffAA, etc. Starting out as a taghazzul rhapsodizing about the ‘gazelles of the Nile Valley and Syria’, the composition proceeds to encompass most of the standard modes of poetry of the classical canon, as well as the most salient features of the non-classical repertoire. The zajal thus contains, in addition to its ghazal, a khamriyya, a zuhrī focusing on a garden and other features of nature, a mini-badī‘iyya in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad, a brief mukaffir, and a concluding istishhād containing pun-laden praise of the poet himself. The piece is replete with all the rhetorical figures popular in Mamluk poetry, including jinās, tawriya and istikhdām, thus exemplifying the style that al-Ḥillī characterized as typical of the muta’akhkhirūn. Most remarkable about this zajal is its dynamic quality, which clearly bespeaks a musical-performance setting. As is often done with the kharja, the main voice of the piece switches to that of a woman. The difference here is that this occurs several times over the course of the whole zajal, with the first-person voice that opens the piece yielding first to that of the ‘beauties of Syria’ and then the ‘beauties of Egypt’. Indeed, at several points it is difficult to be sure who is speaking as the focus shifts from one poetic theme to the other. This ambiguity is, of course, one that would have been clarified for the listeners in an actual performance setting. The flavour of the performance is clearly conveyed in this zajal by the enumeration of the names of various shopkeepers, where first the poultry man, then the spice seller, then the fruit seller is evoked. This is very similar to what we have seen in modern-day oral poetry performances where the poet deliberately inserts into his composition the name or other reference to those who are in attendance. In particular, the name of the sponsor of the occasion is mentioned, and it is easy to imagine that al-Ghubārī’s poem may have been commissioned by a group of local shopkeepers. This zajal thus vividly illustrates one type of patronage these poetic arts found during the Mamluk era. Rather than the elite ruling class that constituted the patrons of classical Arabic poetry through the twelfth century and beyond, we have here a representative sample of a virtual petite bourgeoisie – what al-Maqrīzī (766–845/1364–1441) referred to in his Ighāthat al-umma bi-kashf al-ghumma as ‘aṣḥāb al-ma‘āyish’. Much of the zajal consists of a masterful combining of the products that are the object of these small businesses, with the elements of the metaphors traditionally used in the various poetic modes of the classical canon. In this, then, as in other popular poems of the period, the Mamluk rhetorical obsession with double entendre and toying with the seam between the literal and the figurative, the immediate and the recherché are mapped on to the dialectic between the social classes, often with parodic effect. This zajal by al-Ghubārī is clearly the work of a learned person, well versed not only in poetry but also in philosophy. The language used alternates between very colloquial usage and standard fuṣḥā expression. It is not the product of an uneducated popular poet, but rather the work of an educated practitioner of the form, keenly attuned to the nature and interests of his audience.

Al-Ghubārī composed his poetry during the Mamluk era (1250–1517), by all accounts the heyday of popular Arabic literature. Whether or not more colloquial poetry was being produced than in earlier periods, it is clear that more literature in the vernacular was being recorded – and being studied theoretically. Not only were some of the well-known tales of the Thousand and One Nights written down during this period, but so too were popular romances such as the stories of Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan and Dhāt al-Himma. This was the era of Ibn Dāniyāl’s shadow plays and works such as Ibn al-Ḥajjār’s Kitāb al-ḥarb al-ma‘shūq bayna laḥm al-ḍa’n wa-ḥawāḍir al-sūq (The Lovely War between Mutton and the Refreshments of the Marketplace),⁸⁸ as well as the azjāl and mawāliyyā of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363). There are a number of factors that must have contributed to the more prominent role granted popular literature during the Mamluk era. Despite the severe hardships of the period, including successive waves of bubonic and then pneumonic plague during the fourteenth century, famine, as well as economic stress due to rampant abuse of the iqṭā‘ system of land distribution and the periodic failure of the Nile to rise, literacy was increasing. Numerous kuttāb-sabīl schools were built during the Mamluk era which fostered the spread of basic reading and writing skills. Most important was the blossoming of the middle strata of society, including craftsmen and shopkeepers. Works such as Muḥammad al-Bilbaysī’s al-Mulaḥ wa’l-ṭuraf, in which members of diverse crafts sit around a table exchanging jokes, present a suggestive image of the importance of this class as sponsors and consumers of various types of popular literature. It is thus possible to imagine a more informal type of patronage of literature being practised among a socially diverse body of aficionados.

Clearly the potential for patronage of poetry from the ruling class during the Mamluk era bore little resemblance to that which prevailed during the Abbasid era and engendered some of the great epic poetry of the classical Arabic poetic tradition. The Mamluk one-generation military aristocracy, which perpetuated itself by the continual importing of new Turkic slaves, was separated by ethnicity from the indigenous Arab populations of Egypt and Syria. This was not the first such alienation in the history of the Islamic caliphate, which knew Turkish rule under the Saljuqs. The Mamluks, however, did not emulate their eleventh-century predecessors and had none of the Saljuqs’ pretensions to monarchical grandeur within a unified Sunni Islamic kingdom with the vibrant court life it engendered. The imported slaves were often of humble tribal origin with limited literary culture of any kind. Once in their new abodes, their native Qipchaq Turkish was supplemented by training in Arabic and the religious sciences, but they remained cultural outsiders whose court life focused on Turkish rather than Arabic. The awlād al-nās, the sons of Mamluks who were native Egyptians or Syrians by birth, given their fluency in both Turkish and Arabic and the influence they often wielded, had the potential to fill in the cultural gap left by their fathers. They did in fact sponsor salons that included both Turkish and Arabic entertainment and some even wrote poetry in classical Arabic, but the lack of acceptance they found among the native ‘ulamā’ limited their role as arbiters and sponsors of literary culture.⁸⁹ Relegated, for the most part, to the vernacular language where they were not inhibited by the rejection of the local Arab scholars, these descendants of the military elite privileged the colloquial language by their use and sometimes their patronage of it. There were, of course, exceptions to this general trend, such as Sanjar al-Dawādārī (d. 699/1299–1300), who conducted a lively majlis frequented by scholars, poets and others.⁹⁰

From the earliest years of the Muslim community, the connection between ethnicity and Islamic identity had been carefully cultivated, and classical Arabic poetry became the emblem of that privileged ethnicity. A vital source of linguistic information that threw light on the text of the Koran during the Umayyad era, the poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia later became the inescapable literary model for Abbasid poets whose compositions offered a justification of the caliphate in terms consistent with the pre-Islamic Arab ethos. Even as the Muslim empire expanded to encompass multiple communities with their own heritages and ethnicities, the tie between Islamic identity and Arabness was assiduously fostered by the likes of al-Jāḥiẓ. During the Mamluk era, this association between Muslim identity, ethnicity and Arabic poetry was disrupted. As interested Muslims, the Turkish rulers were comfortable supporting and focusing on the religious sciences, without at the same time privileging the classical Arabic poetic heritage. Their legitimacy derived from the military might they had used to save Islam from the Mongols and the Crusaders and found but scant grounding in the logocentric focus of early Arabo-Islamic culture. The court culture that did exist under the Mamluks often excluded native Egyptians and Syrians, and focused on Turkish rather than Arabic literary culture. There was some patronage of poetry in Arabic, but that poetry was often a far cry from the grandiloquent compositions of earlier periods. Zajjālūn such as al-Ghubārī used the zajal form to eulogize powerful patrons, such as the sultan Ashraf Sha‘bān, and also to record the events of the day, including the various military expeditions of the Mamluks. In so doing he was taking up the traditional role of the poet vis-à-vis the political authorities, functioning at times as a virtual court poet.⁹¹ A comparison of the simple language of his zajal describing the clash between Mamluk authorities and rebellious bedouin tribes in the Egyptian province of al-Buḥayra (781/1379), with Abū Tammām’s famous ode celebrating the capture of Amorium, or al-Mutanabbī’s poetic celebration of the capture of al-Ḥadath, provides eloquent illustration of how officially sanctioned poetry had become transformed by the time of the Mamluks.

Without the powerful cultural filtering mechanism that had been present in earlier centuries, the Mamluk era allowed more poetry of a popular nature to peek through. It is impossible to know whether the case would have been the same under an ethnically Arab ruling class with the same degree of centralization as the Mamluks. It is possible that the demographic and social changes that had taken place – increased literacy, the rise of the petite bourgeoisie – would have led to the same efflorescence of popular poetry, but one is left with the feeling that the dismantling of the cultural Gestalt that wedded Arabness, Islamic identity and classical Arabic language and poetry with political power cannot have been inconsequential in this regard.

