The Arabic Language

5.4 The development of an Arabic literary style
The history of literary style in Arabic went hand in hand with the standardisa
-
tion of the language. The development of such a style did not have to start from 
scratch. The same two sources that had been available for the standardisation of 
the language, the 
Qurʾān
and the pre-Islamic poems, became the initial models 
for a literary style. As in other cultures, the structured composition of poetry in 
Arabic preceded the emergence of a literary prose style. But here, too, the desert 
type of poetry did not satisfy all the needs of a new, elegant sedentary civilisation. 
New forms of poetry developed under the ʾUmayyad dynasty, at whose court love 
poems became a new fashion (e.g., the poems of ʿUmar ibn ʾAbī Rabīʿa, d. 43/712). 
Inevitably, this led to a more flexible use of language and to the development 
of new, often strophic, types of poetry that were not as heavily dependent on 
the Bedouin model. In such forms of poetry, there was easier access for popular 
expressions reflecting the new environment of Arabic culture. Some deviations in 
morphology, syntax and lexicon became gradually accepted (cf. Fück 1950: 73ff.), 
for example, the use of contracted forms such as 
nasīhi
(< 
nasiyahu
), 
baqī
(< 
baqiya
), 
or the confusion of the first verbal measure (
faʿala
)
 
and the fourth (
ʾafʿala
). In 
rajaz
, 
poets could experiment with the creation of new words and word forms to a much 
higher degree than was permitted in official poetry. In general, the 
muwalladūn
, 
the new Arabs, who had never seen the desert, could not be expected to be such 
excellent connoisseurs of Arabic as were the pre-Islamic poets. Although for a 
long time the Bedouin model continued to serve as a strict canon, in Sībawayhi’s 
Kitāb
the poems of the 
muwalladūn
are not excluded as evidence: the 1,000-plus 
quotations from poetry in the 
Kitāb
include both Jāhilī poets and those from 
the urban milieu of the ʾUmayyad period, such as ʿUmar ibn ʾAbī Rabīʿa, who is 
quoted nine times; he even quotes from 
rajaz
poets, such as Ruʾba ibn al-ʿAjjāj (d. 
145/708), who is quoted no less than twenty-eight times.
Gradually, a distinction came into being between the official brand of poetry 
that clung to the old models, and took pleasure in using obsolete vocabulary and 
avoiding any adaptation to the new modes of speaking, on the one hand, and a 
new, ‘faster’ kind of poetry, often improvised, often in strophic form, and very 
often containing vulgarisms, on the other. In the course of time, these two kinds 
of poetry grew further apart. Official poetry became more and more erudite, until 
it could no longer be understood without explanation. The poet al-MutanabbI (d. 
355/965), for instance, published his poems together with a learned commentary. 
The more popular form of poetry, on the other hand, went through a different 

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The Arabic Language
development. In its most developed form, the strophic 
muwaššaḥ
and the 
zajal
, 
it included the use of colloquial forms in a refrain. This kind of poetry became 
especially popular in the Islamic West (cf. below, pp. 315f.).
Because of its idiosyncrasies, poetry is of lesser importance in the standardisa
-
tion of language than prose. We have seen above that for commercial and admin-
istrative purposes Arabic was used from the beginning of the Islamic empire. 
Such written documents had no literary pretensions whatsoever, although their 
scribes did try to maintain a Classical norm, which means that already at this time 
there was a standard (on the language of the papyri, see below, Chapter 9). But 
there were other forms of speech, some of them with roots in the 
Jāhiliyya
. In the 
first place, Arabic culture had a reputation of long standing for its ability to put 
speech to rhetorical use. The Bedouin admired verbal prowess, and the tradition 
of delivering public speeches was continued in early Islam. The earliest preserved 
speeches already exhibit the use of various literary devices and conventions, in