It is so common these days in the West to stigmatize and
stereotype the culture of Islam that we don’t often think about the fact that
much of what we identify as Western culture was actually borrowed from Muslim peoples.
Poetry provides several good examples of this.
We often think of rhymed verse as being characteristic of Western
classic poetry. Actually, the opposite is true. Neither ancient Greek nor Roman
poetry rhymed. Homer’s Odyssey was
chanted to a strummed lyre, but the lines did not end in rhyme. Catullus,
Virgil, Horace—none of the classic Roman poets wrote in rhyme.
Rhyme actually came into European verse through the
influence of Arabic literature and the Qur’an on medieval Provençal poetry. Almost
all of the Qur’an is written in rhymed verse. The oldest Arabic poetic forms,
such as the qasiyah and the ghazal, dating from the 7th century C.E.,
use rhyme in their structure.
Rhymed Arabic poetic forms were sung and flourished in Spain
during the Moorish period that began in the early 700s C.E. These forms
influenced poetry in neighboring Provence, where the troubadours created and
sang the first lively vernacular literature in Europe. There is more than one
scholarly work that documents this legacy, including “The
Impact of muwshah and zajal on troubadours poetry” by Ziad Ali Alharthi and
Abdulhafeth Ali Khrisat, which claims that even the word “troubadour” derives
from Arabic. These authors also maintain that the tradition of courtly love, so
central to Provençal and modern Western poetry, came from previous traditions
in Hispano-Arabic verse. They show that courtly love was originally a Sufi trope, equating the beloved with the divine. What could be more
central to European literature than Dante’s love of Beatrice? And yet that too can
be traced back to a Muslim tradition.
The influence of the rhyme schemes of Islamic poetry appears
in some of the most unexpected places. What poem is more quintessentially
American than Robert Frost’s “Stopping
by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
Whose woods these are I think I
know.
His house is in the village
though;
He will not see me stopping
here
To watch his woods fill up with
snow.
My little horse must think it
queer
To stop without a farmhouse
near
Between the woods and frozen
lake
The darkest evening of the year.
Do you recognize the AABA BBCB rhyme scheme? It’s not at all
a typical pattern for English-language verse.
 |
| Omar Khayyam (1048–1131 C.E.) |
This is the rhyming pattern that
Omar Khayyam used for his famed Rubaiyat
in twelfth-century Persia:
A Book of Verses underneath the
Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and
Thou
Beside me singing in the
Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
This rhyme scheme is actually called the “Rubaiyat stanza”
because it was most famously used in Khayyam’s poem. So, even in one of our
most American poems, you can find the influence of Islamic poetry.
The fact is that all of global culture is as intricately
interwoven as Omar Khayyam’s rhyme scheme. Every culture has evolved in
dialogue with the others it has known. The world is as interconnected
culturally as it is ecologically. To pretend otherwise is to miss the one of
the most important points about the arts.
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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging.
Order in the USA Order in the UK
Zack’s most recent translation:
The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