Untethered from the seats of power, popular poetry was free to cover a wide variety of subjects, some of which traditionally received little or no attention within the corpus of fuṣḥā poetry. One example of this is the bullayqa cited by Ibn Iyās that was circulated during the reign of Baybars Ⅱ (709–10/1309–10).⁹³ Baybars al-Jashnikīr usurped the sultanate from the son of Qalāwūn, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, who enjoyed wide support among the people. The opposition to Baybars was fuelled by the numerous serious problems that marred his year-long reign and increased the anger of the populace. Not only was there a serious outbreak of the plague, but the Nile failed to rise to its customary level, which had a disastrous effect on agriculture. In an attempt to calm things down, Baybars opened the dam on the Nile, but even this drastic move was futile, for the river was still not high enough to effect any real difference. Throughout these troubles, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad continued plotting to depose Baybars and regain the sultanate. The following piece, which Ibn Iyās identifies as having been composed by the common people, was sung at places of amusement:

In this brief piece, the regnal title of the sultan, rukn al-dīn, is referred to in the diminutive, rukayn, making him a ‘little pillar’, as a way of mocking Baybars’ belated and feeble attempt to save the economic day by opening the dam. ‘Duqayn’ refers to Baybars’ nearly beardless viceroy, Salār, who was greatly disliked by the people. Finally, ‘the lame one’ refers to al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, the preferred Qalawunid, whose return to power is described as capable of bringing the forces of nature into line. This small poem, then, which was all the more dangerous for its easy circulation by song among the common people, is a clear voice of political criticism and economic dissatisfaction. While hijā’ poetry in standard Arabic had been widely employed since the Umayyad era, it focused more particularly on invective and personal insult and did not convey the kind of collective social complaint that this bullayqa expresses. The subversive potential of this little ditty did not elude Baybars, who had 300 people arrested, some of whom were flogged while others had their tongues cut out.⁹⁴

Complaint about poverty is a frequent theme in the work of another poet of the seventh/thirteenth century, Jamāl al-Dīn Abū᾽l-Ḥusayn al-Jazzār. Born in 601/1204, during the reign of the Ayyubids, to a family of butchers in Fusṭāṭ, Abū’l-Ḥusayn al-Jazzār showed poetic talent early in life. His father saw to it that his son’s talent was cultivated through the tutelage of men of letters such as Ibn Abī’l-Iṣba ‘and Kamāl al-Dīn ibn al-‘Adīm al-Kātib. Although al-Jazzār at first followed in the footsteps of his relatives and worked as a butcher, he eventually gave that up to try and earn his living as a poet. He became well known not only for his qarīḍ poetry, but also for a poetry ‘that the common people lean toward and the elite do not reject’.⁹⁵ In particular, he employed a technique practised by many poets of the Mamluk period, including Ibn Dāniyāl,⁹⁶ which consisted of a parodic take-off on well-known qaṣā’id of the classical Arabic tradition. In one such piece, al-Jazzār imitates the famous mu‘allaqa of Imru᾽ al-Qays in order to complain of his impoverished state. The first five lines convey the flavour of the poem:

This piece, based on the same rhyme and metre, with some deviations, of the original, contains some very clever plays on the motifs of the original ode. First of all there is the mock nasīb, echoing the standard opening of the pre-Islamic Arabic qaṣīda, in which the poet calls on his companions to halt with him at the site of the abandoned campsite of his parted beloved. Here the trace of the effaced encampment is replaced by the poet’s worn-out articles of clothing. It is not lost love he cries over here, but poverty. Thus, the imperative verb that opens the traditional mu‘allaqa is here used to draw the listener’s attention to the pressing physical needs of the narrator. In effect, from its introductory words, this poem becomes a determined call for an entirely different focus and mission for Arabic poetry. Mocking the poetic conventions that mythologize the distant Arab past, al-Jazzār makes it clear that it is not unknown places and poetic figures he yearns for, but rather attention to his difficult circumstances. His situation is so dire, he says, that even Imru’ al-Qays, who composed the original ode, would turn from women and talk of love if he saw the straits in which his successor lived. The urgent reality of the poet’s poverty is emphasized in his play on the place-name al-Miqrāh, which occurs in the original qaṣīda, here used to mean the bowl used for serving watered-down milk for guests, thus making it an eloquent symbol of scarcity in a pre-Islamic poetic context that exalted generosity.

This poem is far from the short, sing-songy azjāl attributed to al-‘āmma. Still, the simplicity of the language of this poem, coupled with the fame of the original qaṣīda, would have made it accessible to a fairly wide audience with even a modicum of basic education, and the sentiments it conveys would doubtless have resonated with many ordinary people of the period. This is certainly not the first poem to poke fun at well-known poems of the pre-Islamic corpus; Abū Nuwās (d. c. 198/813) is the best-known poet to have indulged in such parody. In cases such as this, however, the distance between the original, in both theme and diction, was not so great as with al-Jazzār’s piece. The unabashedly parodic nature of this poem would exclude it from any possible corpus sanctioned by the elite and renders it an eloquent commentary on the status of poetry at the time and the nature of the dialectic between canonical and more popular works. Most of al-Jazzār’s poetry, in fact, can best be described as canonical poetry of simple diction, sometimes containing a sprinkling of the vernacular that is popular in subject matter. His poem about his overly fertile wife is typical in this regard.

In his mu‘āraḍa of Imru’ al-Qays, al-Jazzār was almost certainly speaking from personal experience. Indeed, unable to make a decent living as a poet, he even returned for a time to his original profession as butcher.

Popular poetry made frequent use of the canonical poetic modes, including panegyric, love poetry, wine poetry and elegy, as is amply illustrated by the examples included by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī in al-‘Āṭil al-ḥālī, and at times expanded the limitations of this thematic base by applying them to novel objects. Badr al-Dīn al-Zaytūnī’s elegiac zajal on the Egyptians who died in the plague is typical.⁹⁹ In its straightforward simplicity, it bears little resemblance to the great elegies of the classical Arabic tradition. Instead of focusing on the virtues of the deceased, this composition emphasizes the absoluteness of God’s will as the only explanation for why particular individuals succumbed to disease. The only descriptive detail referring specifically to the victims is in the line, ‘It [the plague] came and took from them beauties like full moons rising.’ The seven-line piece ends with a straightforward exhortation to the survivors to ‘Lament and cry, oh protected ones, and let tears flow copiously from your eyes / Be sad for those who died and have disappeared from the eyes of the onlookers.’ It is as if the pious tone of the first few lines, which make it more of a prayer than an elegy, granted the permission needed for the grief ordered in the conclusion.

The long tradition of popular poetry related to Sufis continued during the Mamluk era and ranged from devotional pieces, to Ibn Abī᾽l-Afrāḥ’s (d. 703/1303–4) scolding mawāliyyā accusing a devotee of hypocrisy, to Ibn Jābir al-Baghdādī’s satirical portrait of Sufi dervishes:

Simple though this zajal is, it contains a triple pun – akyās (clever fellows) – akyās (pouches of hashish) – kās (glass of wine) – that organically brings together all the vital elements of the portrait. This poem falls within a larger corpus of poetry, mu‘rab and malḥūn, dealing with hashish usage among Sufis, to whom the spread of the drug among the general population in Egypt in the seventh/thirteenth century is often attributed.¹⁰¹

We have already noted the use of the zajal to record historical events during the Mamluk period. This role was not unique to zajal, however, and current political events were sometimes the focus of the other forms of popular verse, often with a humorous tilt to them. Consider the following mawāliyyā by al-Bahā’ Khiḍr ibn Saḥlūl in praise of Yalbughā al-Nāṣirī who was attempting to wrest the sultanate from the grasp of al-Ẓāhir Barqūq:

Obviously, the most striking feature of this brief mawāliyyā is the humorous play on the name of the contested sultan in the last line. The preceding three lines of straightforward support and encouragement act as a mere preface to the joke contained in this conclusion. Likewise, the kān wa-kān, with its emphasis on story-telling, was well suited to the narration of unfolding current events, and was adopted for this purpose by a number of poets in Syria. ‘Umar ibn al-Wardī’s (c. 689–750/1290–1349) kān wa-kān relating the events of the plague of 749/1348, with its personification of the plague (‘It enters the house swearing, / I will not leave without its inhabitants / I have with me the judge’s book / with [the names of] everyone in the house’) typifies this trend.¹⁰³

