From the point of view of Europeans there is no book that deals satisfactorily with Urdū, metres, and as the metres are numerous, it is difficult for a student to recognize any except the three or four commonest. They have all been taken over unaltered from Persian, and Persian took them almost unaltered from Arabic. To Europeans the rules of Urdū prosody seem arbitrary, because metres must conform to certain rules for which there seems to be no adequate reason.

For example the commonest Urdū, metre is scanned as follows: maf‘ūlu fā‘ilātu mafā‘īlu fā‘ilun. It might just as well be scanned mustaf‘ilun mafā‘ilu mustaf‘ilun fa‘al or in other ways, but we should be arbitrarily told that there are no such metres and that in fact they would be impossible.