Linguistic Cultural Dominance in Zihāf: A Critical Study

Abstract

Objectives: This study aims to shed light on the concept of linguistic and cultural hegemony over prosody, attempting to uncover manifestations of this hegemony in the opinions of early linguists and critics. It clarifies the reasons behind the ancients' use of the phrase "fear metrical variations," thus prioritizing linguistic and grammatical rules over prosody, and explores the resulting arguments and debates.

Methodology: The study employs a critical analytical approach, drawing on texts, particularly those addressing the concept of metrical variations in poetry. Poetic examples illustrating the needs of poetry and the conflict between linguistic and grammatical rules are analyzed, and the perspectives of early scholars on these phenomena are clarified.

Results: The research, through a review of texts in foundational texts, revealed that the rules of morphology, syntax, and linguistics became the governing reference for determining the quality of poetry, overshadowing the aesthetics of prosody. This led to prioritizing these rules over the flexibility available to poets. The study also demonstrated how narrators and critics altered or reinterpreted words to avoid metrical irregularities (zihaf), a perspective that attempted to explain zihaf as a flaw in poetry, thus obscuring the identity of prosody. The study discovered that this dominance contributed to labeling metrical irregularities in pre-Islamic poetry as flaws.

Conclusion: The study concluded that linguistic culture had a clear impact on critical practices, defining good poetry as that which adhered to the rules of grammar, morphology, and linguistics, in addition to the rules of prosody, while ignoring the vast amount of poetic use of zihaf throughout the ages, which was an integral part of the structure of Arabic poetry.