Perhaps nowhere is the liminal status of the awlād al-nās, and indeed of what we are here referring to as ‘popular’ poetry, so clearly reflected as in the life and work of the ninth-/fifteenth-century writer ‘Alī ibn Sūdūn al-‘Alā’ al-Bashbughāwī al-Qāhirī (later al-Dimashqī) al-Ḥanafī.¹⁰⁴ Born in 810/1407 to a Mamluk father of Circassian origin, who was probably brought to Egypt during the reign of the sultan Barqūq (784–801/1382–99), Ibn Sūdūn faced the uncertain future typical of the awlād al-nās, who were barred from much of the wealth and privilege their fathers enjoyed. Ibn Sūdūn was sent to study in the Shaykhūniyya khāniqāh/madrasa, where he received a thorough education in the religious sciences, as well as fields such as philosophy and medicine, from some of the outstanding teachers of the time – training that might well equip him for a life as a Sufi or religous scholar. Having started out as imam of several mosques, Ibn Sūdūn at some point changed course and took up literature as a career. At first failing in the hard economic circumstances of the ninth/fifteenth century to make a decent living as a poet, Ibn Sūdūn gave up the field to work as a copyist and a tailor. It was only when he dedicated himself to the most frivolous type of literature that Ibn Sūdūn found real success. His collection known as Nuzhat al-nufūs wa-muḍḥik al-‘abūs (The Recreation of Souls that Makes the Scowler Laugh), which he committed to writing only when he discovered that others were memorizing his poems and passing them off as their own, has survived in thirty-eight manuscripts, two of which are autographs, and enjoyed great popularity through the twelfth/eighteenth century.

The text of Nuzhat al-nufūs wa-muḍḥik al-‘abūs is divided into two parts, the first of which – dedicated to serious poetry, including madḥ and ghazal, and to humorous poetry and prose – is in fuṣḥā. The second part, also dedicated to humorous poetry and prose, is divided into five chapters: humorous qaṣā’id and mock doxologies; concocted stories; silly muwashshaḥāt; poems known as dūbayt, jazal¹⁰⁵ and mawāliyyās, and wondrous curiosities (tuḥaf) and strange novelties (ṭuraf). Much of this part is in the vernacular. The topics covered in this second part range from the pleasures of hashish, sweets and various kinds of food and drink, to poems focusing on occasions such as birth, circumcision, marriage, death and official festivals.

From the point of view of form, the poems in the second section of the text are extremely diverse. Ibn Sūdūn’s so-called ‘muwashshaḥāt hubāliyya’ are actually more muwashshaḥ-like azjāl, resembling the muwashshaḥ in structure but composed in the vernacular. For each poem in this group Ibn Sūdūn specifies a musical mode, making it clear that these compositions were destined to be sung.¹⁰⁶ There are also qaṣā’id zajaliyya, musammaṭ verse, mawāliyyās and dūbayt couplets, as well as two poems consisting of sexually explicit repartee, which Ibn Sūdūn designates as jazal. The following hyperbolic expression of his notorious sweet tooth is typical of much of Ibn Sūdūn’s verse:

How are we to categorize Ibn Sūdūn’s vernacular poetry? Is it popular poetry? At first glance, this poetry seems to illustrate perfectly the intersection between the literature of the elite and that of the common people described earlier. We know from al-Sakhāwī that the ẓurafā’ competed with one another over obtaining Ibn Sūdūn’s dīwān.¹⁰⁸ The ẓurafā’ were a kind of self-conscious cultural and social elite that included young people from diverse professions.¹⁰⁹ Clearly then, Ibn Sūdūn’s poetry appealed to members of a group of effete consumers. At the same time, as Vrolijk has pointed out, the simplicity of the language and themes of the poetry would place it also within the purview of the less privileged of society. This would thus seem to be light literature that cuts across the boundaries of social class. Indeed, while Ibn Sūdūn’s verses may have been available in written form for a price that his more well-to-do admirers could handle, they were, by his own admission, circulated orally before being recorded in writing and must therefore have been accessible to a wide audience from diverse levels of society. This seems especially probable given his background and familiarity with Sufi circles. It is therefore tempting to view Ibn Sūdūn’s work as representative of the shared taste of the lower classes and the ‘raffinés’ at the opposite end of the social spectrum. On the other hand, if we accept the validity of the portrait Arnoud Vrolijk paints of Ibn Sūdūn, we must consider a somewhat different possibility. Erstwhile Sufi and petty religious leader, Ibn Sūdūn is said to have become a kind of buffoon living a dissolute life of hashish and foolery, while supplying titillating and farcical verse and prose to his elegant paying fans. There is nothing to indicate that the burlesque of these pieces actually reflected the literary taste of the ‘āmma, and while it was undoubtedly accessible to them, they and their taste were probably irrelevant to Ibn Sūdūn’s performance context. The designation given by Ibn Sūdūn to one chapter in the second section of his text is suggestive in this connection. ‘Muwashshaḥāt hubāliyya’ is translated by Vrolijk as ‘silly muwashshaḥāt’, where the nisba adjective ‘hubāliyya’ would seem to correspond to the word ‘habāla’, commonly used in modern Egyptian colloquial Arabic to mean ‘foolishness’ or ‘stupidity’.¹¹⁰ Since the roots of this word are also associated with the idea of taking advantage of a situation to gain benefit (al-ihtibāl = al-ightinām wa’l-iḥtiyāl), one wonders if a double entendre were not intended here, with Ibn Sūdūn the proper habbāl ‘striving to make earnings’¹¹¹ with his silly poems. The parodic intent of Nuzhat al-nufūs – clearly signalled by Ibn Sūdūn’s use of mu‘āraḍas (contrafactions), real and mock – is mostly of a general rather than a pointed nature. As van Gelder commented regarding a particularly incoherent poem within the text, Ibn Sūdūn seems to imply ‘that nothing meaningful can be said about the world, or that meaningful things can no longer be said in verse, except when the subjects are food and intoxication’.¹¹²

With the extension from 1516 of Ottoman hegemony over the Arab lands from Iraq to Algeria and southwards to Eritrea, the social and cultural trajectory that characterized the Mamluk era continued and intensified. The generally greater visibility that colloquial Arabic enjoyed during the period is reflected not only in the sprinkling of the vernacular language throughout many of the historical chronicles of the time – a trend that had begun during the late Mamluk era – but also in the appearance of a number of treatises and glossaries focusing on the colloquial language itself. More sabīls were built, and thus more and more people had access to at least an elementary education. At the same time, Sufi orders, which proliferated during the Ottoman era, also encouraged basic literacy and emphasized the importance of reading. This increased literacy¹¹³ resulted in a wider reading public that represented a broader swathe of society, including artisans and craftsmen, whose needs and abilities differed from those of the traditional Arabic-speaking elite involved in literary output. Thus, more popular material found its way into writing, and recensions of popular romances, such as Sīrat Baybars, proliferated. In Cairo, the diminished role of the educated elite was further limited by the decentralization that now characterized this former imperial capital.¹¹⁴ A similarly loose rein characterized Ottoman control over Syria. As ‘institutional forms [gave] way to looser structures’,¹¹⁵ such as informal sessions and literary salons in the private households of amirs, popular poetry found a more naturally hospitable environment in which to flourish. Poetry was still being patronized – by amirs, other local notables, prosperous merchants and even some of the wealthier among the poets themselves. The amir Riḍwān Katkhudā al-Jalfī (d. 1168/1755), for one, conducted a lively court to which poets were invited. Indeed, ‘Abd Allāh ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-Salama al-Idkāwī (1104–84/1693–1770) alternately functioned as a virtual poet-laureate to Riḍwān or travelled around Egypt eulogizing eminent patrons willing to pay for the honour, much as an Abbasid poet might have done. Al-Shaykh Qāsim ibn ‘Aṭā’ al-Miṣrī (d. 1203/1789), whose primary reputation stemmed from his azjāl and his muzdawijas, and who attached himself to the prominent al-Wafā’ī family, is another example of a ‘professional poet’, after the pattern of an earlier era.¹¹⁶

