Mechanisms of Organization and Criteria of Selection in the Classical Arabic Poetic Heritage

Abstract

Arabic poetry stands as the complete archive of Arab wisdom which documents their actual life events while showcasing their mental brilliance and their gathered knowledge. The system allowed people to judge others while enabling them to ask for help but the system represented the highest source of knowledge according to their perspective. Their lively social events together with their book trade made poetry their most important cultural tradition because they shared these verses through memory and spoken word and through group learning during their annual festivals.

The first poetic anthologies stand among the most important collections which maintain pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry in existence. The creators based their selection process on different rules because they needed to achieve their desired results through the work. The Muʿallaqāt represent the highest point of early poetic creation while the Mufaḍḍaliyyāt focus on identifying the most excellent and well-known literary works and the Aṣmaʿiyyāt concentrate on maintaining the exactness of speech and poetic beauty and the Jamharat Ashʿār al-ʿArab seeks to establish the most extensive collection of various poetic works from different time periods. The collection shows that people recognized poetry value from the beginning while different editors used their own goals to select poems and the first literary scholars worked hard to protect poetic works which they passed down to future readers.