Intermingling of Genres and the Prose of Modern Poetry in the Mamluk Era

Abstract

The Mamluk era was one of the most responsive eras to transformations and interventions in literature. This indicates the desire of Mamluk writers to innovate and develop in breaking away from old restrictions, especially since it was an era in which non-Arab speakers proliferated, so classical Arabic became heavy on their tongues, and the need arose to search for lightness and elegance that would keep pace with their mixed society. Perhaps the attempt to search among the arts and poetic purposes helped many poets to find light words and meters that would be lyrical and somewhat free from the restrictions of Arabic meter and rhyme. The squares and quintuplets appeared in the Abbasid era, and the muwashshah appeared in Andalusia. Then, poetic genres appeared one after the other, little by little, so Arabic poetry began to move away from the poetic form for which it was designed towards a kind of prose liberation. This is what we will see in this research of the arts and purposes of modern poetry. I divided the research after the introduction and the preface, in which I mentioned a historical overview of the Mamluk era, and a definition of terms. It came in two sections: The first section included: The newly emerging poetic arts: In it I mentioned the newly emerging poetic arts that contributed to a large extent to the intermingling of poetry with prose. The second section came: In it I spoke about the newly emerging poetic purposes that spread in the Mamluk era and that were close to prose.