Hair

📖 In short

Poetry is beautiful words with meter, rhythm and rhyme, and when we read it we feel its music. Poetry is the Arabs' first art: they learned it by heart and passed it on, and they said “poetry is the register of the Arabs”, because it kept their history, their days and their values.

🤩 Did you know?

In Arabic a line of poetry is called a “bayt” (house), because it gathers the words together as a house gathers its family.
Old poems called the Mu'allaqat became famous.
Ahmed Shawqi wrote stories in verse for children, told by animals.
Poetry is sometimes recited with music, and it becomes a song.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Meter and rhyme

In a traditional Arabic poem each line has a regular rhythm called meter, and the lines end with the same letter, called the rhyme. That's why poetry is easy to learn by heart and recite.

🔍 The market of Ukaz

Before Islam the Arabs gathered at the market of Ukaz, where poets competed by reciting their poems in front of people, and the “Mu'allaqat” poems became famous from there.

💡 Great poets

Among the most famous Arab poets are Imru' al-Qays, al-Mutanabbi and Ahmed Shawqi, called the Prince of Poets, who wrote many poems for children about animals.

🎯 Write your own poem

You can write a simple poem: choose something you love, like your mother, the rain or your cat, then write short lines that end with words that sound alike.

📸 More pictures

The “sumut”: the Arabs compared their fine poems to necklaces and called them “sumut” (strings of pearls).

🧩 Test yourself

1 What do we call the matching letter at the end of a poem's lines?

2 Who was called the Prince of Poets?

3 Which picture shows “Hair”?