What is rhyme in Arabic poetry?

The qafiya is the sound every line of a poem ends on, held by the poet from the first line to the last without variation. Its central element is the rawi, the consonant the poem is built on and named after — a poem whose rawi is lam is called a lamiyya.

What is the difference between the qafiya and the rawi?

The rawi is a single consonant: the letter the poem is built on and named after. The qafiya is broader, covering the rawi together with the vowels and letters attached to it at the end of the line. In everyday use the word qafiya is often used loosely to mean the rawi.

Which rhyme letters are used most in Arabic poetry?

Alif leads by a wide margin, followed by ra, ha, lam and ba. In an archive of roughly 79,000 poems, alif is the rhyme letter in 15,650, ra in 8,199 and ha in 7,552.

Why are some rhyme letters common and others rare?

Because Arabic words do not end in all consonants equally often. Common endings such as ra, lam, mim and nun close a vast number of words, so a poet working in them has room to move across a hundred lines. Za, ghayn and dhal end comparatively few words, which makes sustained composition on them difficult and rare.

What does it mean to call a poem a lamiyya or a raiyya?

It names the poem after its rhyme letter. A lamiyya rhymes on lam, a raiyya on ra, a mimiyya on mim. The best known examples are the Lamiyyat al-Arab of al-Shanfara and the Lamiyyat al-Ajam of al-Tughrai.

Rhyme in Arabic Poetry, and the Thirty-Four Rhyme Letters

An Arabic poem holds a single sound at the end of every line, from the first line to the last. That commitment is the qafiya, and it is the feature that most sharply separates Arabic verse from the poetry of many other traditions. The rhyme does not change within a poem, even across a hundred lines. There are no rhyme schemes, no couplets, no alternating patterns — one sound, held throughout.

The heart of the qafiya is the rawi: the consonant the poem is built on and named after. A poem whose rawi is lām is a lāmiyya; one whose rawi is rāʾ is a rāʾiyya.

Rhyme, rawi, meter

Three terms that get tangled:

Rawi is one consonant — the last root letter the poet commits to in every line.
Qafiya is slightly wider: the rawi plus the vowel and letters attached to it at the line’s end. Loosely, people say qafiya and mean rawi.
Meter is something else entirely — the rhythmic pattern the poem runs on, not the sound it closes on.

Meter is a sustained rhythm; rhyme is a repeated closing note. A poem is described by both: a lāmiyya in Tawil.

Every rhyme letter, by frequency

Rhyme letter	Poems
alif	15,650
rāʾ	8,199
hāʾ	7,552
lām	5,667
bāʾ	5,491
mīm	5,422
yāʾ	5,358
dāl	5,065
nūn	3,792
qāf	2,496
ʿayn	2,041
ḥāʾ	1,619
sīn	1,509
fāʾ	1,452
kāf	1,229
alif maqsura	1,201
hamza	1,179
tāʾ	1,130
jīm	678
ḍād	471
tāʾ marbuta	295
ṭāʾ	295
zāy	253
ṣād	232
thāʾ	223
shīn	215
wāw	145
khāʾ	128
ghayn	99
ẓāʾ	89
dhāl	86
alif with kasra	3
hamza with kasra	3
alif with fatha	1

Thirty-four in total — the letters of the alphabet plus the several written forms of alif and hamza, which are counted separately because they behave differently at a line’s end.

Why some rhymes are common and others rare

The reason is in the language, not in the poets. A consonant that ends a great many Arabic words gives a poet room to choose, and lets him run a hundred lines without repeating himself. A consonant that rarely ends a word closes in on him after a handful.

Rāʾ, lām, mīm and nūn end an uncountable number of Arabic words, and sit near the top of the table accordingly. Ẓāʾ, ghayn and dhāl end very few, and poems built on them are correspondingly scarce.

Which is exactly why composing on a rare letter became a recognised way of showing off. A poet who produced a long ẓāʾiyya had demonstrated the reach of his vocabulary, and everyone listening knew it.

Poems known by their rhyme

Some Arabic poems are identified by their rhyme letter rather than by their opening line:

Lamiyyat al-Arab by al-Shanfara, the most famous poem of the outlaw-poet tradition and of fierce self-reliance.
Lamiyyat al-Ajam by al-Tughrai, written in deliberate answer to it.
The Nuniyya of Ibn Zaydun, among the most delicate poems of longing produced in al-Andalus.
Banat Suad by Kaab ibn Zuhayr, a dāliyya, though this one is known by its opening because the opening is famous enough to carry it.

Browsing poetry by rhyme

Rhyme is a classification axis like meter or theme, but most sites do not index by it. If you remember only that a poem’s lines ended in rāʾ, that fact alone narrows the field to 8,199 poems rather than eighty thousand — and narrows further if you can add the theme or the meter.

On Qafiyah, every rhyme letter has its own browsable page. The figures above are taken from it.