Nonetheless, patronage of poetry was but a shadow of the official sponsorship of days gone by. The overall effect of this was to level the playing field somewhat between fuṣḥā and popular poetry, for, in this environment, qarīḍ poetry did not possess any more precedence over vernacular poetry than the now-expanding public was willing to give it. In addition, as the local elite was becoming more and more Ottomanized, it was, ironically, the ‘āmma that retained a more unambiguous identification with Arabic. This was particularly true in the case of provinces, such as Aleppo, that remained under the direct control of Istanbul. It is not surprising, then, that most poets composed at least some popular poetry, which was enjoyed by virtually all classes of society. This is not to suggest that popular poetry was suddenly held in such high esteem that it was studiously and consistently recorded. On the contrary, the bulk of it was still left to the vagaries of time, and had it not been for al-Jabartī’s (1167–1241/1753–1825) ‘Ajā’ib al-āthār fī’l-tarājim wa᾽l-akhbār, which Hourani has called ‘the last great chronicle in the traditional style’,¹¹⁷ very little popular poetry from this period would have found its way to us. The appearance in the sixteenth century of the coffeehouse constituted a further encouragement to the production and dissemination of popular poetry and other forms of popular entertainment. Venues like this, which became very numerous in Egypt, for example, over the course of the next three centuries, hosted popular entertainment such as puppet shows and shadow plays and encouraged the use of a linguistic level that was accessible to its more modestly educated clientele.¹¹⁸

The newly emphasized taste for drinking coffee is reflected in a muwashshaḥ by Muḥammad al-Bakrī (d. 994/1585),¹¹⁹ in which he encourages the practice in terms borrowed from the traditional khamriyya. ‘Pass around the coffee in a splendid glass’, he urges, for it solves the problem of ‘what [right] understanding has prohibited’. The beverage is described as being the preferred drink of Sufis, implying that it has similar ecstasy-producing effects. The piece is even complete with a censor whose presumed disapproval of coffee is dismissed as ignorant chatter. The muwashshaḥ ends with a pun on the word rāḥ, meaning both ‘he departed’, in reference to the censor, and ‘wine’ – a parting shot that signals the parody of the entire poem. It is easy to imagine a gathering of friends in a coffeehouse enjoying this spontaneous pastiche of the traditional wine song with Sufi overtones.

Little is known about the life of one of the most compelling figures in the field of popular literature in the seventeenth century, Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Jawwād ibn Khiḍr al-Shirbīnī (d. after 1032/1687), author of the work entitled Hazz al-quḥūf fī sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf (The Shaking of the Peasant Caps in the Interpreting of the Ode of Abū Shādūf or The Stirring of the Yokels¹²⁰ in the Interpreting of the Ode of Abū Shādūf). As was the case for many writers and chroniclers of the Ottoman period, al-Shirbīnī was neglected by the biographers of the period, with the result that much of what is known about him must be gleaned from his works. Al-Shirbīnī was born in the village of Shirbīn of a family he specifies were not peasants. Though he lived in Cairo, he maintained contact with his village of origin. In his still valuable treatment of Hazz al-quḥūf, Baer concludes that al-Shirbīnī was ‘what he calls a mu‘āmil, a merchant and money-lender doing business with the fellahs, or at least that this was the occupation of the family or social group to which he belonged’.¹²¹ Al-Shirbīnī himself was a scholar thoroughly versed in the dominant religious sciences and literary culture and was probably one of the many scholars of rural origin who went to Cairo to study at a madrasa and remained there as ‘part of Cairo’s corps of ‘ulamā᾽’.¹²² Besides a monograph on peasant weddings, al-Shirbīnī also composed a homiletic tract consisting entirely of undotted letters.¹²³

Hazz al-quḥūf, written between 1664 and 1686, is a collection of anecdotes intermingled with poetry exposing what al-Shirbīnī deemed the overall inferiority of the peasant to the Cairene in intelligence, manners, morality and taste, and portraying him as coarse, deceptive and even sexually perverse. The text is, to quote van Gelder’s succinct description of it, a ‘mixture of the serious and the jesting, where true facts alternate with perfect nonsense and gross lies, in which blatant contradictions are rife and perfectly acceptable, and where bitter mockery and compassion are not incompatible’.¹²⁴ The work is divided into two parts, the first of which is an introduction in which al-Shirbīnī announces his intention to provide a commentary on the qaṣīda of the peasant poet Abū Shādūf, in accordance with the request of one he ‘cannot disobey’, whom Baer has identified as the well-known scholar al-Shaykh Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī al-Sandūbī.¹²⁵ This introduction, in which al-Shirbīnī declares his intention to satisfy the prevailing taste of his readers by offering an entertaining rather than edifying text, contains a description of peasant life and anecdotes illustrating the coarseness of rural language and the peasant’s ignorance of sanitary habits, fine food and religion. Stories about encounters between Azharīs and rural fuqahā’ are presented to demonstrate the backwardness and ignorance of the latter. Peasant mawwāls receive al-Shirbīnī’s linguistic and social commentary, while Sufi dervishes are condemned for claiming miraculous powers and being good-for-nothing beggars. The first part concludes with a long urjūza summarizing what precedes it. The second part of Hazz al-quḥūf consists of the commentary on the poem by Abū Shādūf, along with information on the poet’s biography and his beard, and lesser odes supposedly by Abū Shādūf. It is the contents of the main ode attributed to Abū Shādūf with its complaints about the lot of the peasant and oppression by local officials that provided the basis for the essentially socialist interpretation of this text offered by a number of modern Egyptian scholars.¹²⁶ The work concludes with two unrelated tales, one the tale of the barber in A Thousand and One Nights, the other an account of the death of ḥusayn. Besides this last, the only evidence of borrowings from the existent popular literary tradition is to be found in echoes of the epic tale of Banī Hilāī¹²⁷ and the possible influence of the shadow play, Li‘b al-timsāḥ, dating from the second half of the seventeenth century.¹²⁸ As Humphrey Davies points out, a ‘contemporary oral tradition of jokes and anecdotes, about peasants or adaptable to them’ probably also served as a source for al-Shirbīnī.¹²⁹ The colloquial poetry in this work includes several poems in the first part, one of which is a humorous ode about weddings and another a parody of a wedding song by Ibn Sūdūn. In addition, there are six two-line mawāliyyās about love among peasants. The language of the latter is more purely colloquial than the former, all of which are, like the poetry of part two, a mix of colloquial and classical elements.

The scholars who have studied Hazz al-quḥūf have underlined the parodic nature of the text. There is, of course, no doubt that the application of the rigorous and detailed scholarly apparatus of commentary and explication, complete with mock etymologies, to the gross content of putative peasant poetry has the effect of parodying those scholarly methodologies. Then too, the fact that the so-called qaṣīd Abī Shādūf is apocryphal is at the parodic heart of the text. On the other hand, the vehement condemnation of the peasant and his way of life and the portrayal of him that emphasizes the scatalogical has been more perplexing to these same scholars. The explanation suggested by Baer remains the most convincing one proffered to date. This unique example of a literary text focused almost entirely on the mockery of peasants, he suggests, derives from al-Shirbīnī’s desire to dissociate himself, despite his rural origins, from this group that was so roundly derided by his ‘ulamā’ colleagues at al-Azhar. His audience, it would therefore seem, was primarily an urban educated elite that doubtless included some scholars who, like himself, hailed originally from the countryside. This explains the departure from the primary attitude of the text, which is humour and entertainment, to include serious passages that also vilify the peasant, as well as, conversely, the faithful exposition of certain aspects of the peasant’s real-life oppression. It is clear, given the inherent irony in al-Shirbīnī’s liminal position (reflected in the text), between the peasants he disparages and the educated urban ‘ulamā’ with whom he wishes to identify, that Hazz al-quḥūf begs for a literary analysis that takes into account its dialogic nature. Inasmuch as this text still awaits even a critical edition,¹³⁰ it is not surprising that such a literary analysis has yet to be produced.¹³¹

Given the nature of al-Shirbīnī’s probable audience – not to mention the emphasis on food – the comparison with Ibn Sūdūn, the only predecessor the author acknowledges emulating, is particularly apt. In his introduction, al-Shirbīnī promises his text will contain ‘[al-]khalā‘a wa’l-mujūn wa-shay’ yuḥākī Ibn Sūdūn’, and indeed imitates Ibn Sūdūn in his inclusion of obscenity and even copies a long monologue entitled ‘maktūb Finayn’ from Ibn Sūdūn. In fact, both authors seem to have been using mockery of the common people, rural or otherwise, as the fulcrum for the titillation of an elite audience. In that sense, the poetry included in al-Shirbīnī’s work can be deemed ‘popular’ on the basis of linguistic register, but not on the basis of its target audience or indeed its author.

