al-Harīrī | Geert Jan van Gelder (essay date spring 1999)
Geert Jan van Gelder (essay date spring 1999)
SOURCE: van Gelder, Geert Jan. “Rhyme in Maqāmāt or, Too Many Exceptions Do Not Prove a Rule.” ,Journal of Semitic Studies 44, no. 1 (spring 1999): 75-82.
[In the following essay, Van Gelder examines the nature of the rhymes in the works of two practitioners of Maqāmāt: al-Hamadhānī and al-Harīrī.]
Rhyme is ubiquitous in classical Arabic literature, obligatory in poetry and often employed in forms of more or less ornate prose. The rules of rhyme in poetry and rhymed prose (saj‘) are not wholly identical, since, as is well known, pausal forms may differ, prose normally requiring final short vowels to be dropped, whereas they are mostly lengthened in poetry. I‘rāb, or inflectional ending, has a shadowy, virtual existence in rhymed prose: it is often written, in carefully vowelled texts, but it is not supposed to be realized in actual speech. The...
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