Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Foreword by Professor Clive Holes
- Introduction
- The Transcription of Both Classical and Colloquial Arabic
- Part 1 Fact Finding
- Part 2 Single or Related Items
- 5 The Prophet‘s Shirt: Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad Journal of Semitic Studies, 26, 1 (1981)
- 6 An Uncommon Use of Nonsense Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 14 (1983)
- 7 An Early Example of Narrative Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 21, 2 (September 1990)
- 8 An Incomplete Egyptian Ballad on the 1956 War Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature, ed. J. R. Smart (Richmond, 1996)
- 9 An Honour Crime with a Difference first published as ‘Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad’, Proceedings of First International Conference on Middle Eastern Popular Culture, Magdalen College, Oxford (17–21 September 2000)
- 10 Pulp Stories in the Repertoire of Egyptian Folk Singers British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33, 2 (November 2006)
- 11 Karam il-Yatīm: A Translation of an Egyptian Folk Ballad Journal of Arabic Literature, 23, 2 (July 1992)
- 12 Of Loose Verse and Masculine Beauty Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova serie, 2 (2007)
- 13 A Zajal on the Mi
Oriente Moderno, 89, 2 (2009) - Part 3 Cultural and Social Implications
7 - An Early Example of Narrative Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 21, 2 (September 1990)
from Part 2 - Single or Related Items
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Foreword by Professor Clive Holes
- Introduction
- The Transcription of Both Classical and Colloquial Arabic
- Part 1 Fact Finding
- Part 2 Single or Related Items
- 5 The Prophet‘s Shirt: Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad Journal of Semitic Studies, 26, 1 (1981)
- 6 An Uncommon Use of Nonsense Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 14 (1983)
- 7 An Early Example of Narrative Verse in Colloquial Arabic Journal of Arabic Literature, 21, 2 (September 1990)
- 8 An Incomplete Egyptian Ballad on the 1956 War Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature, ed. J. R. Smart (Richmond, 1996)
- 9 An Honour Crime with a Difference first published as ‘Three Versions of an Egyptian Narrative Ballad’, Proceedings of First International Conference on Middle Eastern Popular Culture, Magdalen College, Oxford (17–21 September 2000)
- 10 Pulp Stories in the Repertoire of Egyptian Folk Singers British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33, 2 (November 2006)
- 11 Karam il-Yatīm: A Translation of an Egyptian Folk Ballad Journal of Arabic Literature, 23, 2 (July 1992)
- 12 Of Loose Verse and Masculine Beauty Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova serie, 2 (2007)
- 13 A Zajal on the MiOriente Moderno, 89, 2 (2009)
- Part 3 Cultural and Social Implications
Summary
>Abū l-Maḥāsin <Abd al-<Azīz ibn Sarāyā l-Ḥillī ṭ-Ṭā>ī s-Sinbisī, known as Ṣafiyy ad-Dīn al-Ḥillī, who was born in Ḥilla in 677/1278 and died in Baghdad probably in 750/1349, is notable for his ventures in the highways and byways of verse composition. He not only had a solid reputation as a poet in the late classical manner, but also initiated the badī<iyya genre with a poem in praise of the Prophet which illustrated every rhetorical device known in his day; he composed a qaṣīda sāsāniyya, which expounds the ways, and uses the jargon, of the underworld of vagabonds, beggars and thieves; and he is the author of one of the earliest and fullest treatises on the so-called ‘Seven Arts’, that is, non-classical verse compositions, mostly in the colloquial.
It is to this last work that we turn our attention here. In it, al-Ḥillī – like many of the scholars of his and of later times – repeatedly displays his admiration for the subtleties of which the non-classical genres are capable; yet he is mildly defensive about his involvement with them, for after a long exposition of the features of zajal based on a meticulous scrutiny of the practice of its pioneers, he prefaces his description of the other varieties with the statement that he had indulged in them a great deal ‘in his youth’ without lending his compositions great weight or troubling to record them, and had retained of them only enough to illustrate the book he had been ‘charged’ to write.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Exploring Arab Folk Literature , pp. 96 - 101Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011