By this period (the eleventh/seventeenth century), poets of mawāliyyā were flourishing in Iraq thanks to the encouragement of Afrāsiyāb, governor of Basra, and his amirs. The poet ‘Abd ‘Alī ibn Nāṣir, known as Ibn Raḥma al-Ḥuwayzī (d. 1075/1664), produced an entire dīwān of mawāliyyā entitled, al-Fayḍ al-ghazīr fŋ sharḥ mawāliyyā al-amīr, in praise of the amir ‘Aḍīd al-Dawla.¹³² During the same period Ma‘tūq al-Mūsawī (d. 1087/1676) produced a dīwān eulogizing the governor and amir of Basra, which he concluded with a number of mawāliyyā of diverse types.¹³³ The following two centuries also produced prominent mawāliyyā poets, including al-Shaykh Kāẓim al-Azrī (d. 1211/1796). The rule of the Jalīlī family of governors in Mosul during the second half of the twelfth/eighteenth century brought a period of patronage of the arts and fostering of cultural life, as scholars and poets were supported and numerous schools and mosques were built. A number of Jalīlī poets emerged during this time, including Fakhr al-Dīn Abū Sa‘īd ‘Uthmān al-Ḥayyā’ī (d. 1245/1829), and his sons, Muḥammad Amīn Bāshā al-Jalīlī (d. 1262/1846) and Muḥammad Sa‘īd ibn al-Ḥājj ‘Uthmān al-Ḥayyā’ī al-Jalīlī (d. 1233/1818). Mosul also boasted ‘Abd al-Bāqī al-‘Umarī (d. 1278/1861), ‘Abd al-Ghaffār al-Akhras (d. 1291/1774) and al-Ḥilla, Muḥammad ibn Ismā‘īl Ibn al-Khalfa (d. 1247/1831).¹³⁴

As limited as our information about al-Shirbīnī is, it still greatly outstrips what we know of the life and work of the legendary Egyptian poet Ibn ‘Arūs (fl. c. 1193/1780). Even the name ‘Ibn ‘Arūs’ was almost certainly not the poet’s real one. Ibn ‘Arūs, to whom at least one writer refers as ‘Aḥmad Ibn ‘Arūs’,¹³⁵ is said to have been born in one of the villages of Qinā in Upper Egypt.¹³⁶ He became a notorious brigand and leader of one of the most dangerous gangs of thieves that was terrorizing Egypt during the eighteenth century, and is said to have made a fortune extorting tribute money from various villages, with public officials themselves helpless to rein him in. Later in life, Ibn ‘Arūs apparently repented his evil ways, became a Sufi ascetic, and for the last twenty years of his life travelled around the country distributing his ill-gotten wealth to the poor. One almost certainly apocryphal story about the origin of the name ‘Ibn ‘Arūs’ has it that once, during his futuwwa days, the poet attacked a wedding party. When the bride, abandoned in her litter by the frightened men, responded to her would-be assailant with poetry and a disarming lack of fear, the impressed Ibn ‘Arūs escorted her unharmed to her waiting groom and went off to repent his sinful ways. His fellow thieves in response dubbed him ‘Ibn ‘Arūs’, as if he had been born anew of the unnamed bride.¹³⁷ According to Ḥusayn Maẓlūm Riyāḍ and Muṣṭafā Muḥammad al-Ṣabbāḥī, in one of the few modern sources providing any information at all about Ibn ‘Arūs, his azjāl – many of which focused on moral counsel and wise advice – were widely circulated among all classes of Egyptian society, but only a few have been preserved in writing.¹³⁸ Indeed, they claim, much material has been falsely attributed to him, though they vouch for the authenticity of the one long zajal of his included in their own text.¹³⁹ In contrast, Abū Buthayna claims that an entire dīwān of his work has been preserved in Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya.¹⁴⁰ Pierre Cachia affirms that Ibn ‘Arūs is still frequently quoted by the singers of modern popular ballads in Egypt who sing quatrains they attribute to him. Ibn ‘Arūs even became the eponym for a society of Egyptian colloquial poets – the Ibn ‘Arūs Society – in the 1950s.

Among the many zajjālūn of the period, al-Shaykh ‘Āmir al-Anbūṭī (d. 1173/1759) is distinguished by his focus on food and drink, in the tradition of Ibn Sūdūn. A sharp-tongued poet whose invective was feared by many, al-Anbūṭī also composed a ‘Lāmiyya’ in the pattern of al-Ṭughrā’ī’s Lāmiyyat al-‘ajam and another after the ‘Lāmiyya’ of al-Wardī. Al-Anbūṭī’s contemporaries so feared his parodies of their poems, that they on occasion resorted to paying him to keep him from composing such works.

One such cautious benefactor was ‘Abd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn ‘Āmir ibn Sharaf al-Dīn al-Shabrāwī¹⁴¹ (1091–1171/1680–1758). The demand for popular entertainment material of the kind suitable for coffeehouses increased during the Ottoman era, and many poets of the period composed azjāl, muwashshaḥāt and short poems that were made into songs. Al-Shabrāwī, the author of the following little ditty, was a well-known composer of such songs, which were widely circulated among the ‘āmma.

It is revealing about the state of poetry in general in the eighteenth century to note that the poet who composed this fairly insipid piece was an Azharī scholar from a well-known family of ‘ulamā’, who became rector of al-Azhar in 1724. Al-Shabrāwī was typical of many of the poets of the period, not only in his Azhar training, but also in his composition of both fuṣḥā poetry and popular poetry. Al-Shabrāwī in fact composed not only panegyrics to notable figures of his day, but also a number of ghazal poems that were still being sung by popular singers in Egypt well into the twentieth century.¹⁴³ Indeed, the case of al-Shabrāwī’s popularity and career represents another argument against too cantonized a view of pre-modern Arab society. The ‘ulamā’ of eighteenth-century Egypt had direct contact with the ‘āmma, and hence that potential audience, through the religious orders and corporations, and, in any case, often pursued interests and activities entirely separate and distinct from their Azhar-defined identities.¹⁴⁴

Not all Ottoman-period verse of a non-canonical nature focused on light topics, however. As in previous periods, during the Ottoman era, non-canonical poetic forms such as the zajal were often used as the vehicle for eulogizing powerful figures and patrons. One example of this is Ibrāhīm al-Shāfi‘ī’s long zajal (1177/1763) praising the amir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Katkhudā, in which he named the numerous buildings he had built and the various charities he had endowed.¹⁴⁵ Likewise, many eighteenth-century azjāl record details of the popular Egyptian revolt against the French.¹⁴⁶ In Iraq, al-Shaykh Muḥammad al-‘Umarī al-Mawṣilī (d. 1216/1801), a Sufi ascetic known for his miracles, composed kān wa-kān poems for use in preaching. In one long poem, he exhorts the practitioners of the various trades, naming them individually and instructing them on the unscrupulous business practices they should avoid in order to please God and fulfil their professional duties.¹⁴⁷ Each example contains a play on words that involves vocabulary associated with that profession, as when the baker is instructed to ‘ifham daqīq lafẓ qawlī’ (‘understand the subtlety of what I am saying’), the word daqīq meaning both ‘flour’ and ‘that which is subtle or precise’. The extent to which popular poetic forms were nurtured and developed in Sufi circles is evidenced by the work of Aḥmad al-Darwīshī al-Burullusī (d. 1216/1801). An Aḥmadī Sufi, he authored a book entitled al-‘Aqīda al-darwīshiyya fī taḥrīr al-sab‘ [sic] funūn al-adabiyya, in which he provides illustrations from his own compositions of each of the seven arts. Even more interesting, in this work he established for this poetry rhythmic measures deriving from the zajal tradition, distinct from the Khalīlian metrical system.¹⁴⁸ The nineteenth century also produced a number of mawāliyyā/zuhayrī poets in Iraq, including ‘Abd al-Ghanī Jamīl (d. 1280/1863) and Ḥusayn al-Ḥājj Mahdī (d. 1276/1860).

