Foundations of Prosody According to Abdullah al-Tayib in His Book "The Guide to Understanding Arabic Poetry"

Abstract

This research delves into the foundations of prosody as established by Abdullah al-Tayib in his book "The Guide to Understanding Arabic Poetry and Its Craft." The researcher presents al-Tayib's method of teaching prosody to learners, a method that aimed primarily at cultivating a refined taste for poetic meters in students by training their ears and senses to appreciate the music of Arabic meters. Al-Tayib adopted a unique approach, providing examples of meters, presenting evidence, and focusing on the suitability of each meter for specific poetic themes and meanings through carefully selected poetic examples. He delved into the study of these examples, drawing the learner's attention to the beauty of their prosodic structures and the appropriateness of these meters for poetic themes such as praise, boasting, elegy, satire, and others. Moreover, he criticized certain poems based on the principle of each meter's suitability for a specific meaning. His criticism was directed at the approach of prosody that followed the methods of grammarians, leading them to postulate meters without corresponding textual evidence and to proliferate terminology as a result.