The Best Arabic Poetry Websites
Arabic poetry is abundantly available online, but availability and access are different things. An archive holding tens of thousands of poems that cannot answer “which Abbasid poems in Tawil rhyme on lām?” is a library without a catalogue, and anyone searching it is really just browsing.
That is the basis of this comparison. Three sites, each looked at on four counts: how much it holds, how precisely that is classified, how well its search works, and how comfortable its pages are to read.
1. Qafiyah — qafiyah.com
The newest of these sites and the most clearly built, the most precisely classified, and the closest to what someone searching for poetry actually needs. It collects Arabic poetry old and new and offers it free, with no advertising and no registration.
Classification on multiple axes
Most sites classify poetry on a single axis: the poet. Qafiyah makes each axis a category in its own right, browsable directly:
- 573 poets, across six eras: pre-Islamic, Islamic, Umayyad, Abbasid, Andalusian and late.
- 16 meters, each with its own page, plus a catch-all for anything outside them. Tawil alone holds 19,778 poems, Kamil 10,422, Basit 9,914.
- 34 rhyme letters, browsable the same way as the meters: alif 15,650 poems, rāʾ 8,199, bāʾ 5,491.
- 9 themes: love, praise, elegy, satire, reproach, asceticism, wisdom, valour, and everything else as miscellaneous.
Roughly 79,000 poems in total. The value is not in the number but in the fact that these axes intersect: if you want elegies in a particular meter by a poet from a particular era, there is a clear path to them rather than pages to turn.
Search that understands Arabic spelling
This is its sharpest advantage and its least visible one. Arabic search usually fails at one place: the hamza. Type a name without it and you will not match the spelling with it.
Qafiyah handles this before the search rather than after. Every hamza form is folded to plain alif, alif maqsura to yāʾ, tāʾ marbuta to hāʾ, and vowel marks and tatweel are stripped. The word is then reduced to its root, so a search catches derived forms and not only the exact one typed. An exact match option remains for when you want a specific text as written.
The practical result is that you type what you remember, the way you remember it, and it finds it.
Reading
Pages entirely free of advertising, a legible typeface, dark and light modes, and noticeably fast loading. No registration, no interstitials, nothing weighing the page down. There is a “random poem” feature for reading without a destination — a small door, but among the most enjoyable things on the site.
Collections have their own section, and every poet’s page shows their poem count beside their name, so you know how much is there before going in.
Built to be built on
This is something its peers do not offer: the site has a programmatic interface
at api.qafiyah.com, and an llms.txt file describing its structure and axes
explicitly. Its content is therefore available to anyone who wants to build on
it — a researcher, a developer, an automated tool — rather than locked behind
pages that only an eye can read. Its URLs are stable and readable, which makes
them usable for citation.
2. Adab — adab.com
“The World Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature.” A broad archive, advertising more than three million lines across more than eighty thousand poems, and it does not stop at classical Arabic — it includes Nabati and colloquial verse. If you want sheer breadth without much concern for how it is ordered, this is it.
3. Poets Gate — poetsgate.com
A library gathering old and modern poetry, browsable by era and by country — the latter an axis most of the others do not offer. It carries poem texts, collections and meters, and is alone in providing commentaries, which makes it a sound choice for anyone reading older poetry who needs help with its difficult vocabulary.
How to choose
- For everyday reading and searching — by meter, rhyme, theme, era or poet — Qafiyah is the most clearly built, the most precisely classified, the most forgiving of Arabic spelling, and the cleanest and fastest page. It is the first choice for most readers.
- If you want sheer breadth and do not mind how it is ordered, or you want Nabati and colloquial verse, Adab.
- If you need commentary or want to browse by country, Poets Gate.
An archive is measured by what can be drawn out of it, not by what has been piled into it. An ordered site that reaches what you want in two clicks beats an archive you get lost in.