As discussed in the first chapter of this volume, the aptness of the traditionally applied term for the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century in Arabic literary history, ‘aṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ, has long been debated. After decades of cavalier condemnation of these centuries of literary production, the more judicious position that seems finally to have taken root among scholars of Arabic literature is that, given the fact that much of the basic research into the actual literature of this period has yet to be done, we are in no position to dismiss it out of hand. In regard to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this is particularly true, for, in fact, very little poetry, canonical or otherwise, has actually been preserved from this period. The first half of the nineteenth century was truly a transitional period socially, politically and culturally. All the mechanisms that would bring about the cultural efflorescence of the nahḍa in the second half of the century were in place, but were barely in their infancy. The Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the beginning of a new era of increased European presence and influence in Arab countries. Secular education, which would become widespread by the last decades of the century, was now being introduced by Christian missionaries in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and by Muḥammad ‘Alī (reigned 1220–64/1805–48) in Egypt. Publishing was expanding and the Būlāq press was established in Cairo in 1822. At the same time, official newspapers that appeared during this period, such as al-Waqā’i ‘al-Miṣriyya (from 1244/1828), were the vanguard of the vital and influential journals of the second half of the century that would effectively transform traditional Arab society. During the period 1800–50, none of these elements was fully evolved, and the great impact they were to have needed several decades to manifest itself. Popular poetry, too, seems to have slumbered during this period. This may have been due to particular social and economic measures that had the effect of exaggerating class differences and widening the gap between the various sectors of society. As secular education became available to a select group of officials and well-connected elites, and family and supporters of Muḥammad ‘Alī were granted land holdings in payment for their services and loyalty, and as wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer merchants who managed to create a niche for themselves in the context of European manipulation of trade markets, the poorer classes had less and less in common with those at the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum. Informal channels of communication and exchange were being transformed, and the period was marked by more rigid social stratification. In this environment, the limited body of shared popular culture and literature shrank still further.

One of the last nineteenth-century zajjalūn of note was a talented Azhar student from an elite family, Abū Muḥammad ‘Abd Allāh ibn Ibrāhīm al-Faḥḥām, who used rhetorical embellishment in his azjāl after the manner of the fuṣḥā poets of his day. According to Riyāḍ and al-Ṣabbāḥī, al-Faḥḥām’s work created a wider audience for zajal, as people from all levels of society turned their attention to the zajal, after having long neglected it. Indeed, many men of letters began composing azjāl in imitation of al-Faḥḥām, since zajal was more positively received and more widely circulated among the people, ‘while only a small group of the nation’s elite read and transmitted poetry’.¹⁴⁹ The fact that zajal was thriving during the Mamluk era and then found a receptive audience again in the nineteenth century that al-Faḥḥām and others were able to exploit, suggests a line of continuity of this form among certain sectors of society that we, in our dependence on the written record, cannot fully reconstruct. Unfortunately, despite al-Faḥḥām’s reputation for carefully guarding his collected poetry, very little of his work, which consisted mainly of muwashshaḥāt, madā’iḥ nabawiyya and Sufi hymns, has survived.¹⁵⁰ What is perhaps most revealing about al-Faḥḥām’s work is that it illustrates to some extent the temporary shifting of the familiar balance between the canonical and the non-canonical poetic forms, which characterized the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the poetic environment of this ‘exhausted, inward-looking culture’,¹⁵¹ it is as if non-canonical poetry were almost becoming canonical, by default.

During this period, the shaykh-poets continued to produce both fuṣḥā and popular poetry. Their ranks included, besides al-Faḥḥām, Shaykh Amīn ibn Khālid Aghā (1180–1257/1766–1841), who was known for his mawāliyyā and songs arranged for musical instruments.¹⁵² Many of the civil servants of the local Ottoman administrations also composed poetry, and Christian monks and priests in Syria and Lebanon made important contributions. One such cleric was Father Ḥanāniyyā Munayyar al-Zawqī (d. 1170/1757), whose long zajal consisting of a dialogue between a flea and a monk destined to be his nocturnal meal has been preserved.¹⁵³ The most obvious goal of this thirty-seven-stanza poem in colloquial Arabic was to entertain, and the most effective vehicle employed to that end is the attribution of human traits, aspirations and reasoning to the flea. For example, the flea announces his intentions by saying that he has been fasting for two months and figures that Ramadan must be over, and then scolds the potential victim for wanting to leave his guest, the flea, hungry, contrary to well-known custom. The insect portrays himself as an aid to piety in that he keeps the wretched monk awake so that ‘he will get up and worship his lord / and ask forgiveness for the world’. A hint of political commentary occurs when, as the exasperated monk threatens to complain about him to the judge and seek a decree (faramān) calling for his murder, the flea announces: ‘I am not scared of a minister / or governor or sultan.’ The most noteworthy instance of cautious political commentary occurs when the flea declares: ‘My relatives and children are numerous / and were raised inda’l-jazzār.’ The meaning is clear: this family of fleas wants blood, but the word al-jazzār (butcher) is a double entendre that can be read as referring to any butcher or to the notorious Ottoman governor of Acre, Aḥmad Pāshā al-Jazzār (d. 1219/1804).

The three penultimate stanzas in this zajal relate to the second, particularly telling goal of the poem. After having coaxed and threatened the flea in an attempt to get him to leave him alone, the exasperated monk begs the flea for charity, to which the flea responds with a series of instructions amounting to a prescription for good hygiene and sanitation, without a hint of humour in them. By directing the monk to ‘whitewash your house’ and ‘make it cleaner than china’, to ‘check your clothes for fleas or put them in the sun / before putting them on’ and ‘sweep the floor of your house’, and to ‘change your clothes when it’s time for bed / so no [flea] will come near you’, the voice of the flea is providing straightforward, practical advice that the author clearly wished to convey to a fairly wide audience from diverse social classes. Although Moreh’s comment that ‘during the nineteenth century the strophic form was employed not in higher literary circles, but in what may be called “private” ones’¹⁵⁴ is generally true, this is an obvious exception to that rule. Clearly, Munayyar intended to entertain and educate; indeed, the didactic section of the poem is effective because it is light-handed and brief, and is presented as the advice of the flea himself, occurring only after a lengthy, entertaining negotiation between the parasite and his victim. Although this piece derives, like so many others, from a member of an educational and social elite, on the basis of the wide-ranging audience in need of edification that is clearly envisioned by the author, as well as the linguistic register and the poetic form employed, this poem must be deemed ‘popular’.

Moreh has drawn attention to the revival in the nineteenth century of strophic forms, such as the muzdawij, the muwashshaḥ and the zajal for use in hymns and translations from European languages. One example of this phenomenon is Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī’s (1215–88/1800–71) translation of the psalter using ‘varied rhyme schemes common to zajal’.¹⁵⁵ In so doing, Syrian and Lebanese Christians were inclining towards the more colloquial language of Christian liturgical literature.¹⁵⁶ This linguistic and stylistic choice was not unique to Christians, however, and in fact the most outstanding exemplar of this practice was Muḥammad ‘Uthmān Jalāl (1245–1316/1829–98), best known for his translations of French literary works into Arabic. A product first of the traditional kuttāb, and then one of the secular preparatory schools that came into existence as part of Muḥammad ‘Alī’s vast educational reform intended to foster the creation of a modern army in Egypt, Muḥammad ‘Uthmān Jalāl was ultimately invited by Rifā‘a Rāfi ‘al-Ṭahṭāwī (1216–88/1801–71) to study at the newly created School of Languages. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Muḥammad ‘Uthmān Jalāl was to translate a number of seventeenth-century French plays into Arabic, including several by Racine and, most notably, a number of comedies by Molière. All of these were in Egyptian colloquial verse. During the last half-century under our consideration, he translated La Fontaine’s Fables into Arabic under the title, al-‘Uyūn al-yawāqiẓ fī’l-amthāl wa᾽l-mawā‘iẓ, in many of which he employed the zajal form. Colloquial poetry also constituted a significant part of his oeuvre. One short zajal that has been preserved was composed by Jalāl in 1261/1845 when he was charged with teaching French to a certain Zā’id Efendi who had been employed by Muḥammad ‘Alī to translate the collected works of the Hanafi shaykh al-Jazā’irlī. Frustrated by his student’s slowness, Jalāl wrote:

The words of Jalāl used to introduce this piece are telling: ‘I didn’t want to go to the trouble of writing poetry about him, even a satire, so I wrote the following about him in the form of a zajal.’ This comment reveals a disparaging attitude towards this non-canonical verse form that is hardly different from what we saw with Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī five centuries earlier. Given the form, the linguistic register and the subject matter, this poem would certainly be classified as popular – if it ever found an audience. There is, however, no evidence that this zajal, unlike some of his other humorous poetry, was made public any time before its inclusion in al-Khiṭaṭ al-tawfīqiyya, and, in all likelihood, it never had any more of an audience than personal friends of the author.

