المعلقات السبع (The Seven Suspended Odes — Arabic text with English)

mental production, to be appreciated as a high accomplishment, and to be regarded as a qualification for exaltation of rank and esteem in society. Poets came forward to emulate and vie with one another to carry off the palm. This led to the establishment of a department of literary exhibition in the national fair of ’Okâz a major pre-Islamic marketplace and poetry festival site, which was held annually in Zû-l-Qa’dah the eleventh month of the Islamic calendar, one of the four sacred months, in which war was forbidden to be waged. To it flocked merchants from Hijâz a region in western Arabia, Nejd a plateau region in central Arabia and other parts of Arabia. ’Okâz was the ‘Olympia of Arabia,’ where poets resorted and placed their poetic talents before the public for their judgment and award, which were always regarded as decisive and final.

The Arabic literature attained the zenith just at the time, when the faith of Islâm the religion of submission to God made its appearance in Arabia, and the Korân the central religious text of Islam marked the highest point, to which the Arabic language and literature were destined to rise, after which, as the Arabs by the spread and the conquest of Islâm came in contact with foreigners, they had reason to grow jealous of their noble language; and being afraid lest its purity might suffer from its contact with other languages, they were obliged to state the principles of grammar, to explain the laws of syntax, to discover the measures of prosody, to formulate the figures of rhetoric and composition, to define the criteria of lexicography, to determine the standards of phraseology, and to fix the canons of criticism, all founded on the basis of the universal principles that underlie the pure language of the pre-Islamic time. The simplicity of nature, however, was rapidly waning and giving its place to artificial ornamentation, unnatural embellishment, and scholastic mannerism. Poets, orators and writers then vied in indulging in poetic reveries, in giving a full play to their imagination, in forming new sentiments, in inventing new metaphors and rare similes, in discovering the beauties of the pre-Islamic poetry, and in imitating by every artificial means in their power the