What are the themes of Arabic poetry?

Eight themes are conventionally named: madih (praise), ritha (elegy), hija (satire), nasib (love), itab (reproach), zuhd (asceticism), hikma (wisdom) and hamasa (valour). Everything that falls outside them is grouped as mutafarriqat, miscellaneous — which is in fact the largest category of all.

What is the difference between praise and satire in Arabic poetry?

Madih praises its subject for generosity, courage and forbearance, and was most often addressed to caliphs and princes in hope of reward. Hija is its opposite: it attacks the subject for miserliness, cowardice or low birth. The same poet frequently produced both about the same person, depending on how the relationship went.

What is the difference between nasib and ghazal?

Nasib originally meant the amatory prelude at the opening of a long ode, recalling a woman before the poem turned to its real subject; it was a structural part of the pre-Islamic qasida. Ghazal is love poetry as a subject in its own right, filling an entire poem. Modern usage often treats the two words as interchangeable.

Which theme is most common in Arabic poetry?

Among the named themes, nasib is the most common, followed by madih, ritha and hija. In an archive of roughly 79,000 poems, nasib accounts for 11,967, madih for 7,282 and ritha for 5,411.

What is hamasa in Arabic poetry?

Hamasa is the poetry of courage, of pressing forward and of pride in prowess in battle; the celebrated anthology of Abu Tammam takes its name from it. It is the least represented theme in what survives, because it was tied to a social world that no longer exists.

The Nine Themes of Arabic Poetry, and What Sets Each Apart

An Arabic poem is classified on three axes: its meter, its rhyme, and its theme. The theme — gharad — is its subject, the purpose for which it was said. Eight themes are conventionally named, and everything else is gathered under mutafarriqat, miscellaneous.

The classification is descriptive rather than strict. A long pre-Islamic ode may open with love, move through a lengthy description of a camel, and end in praise or boasting. It is assigned to its dominant theme, not to everything it contains.

The nine categories

Theme	What it covers	Poems
Mutafarriqat (miscellaneous)	anything not falling under a named theme	44,566
Nasib (love)	recalling a woman, the amatory prelude	11,967
Madih (praise)	praising a patron, seeking his reward	7,282
Ritha (elegy)	mourning the dead and numbering their virtues	5,411
Hija (satire)	attacking and belittling its subject	4,461
Itab (reproach)	reproaching a friend for falling short	2,658
Zuhd (asceticism)	remembering death, disparaging the world	1,578
Hikma (wisdom)	experience distilled into a portable line	1,045
Hamasa (valour)	courage, boldness, pride in prowess	300

The striking figure is the first one. Miscellaneous is the largest category by far, holding more than half of everything available. That is not a failure of the taxonomy so much as a fact about poetry: most of it was composed for occasions that do not reduce to a single purpose — a description of a scene, a note between friends, an exchange at a gathering.

Praise and satire: one craft, two directions

Madih was the theme most directly tied to money. A poet would approach a caliph or a prince with a poem cataloguing his generosity, courage and forbearance, and leave with a payment. The practice reached its height with al-Mutanabbi’s poems for Sayf al-Dawla.

Satire is its opposite in meaning and its twin in technique. A poet skilled at enumerating virtues is equally skilled at enumerating faults, and the great panegyrists were very often great satirists, their praise curdling into attack the moment the payments stopped. The reputations of Jarir and al-Farazdaq rest more on their mutual invective than on anything they wrote in praise.

Elegy: the most honest theme

Scholars have long argued that elegy is the most truthful of the themes, for a structural reason. It is the only one with nothing to gain. The dead cannot pay, and so nothing is left for the poet to say except what he actually finds.

Its most famous practitioner is al-Khansa, mourning her brother Sakhr, whose name became so bound to the form that it functions in Arabic as a byword for elegy itself.

Asceticism and wisdom: not the same thing

These two are routinely confused, though the distinction is clear:

Zuhd takes a position on the world: remember death, do not grasp, travel light. It flourished in the Abbasid period with Abu al-Atahiya.
Hikma distils experience into a line that travels. It need not concern the world or renouncing it at all; it is as often about how people behave and how things turn out. Most of al-Mutanabbi’s endlessly quoted lines are of this kind.

Asceticism urges you to give something up. Wisdom tells you how things go.

Reading poetry sorted by theme

Theme is one of three axes a poem can be browsed by, the others being meter and rhyme. Combining two of them narrows a search dramatically: an elegy in Tawil, or a praise poem rhyming on lām.

On Qafiyah, each theme has its own browsable page, and the counts above come from it. If all you remember of a poem is roughly what it was about, there is a practical guide here to finding a poem you barely remember.