Ahímu bi-Da'din má ḥayaytu, fa-in amut,
Fa-wá-ḥarabá mim-man yahímu bihá ba'dí!
“I shall continue madly in love with Da'd so long as I live;
and, if I die,
Alack and alas for him who shall be in love with her after
me!”
They replied, “A fine sentiment.” “Nay,” said 'Abdu'l-
… Uwakkil bi-Da'din man yahímu bihá ba'di!
… “I will assign to Da'd one who shall love her after me!”
“Nay,” said 'Abdu'l-Malik, “this is [the saying of] a dead man who is a procurer and a go-between.” “Then how,” the courtiers demanded, “should he have expressed himself?” “Why,” said the Caliph, “he should have said:—
… Fa-lá ṣaluḥat Da'dun li-dhí khullatin ba'dí!
…; ‘and if I die,
Da'd shall be no good to any lover after me!’”
Here, then, it is wholly a question of the idea expressed, not of the form in which it is cast.
Now see what that greatest philosophical historian of the Arabs, the celebrated Ibn Khaldún (born in Tunis, A.D. 1332;
Ibn Khaldún on “Moulds” or Models of Style. died in Cairo, A.D. 1406) says in chap. xlvii of the sixth section of his masterly Prolegomena, * which is headed: “That the Art of composing in verse or prose is concerned only with words, not with ideas”:—“Know,” he begins, “that the Art of Discourse, whether in verse or prose, lies only in words, not in ideas; for the latter are merely accessories, while the former are the principal concern [of the writer]. So the artist who would practise the faculty of Discourse in verse and prose, exercises it in words only, by storing his memory with models from the speech of the Arabs, so that the use and fluency thereof may increase on his tongue until the faculty [of expressing himself] in the language of Muḍar becomes confirmed in him, and he becomes freed from the foreign idiom wherein he was educated amongst his people. So he should imagine himself as one born and brought up amongst the Arabs, learning their language by oral prompting as the child learns it, until he becomes, as it were, one of them in their language. This is because, as we have already said, language is a faculty [manifested] in speech and acquired by repetition with the tongue until it be fully acquired. Now the tongue and speech deal only with words, while ideas belong to the mind. And, again, ideas are common to all, and are at the disposal of every understanding, to employ as it will, needing [for such employment] no art; it is the construction of speech to express them which needs art, as we have said; this consisting, as it were, of moulds to contain the ideas. So, just as the vessels wherein water is drawn from the sea may be of gold, or silver, or pottery, or glass, or earthenware, whilst the water is in its essence one, in such wise that the respective excellence [of each] varies according to the vessels filled with water, according to the diversity of their species, not according to any difference in the water; just so the excellence and eloquence of language in its use differs according to the different grades of speech in which it is expressed, in respect of its conformity with the objects [in view], while the ideas are [in each case] invariable in themselves. He, then, who is incapable of framing a discourse and [shaping] its moulds [i.e., its style] according to the requirements of the faculty of speech, and who endeavours to express his thought, but fails to express it well, is like the paralytic who, desiring to rise up, cannot do so, for loss of the power thereunto.”
With these “moulds” (asálíb, plural of uslúb), wherein, as it
were, we cast our ideas, and so give them style and distinction,
Ibn Khaldún deals at some length, recommending as models
of expression the pre-Islámic pagan poets of the Arabs; Abú
Tammám, the compiler of the Ḥamása, who died about the
middle of the ninth century; Kulthúm b. 'Umar al-'Attábí,
who flourished in the reign of Hárúnu'r-Rashíd; Ibnu'l-
“Poetry is an effective discourse, based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into parts [i.e., verses] agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each one of such parts being independent in scope and aim of what precedes and follows it, and conforming to the moulds [or styles] of the Arabs appropriated to it.”
And about a page further back he compares the writer, whether in prose or verse, to the architect or the weaver, in that he, like them, must work by pattern; for which reason he seems inclined to agree with those who would exclude al-Mutanabbí and Abu'l-'Alá al-Ma'arrí from the Arabian Parnassus because they were original, and “did not observe the moulds [or models sanctioned by long usage] of the Arabs.”
Turning now to the Persians, we find, as we should naturally
expect in these apt pupils of the Arabs, that precisely similar
Conservatism of
Persian poetry
and prose styles.
ideas maintain in this field also. “The words of
the secretary (or clerk in a Government office)
will not,” says the author of the Chahár Maqála,
“attain to this elevation until he becomes familiar with every
science, obtains some hint from every master, hears some
aphorism from every philosopher, and borrows some elegance from
every man of letters.” To this end the aspirant to literary skill
is advised in particular to study, with a view to forming and
improving his style, in Arabic the Qur'án, the Traditions, the
proverbial sayings of the Arabs, and the writings of the Ṣáḥib
Isma'íl b. 'Abbád, aṣ-Ṣábí, Ibn Qudáma, Badí'u'z-Zamán al-
The models or “moulds” in Persian, as in Arabic, have, it
is true, varied from time to time and, to a certain extent, from
Bombast and
inflation an accidental, not an
essential, quality
of Persian
literary style.
place to place; for, as we have seen, the canons
of criticism adopted by Dawlatsháh at the end of
the fifteenth century differ widely from those laid
down by the author of the Chahár Maqála in the
middle of the twelfth; while Ibn Khaldún's severe
and classical taste prevented him from approving the rhetorical
extravagances which had prevailed amongst his Eastern co-