The second half of the nineteenth century would witness a plethora of translations using colloquial verse, as well as much original popular poetry in the vernacular. Writers such as ‘Abd Allāh al-Nadīm (1260–1314/1843–96) and Ya‘qūb Ṣanū ‘(1255–1330/1839–1912) took advantage of the many periodicals and newspapers of the day to rail against political and economic inequities and to furnish a voice of nascent resistance to European domination in the area. Both al-Nadīm and Ṣanū ‘even founded their own newspapers – al-Tankīt wa’l-tabkīt and al-Ustādh for al-Nadīm, and Abū Naḍḍāra Zārqā’ for Ṣanū ‘– which provided a dedicated platform for their views. This was distinct from the explicitly political popular poetry of Algeria in the 1830s in that this latter operated in what was primarily a traditional vein. Poems meant to rally support around ‘Abd al-Qādir (1222–1300/1808–83), the most successful local claimant to power after the removal of the dey’s government, resembled classical eulogy and boasting; couplets circulated by angry rivals to disparage the amir smacked of traditional satire. Written in dialect, they differed from classical models in their linguistic register, but not in their basic outlook.¹⁵⁸ In Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century, the traditional themes of popular poetry, such as ghazal, wise counsel and exhortation, and praise of the Prophet, endured, but they took second seat to the more engaged poetry of political resistance and social reform. The immediacy, intimacy and directness that had always characterized popular poetry now served the needs of a changing society, looking inward and outward through this vehicle of culturally authentic expression.

¹ Cachia, Ballads, p. 9.

² Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, p. 4, fn. 5.

³ Maspéro, Chansons populaires, cited by Cachia, Ballads, p. 6.

⁴ Kīlānī, al-Adab al-miṣrī, p. 193.

⁵ Ibid., p. 194.

⁶ Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, p. ⅹⅴ.

⁷ Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, p. 44.

⁸ Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture.

⁹ Alan Jones has argued that muwashshaḥ no. 33 of the῾Uddat al-jalīs attributed to one Abū’l-Qāsim al-῾Aṭṭār was actually the work of Abū᾽l-Qāsim ibn al-῾Aṭṭār (d. 387/997), making it the oldest datable such poem, but this claim is not unanimously accepted: Jones, ‘A Tenth Century Muwaṣṣaḥ’.

¹⁰ In fact, there is in the sources considerable inconsistency in the use of terms referring to the component parts of the muwashshaḥ. Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk, for example, uses the term bayt for ghuṣn. Even the terms ‘muwashshaḥ’ and ‘zajal’ are not uniformly applied: Ibn Quzmān does not distinguish between the two terms, and Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk uses the term muwashshaḥ malḥūn for what we know as zajal. Often the discrepancies arise from the use of terms from the musical lexicon alongside or in lieu of literary designations.

¹¹ Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, p. 185.

¹² Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry, p. 270; Corriente, Gramática, p. 4.

¹³ Monroe, ‘Ibn Quzmān’, p. 50; Zwartjes, Crossroads, p. 79.

¹⁴ Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry, p. 270; Corriente, Gramática, p. 4.

¹⁵ EI2, s.v. ‘Zadjal’.

¹⁶ Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, p. 169.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 170.

¹⁸ Cachia in Cachia and Watt, Islamic Spain, p. 118. This too is the view of Wright regarding exchange between the indigenous Christian population and the Arab conquerors in the first decades after the Muslim invasion: Wright, ‘Music’, p. 563. See also Dwight Reynolds, ‘Music’, in CHALAND.

¹⁹ Wright, ‘Music’, p. 563; Cachia and Watt, Islamic Spain, p. 118.

²⁰ Wright, ‘Music’, p. 563.

²¹ Ibid., p. 556.

²² Ibid., p. 562.

²³ Schoeler, ‘Muwaššaḥ und Zaǧal’, pp. 440–64.

²⁴ Zwartjes, Crossroads, p. 30.

²⁵ Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldūn, vol. Ⅲ, p. 414.

²⁶ Schoeler, ‘Muwaššaḥ und Zaǧal’, pp. 441–2.

²⁷ Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, p. 55.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 51.

²⁹ Zwartjes, Crossroads, p. 81.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 83.

³¹ Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, pp. 72–4.

³² Zwartjes, Crossroads, p. 48.

³³ Ibid., p. 78.

³⁴ Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk, Dār al-ṭirāz, p. 33, cited by and tr. Cachia, Ballads, p. 12.

³⁵ Stoetzer, Theory and Practice, pp. 90–108; and his, ‘Arabic Metrics’, p. 115.

³⁶ EI2, s.v. ‘Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’.

³⁷ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil (hereinafter al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N), p. 5; Hoenerbach (ed.), Poetik (hereinafter al-‘Āṭil/H), p. 9.

³⁸ He points out that the Iraqis do not include the zajal among the seven arts because they make no distinction between the muwashshaḥ, the zajal and the muzannam (mixed-register compositions).

³⁹ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 108; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 136.

⁴⁰ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 134; this section of the text is not in al-‘Āṭil/H.

⁴¹ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 13; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 16.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 6; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 10.

⁴⁵ Sallām offers a more specific definition of the bullayq as a ‘zajal-like composition, which, according to the Egyptians, differed from the zajal on the basis of its subject matter’. Balālīq treated subjects that were light, amusing, topical or mocking. Because they were short and used easily repeatable metres, these poems were more generally known among the common people than the zajal. While the illustrations Sallām cites for the bullayq all conform to this description in their use of short, sing-songy metres, Ṣafŋ al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’s use of the term for longer poems suggests a less delimited application of the term: Sallām, al-Adab, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 316–20. The other terms of this content-based typology have suffered from similarly inconsistent application. Kīlānī even treats qarqŋ, bullayq and mukaffir as ‘types of mawāliyyā’ in pre-Ottoman- and Ottoman-period Egypt (al-Adab, p. 194), as does al-Qurayshī (al-Funūn, vol. I, pp. 70–3). Similarly, the term ḥammāq, which Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī lists as one of the seven poetic arts, recognized by the people of Andalusia, Egypt and Syria but unknown to Iraqis (al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 2; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 7), is elsewhere used to refer to a type of zajal dealing with light, sometimes satirical, subjects.

⁴⁶ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, pp. 47–8; al-‘Āṭil/H, pp. 53–4.

⁴⁷ EI2, s.v. ‘Zadjal’.

⁴⁸ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, pp. 101–3; al-‘Āṭil/H, pp. 124–8.

⁴⁹ Bosworth, Underworld, p. 218.

⁵⁰ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, pp. 96–7; al-‘Āṭil/H, pp. 115–18.

⁵¹ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, pp. 95–6; al-‘Āṭil/H, pp. 113–15.

⁵² EI2, s.v. ‘Mawāliya’.

⁵³ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, pp. 108–14; al-‘Āṭil/H, pp. 137–48.

⁵⁴ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 106; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 133.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. Ⅰ, pp. 61, 63, 64.

⁵⁷ Ibn Iyās al-Ḥanafī, ‘al-Durr al-maknūn’, fo. 166.

⁵⁸ al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. I, p. 78.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 76–7, 82.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 88.

⁶¹ See al-Khāqānī, Funūn.

⁶² al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. I, pp. 115, 116.

⁶³ al-Shammarī, al-‘Arūḍ, p. 112.

⁶⁴ Cachia, Ballads, p. 34.

⁶⁵ Cachia, Arch Rhetorician, pp. 44, 108.

⁶⁶ al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. Ⅲ, pp. 36–42. The MS is ‘Shi‘r Taymūr’, No. 608, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya.

⁶⁷ al-Shaybī, Dīwān, pp. 259–92.

⁶⁸ The MS is not dated; this is al-Shaybī’s estimate.

⁶⁹ al-Shaybī, Dīwān, p. 260.

⁷⁰ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 127; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 171.

⁷¹ al-Ḥillī, al-‘Āṭil/N, p. 128; al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 172.

⁷² This information is derived from Sowayan, Nabaṭi Poetry. See also Ibn Khamīs, Rāshid al-Khalāwī; and his, al-Adab al-sha’bī.

⁷³ Semah, ‘Ḥumaynī Poetry’, 235. The information in this paragraph is derived from this article. See also al-Maqāliḥ, Shi‘r al-‘āmmiyya.

⁷⁴ al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. I, p. 87.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 88.

⁷⁶ Ibid., pp. 83–5.

