Literature

Every civilisation has an epic. Mesopotamia has Gilgamesh. India has the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Greece has the Iliad and Odyssey. China has the Journey to the West. Arabia has the pre-Islamic Mu'allaqāt — seven long odes said to have been hung in the Ka'ba.

The novel, as we know it, is younger. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) is often called the first modern novel. In Arabic, the modern novel emerges in the late 19th century — with figures like Naguib Mahfouz, later a Nobel laureate, chronicling Cairo.

For Arabs, poetry (shi'r) has always been what music is for other peoples: the highest verbal art. The pre-Islamic qasida followed strict metre and rhyme; the ghazal, mystical love-poem, was later perfected in Persian by Hafez and Rumi.

Rumi's Masnavi is arguably the most-read poetry outside the Bible. Iqbal's Persian and Urdu verses awakened a generation. In Palestinian resistance, Mahmoud Darwish's poems became a nation's memory.

Arabic literature is one of the great continuous literary traditions of the world. Before Islam: the seven Mu'allaqāt (Suspended Odes) by Imru' al-Qais, Labid, Antara ibn Shaddad and others — poems of desert, war, love, and death.

Umayyad and Abbasid: the ghazal of Umar ibn Abi Rabi'a; the passionate poetry of the mad-lover Majnun Layla; the philosophical zuhdiyyat of Abu al-Atahiya; the wine and satire of Abu Nuwas; the towering al-Mutanabbi, whose lines are still quoted daily in Arab conversation; the letters and adab of al-Jahiz and al-Tawhidi; the maqamat of al-Hariri.

Modern: Ahmed Shawqi, 'Prince of Poets'; Mahmoud Darwish, whose 'Identity Card' became a Palestinian anthem; Nizar Qabbani, poet of love and political grief; Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel laureate for the Cairo Trilogy; Tayeb Salih of Sudan; Ghassan Kanafani; Adonis; Assia Djebar of Algeria.

Persian gave the world Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (60,000 couplets, the epic of Iran), Rumi's Masnavi and Divan, Hafez's ghazals (whose Divan is still opened for divination in Iranian homes), Sa'di's Gulistan and Bustan, Attar's Conference of the Birds, and Nizami's romances.

Urdu poetry — Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz — carries the ghazal tradition into the modern age. Its verse is sung in every Pakistani and Indian Muslim household. Faiz's political poetry, written in Pakistani prisons, is one of the great achievements of 20th-century world literature.

Turkish gave Yunus Emre (13th c., saint-poet of the Anatolian people) and, in the 20th century, Nazim Hikmet, whose poems moved the world from a Turkish prison cell.

Because a good story lets you live a life not your own — an act of moral imagination the Prophet ﷺ modelled when he told parables of the Israelites, the man with two gardens, the people of the town, and the three trapped in the cave. Because poetry captures what prose cannot. Because the Qur'an itself is the most beautiful Arabic ever written — appreciating its rhythm, structure, and imagery requires a literary ear.

As Ibn Rushd wrote: 'The soul is stirred to virtue by what it hears in verse in a way that mere argument cannot achieve.'