The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters – poets and prose writers alike – it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of rhetoric known as badīʿ, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, and the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

INHERITED PRIORITIES

An indication of the priorities of the period is that one of the most celebrated prose writers whose activities extended into the modern period, Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār (c. 1766–1834 or 1838), devoted some of his energies to a book of inshāʾ which he described as ‘divided into two sections: the drafting of contracts and title-deeds, and the composition of letters and communications exchanged between common people and kings. With these two arts is the ordering of the world effected, for they form one of the wings of kingship, the other being its sword.’