⁷⁷ al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. Ⅱ, p. 62; and his introduction to al-Ḥamawī, Bulūgh al-amal, pp. 27–8. Note that the reference to Bulūgh al-amal provided by al-Qurayshī in al-Funūn is invalid.

⁷⁸ al-Qurayshī, introduction to al-Ḥamawī, Bulūgh al-amal, p. 30. Al-Qurayshī (ibid., 115, fn. 2) suggests al-Banawānī died before his contemporary, Ibn Ḥijja, i.e. before 837/1434; al-Shaybī (Dīwān, p. 368) offers the alternative death date of 860/1456.

⁷⁹ EI2, s.v. ‘Zadjal’.

⁸⁰ al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 3.

⁸¹ al-Qurayshī, introduction to al-Ḥamawī, Bulūgh al-amal, p. 31.

⁸² al-‘Āṭil/H, p. 3.

⁸³ Ibid., pp. 3–5.

⁸⁴ It is the view of one writer on al-Ghubārī that he turned to zajal only after his qarīḍ poetry failed to gain a significant reception. Abū Buthayna, al-Zajal al-‘arabī, p. 46.

⁸⁵ According to al-Qurayshī (al-Funūn, vol. I, p. 62) – and only al-Qurayshī, as far as I know – al-Ghubārī also composed mawāliyyā.

⁸⁶ In David Semah’s description of the unique manuscript (Escorial 434) of ‘Uqūd he notes that the text includes ninety muwashshaḥāt, some attested in no other source. However, in the 1982 edition by al-Shihābī (al-Nawājī, ‘Uqūd), only eighty-seven muwashshaḥāt are included. This is perhaps not surprising since the editor acknowledges that he omitted some azjāl containing khalā‘a and mujūn for the sake of propriety. The azjāl that are included in this edition number thirty-one, composed by seventeen different zajjālūn. The earliest dates from the sixth/twelfth century, the latest from the ninth/fifteenth.

⁸⁷ al-Ibshīhī, al-Mustaṭraf, pp. 240–1. A more detailed analysis of this piece was presented at the International Conference on Middle Eastern Popular Culture, Oxford University, 18 September 2000, and is being prepared for publication.

⁸⁸ van Gelder, God’s Banquet, p. 97.

⁸⁹ Haarmann, ‘Arabic in Speech’.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 97.

⁹¹ Sallām, al-Adab, vol. I, pp. 314–15.

⁹² Ibid., p. 315.

⁹³ Ibid., p. 316.

⁹⁴ Shoshan, Popular Culture, p. 53.

⁹⁵ Sallām, al-Adab, vol. Ⅱ, p. 139.

⁹⁶ al-Jammāl, al-Adab, p. 195.

⁹⁷ Ibid.

⁹⁸ Sallām, al-Adab, vol. Ⅱ, p. 146.

⁹⁹ Ibid., vol. Ⅱ, p. 314.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 312.

¹⁰¹ al-Jammāl, al-Adab, pp. 62–5. See also Rosenthal, The Herb.

¹⁰² Sallām, al-Adab, vol. I, p. 323.

¹⁰³ Ibid., p. 331.

¹⁰⁴ The following derives from Vrolijk’s introduction to his edition of Ibn Sūdūn’s Nuzhat al-nufūs. See also al-Jammāl, al-Adab, pp. 209–16.

¹⁰⁵ This is how Vrolijk vocalizes the word, which he associates with the verb’s basic meaning ‘to cut, divide’. This sense does seem to correspond to the clipped rhythm of the two long poems thus described. This vocalization and usage contrast with the more common usage, jazl, which means ‘eloquent’ or ‘clear’ speech or poetry. Al-Hillī uses jazl to refer to poetry using the traditional poetic modes.

¹⁰⁶ Vrolijk Nuzhat al-nufūs, dedicates his chapter 10, pp. 129–36, to a discussion of Ibn Sūdūn’s use of the musical maqāmāt.

¹⁰⁷ Ibn Sūdūn, ibid., p. 81 in the Arabic section.

¹⁰⁸ al-Sakhāwī, al-Ḍaw’ al-lāmi‘, vol. V, pp. 229–30.

¹⁰⁹ Ghazi, ‘Un Groupe social’.

¹¹⁰ The vocalization of the hā’, I assume, derives from Ibn Sūdūn himself, since Vrolijk reports that the manuscripts were generously vocalized.

¹¹¹ al-Zāwī, Tartīb, vol. Ⅳ, pp. 475–6; Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, vol. Ⅵ, p. 4,608.

¹¹² van Gelder, God’s Banquet, p. 92.

¹¹³ By the eighteenth century, perhaps as much as half of the male population was literate; Hourani, History, p. 254.

¹¹⁴ Hanna, ‘Culture’, pp. 87–112.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., p. 90.

¹¹⁶ Heyworth-Dunne, ‘Arabic Literature’, 683–5.

¹¹⁷ Hourani, History, p. 256.

¹¹⁸ Hanna, ‘Culture’, p. 107.

¹¹⁹ Kīlānī, al-Adab, pp. 194–5.

¹²⁰ Cachia, Ballads, p. 15.

¹²¹ Baer, Fellah, p. 6.

¹²² Ibid., p. 4.

¹²³ Davies, ‘Egyptian Arabic’, p. 6.

¹²⁴ van Gelder, God’s Banquet, p. 108.

¹²⁵ Baer, Fellah, p. 4.

¹²⁶ Baer provides a thorough discussion of the various interpretations the text has received in modern Egypt: Fellah, pp. 26–34.

¹²⁷ Kern, ‘Humoristen und Satiriker’, 39–42.

¹²⁸ Kahle, ‘Das Krokodilspiel’, pp. 188–359, also cited by Baer, Fellah, p. 9.

¹²⁹ Davies, ‘Egyptian Arabic’, p. 19.

¹³⁰ It is my understanding that Humphrey Davies, the author of the above-mentioned dissertation on the colloquial language of Hazz al-quḥūf, is at work on a critical edition of the text.

¹³¹ Vial, ‘Le Hazz al-Quḥūf’, pp. 170–81, contains some observations relevant to this perspective.

¹³² al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. Ⅰ, p. 97.

¹³³ Ibid., p. 98.

¹³⁴ Ibid., pp. 100, 104, 107, 108, 111.

¹³⁵ Abū Buthayna, al-Zajal al-‘arabī, pp. 49–50.

¹³⁶ Ibid., p. 50.

¹³⁷ Ibid., pp. 51–2.

¹³⁸ Riyāḍ and al-Ṣabbāḥī, Tārīkh adab al-sha‘b, pp. 83–4.

¹³⁹ Ibid., pp. 59–61, 83–91.

¹⁴⁰ Abū Buthayna, al-Zajal al-‘arabī, p. 53.

¹⁴¹ In contrast to the vocalization used by EI2 and others (al-Shubrāwī), I have adopted the spelling used by al-Ziriklī, al-A‘lām, p. 13, since it also corresponds to a name commonly known in Egypt.

¹⁴² Kīlānī, al-Adab, p. 206.

¹⁴³ al-Ziriklī, al-A‘lām, p. 130; Heyworth-Dunne, ‘Arabic Literature’, 682.

¹⁴⁴ Individuals such as al-Shaykh ‘Uthmān ibn Aḥmad al-Ṣafā’ī (d. 1204/1790), who wrote both licentious poetry and ‘proper’ works such as a takhmīs on the Burda (Heyworth-Dunne, ‘Arabic Literature’, 689), give evidence of the shaykh-poets’ diversity of interests.

¹⁴⁵ Kīlānī, al-Adab, p. 202.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 206–7.

¹⁴⁷ al-Qurayshī, al-Funūn, vol. Ⅲ, pp. 30–1.

¹⁴⁸ MS, ‘Adab Taymūr’, No. 8, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, cited by al-Shaybī, Dīwān, pp. 329–30.

¹⁴⁹ Riyāḍ and al-Ṣabbāḥī, Tārīkh adab al-sha‘b, p. 60.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 92–7.

¹⁵¹ Badawi, introduction to CHALMAL, p. 3.

¹⁵² Cheikho, Tārīkh.

¹⁵³ Ibid., pp. 37–9.

¹⁵⁴ Moreh, Modern Arabic Poetry, p. 52.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 30.

¹⁵⁶ Ibid., pp. 11–53.

¹⁵⁷ Mubārak, al-Khiṭaṭ al-tawfīqiyya al-jadīda, p. 63.

¹⁵⁸ Cour, ‘La Poésie populaire’, 458–93.