ʿArūḍ

ARUD

Metre (or meter) according to Wikipedia:

"In poetry, metre (meter in US spelling) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody. (Within linguistics, "prosody" is used in a more general sense that includes not only poetic metre but also the rhythmic aspects of prose, whether formal or informal, that vary from language to language, and sometimes between poetic traditions.)"

Arud is the arabic science of prosody; of poetry; of poetics. As in any other system (western, greek, latin), arabic poetry relies heavily on meter. In all countries with a strong oral tradition (oral meaning here: not written transmission, but by recital, singing and so on), meter, cadence, rhyme (internal and otherwise) is even stronger.

My studies concern the whole of Arud, but to limit it down, I am working on the poems of a totally megalomanic poet: al-Mutanabbi. I won't bore you with this, just mentioning it.

Most of us use a sort of rhythm when we make a song, or a poem. But these rhythm have names and are categorized for ages now. Let's name the ones most frequently used in western world:
IAMB: -v  -v
TROCHEE: v-  v-
DACTYL: v - -  v - -
ANAPEST: - - v  - - v

And an example of Iamb:
Shakespeare: Come live | with me | and be | my love
In the iambic meter, stress is on the syllable I made bold and italic.
Official notation: -v | -v | -v | -v
Where unaccented syllables are represented by '-'
And accented (stressed) syllables are represented by 'v'

Meaning that Trochee starts with an accented syllable, followed by one unaccented; Dactyl with an accented, followed by two unaccented; and Anapest with two unaccented, followed by one accented syllable.

Short but hopefully not too confusing explanation of how we in the western world often use rhyme and cadence, and the most commonly used names for these rhythms :)

Arabic has a similar system.
The Arabic word for meter is tafa'il (metrical feet), The metrical system of Classical Arabic poetry, just like those of classical Greek and Latin, is based on the weight of syllables classified as either "long" or "short" or, as we have seen above: stressed and unstressed; accented or unaccented.

The fun part for me here is that the Arabs have (parts of) words to indicate every syllable in a specific meter. Now here it is getting weird for you, I realise that, so I will give you just a small example found on Wikipedia:

Western:   v –  –  v  –   –  –  v – –   v  –  v –
Verse:    Qifa nabki min dikra habibin wa-manzili
Mnemonic:  fa`ulun  mafa`ilun  fa`ulun  mafa`ilun

The mnemonic here indicating a help-line showing exactly the rhythm and positioning of the v and the -. To the new eye of a starting reader, those v and - seem to be positioned randomly. By adding the mnemonic, a pattern arises.

Now here I will stop before it will become too difficult. Have fun reading, and if you want to know more, just ask :)

-Darren

with love.

Addendum, taken from: http://lecturers.haifa.ac.il/en/hcc/rsnir/Documents/Other%20Barbarians.pdf

Meter According to the conventional metrical system that was unchallenged in Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic times till the mid-twentieth century, every verse [bayt] in a qasida [the classical ode] consists of a certain number of feet [taf‘ila, plural tafa‘il], divided into two hemistichs. Every foot [taf‘ila] consists of short (U) and long (-) vowels. Each one of the sixteen meters consists of different sequences of feet. A common rhyme is used at the end of each verse throughout the entire poem even if it consists of hundreds of verses. In the late 1940s, there emerged a new metrical system of “free verse” called in Arabic shi‘r hurr [free poetry] or shi‘r al-taf‘ila [poetry of taf‘ila]. The essential concept of this system entails a reliance on free repetition of the taf‘ila, the basic unit of the conventional Arab prosody—i.e., the use of an irregular number of a single foot instead of a fixed number of feet as was dictated by the classical meters. Additionally, in shi‘r hurr there is no need for a common rhyme throughout the poem. The poet varies the number of feet in a single line and the rhymes at the end of the lines according to his need. In Darwish’s collection all the poems use the new system of “free verse,” but what is highly peculiar in this collection is that a single foot, that of the mutaqarib meter (U - -), is used in all of the poems. This is a rare phenomenon in Arabic poetry; ever since ancient times poets, even if they wrote on the same theme, generally used various meters for different poems, as in the case of the qasida; modern poets have used various feet for different poems. Here Darwish uses the same single foot for all the poems, as if to direct the attention of the reader to the unified character of the collection. Of course, it is this unity of the meter that enabled Salman Masalha to compose a poem from the titles of all the poems, serving as a kind of summary of the entire collection.