Arabic poetry forms

thumb|An illustrated headpiece from a mid-18th century collection of ghazals and Rubaʿi|rubāʻīyāt

The qaṣīda (also spelled qaṣīdah; plural qaṣā’id) is an ancient Arabic word and form of poetry, often translated as ode. The qasida originated in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and passed into non-Arabic cultures after the Arab Muslim expansion.

Mathnawi ( ), also spelled masnavi, mesnevi or masnawi, is a kind of poem written in rhyming couplets, or more specifically "a poem based on independent, internally rhyming lines". Most mathnawi poems follow a meter of eleven, or occasionally ten, syllables, but had no limit in their length. Typical mathnawi poems consist of an indefinite number of couplets, with the rhyme scheme aa/bb/cc.

Muwashshah ( '''' 'girdled'; plural '; also ' 'girdling,' pl. ') is a strophic poetic form that developed in al-Andalus in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. The ', embodying the Iberian rhyme revolution, was the major Andalusi innovation in Arabic poetry, and it was sung and performed musically. The muwaššaḥ features a complex rhyme and metrical scheme usually containing five '''' ( 'branches'; sing. '), with uniform rhyme within each strophe, interspersed with ' ( 'threads for stringing pearls'; sing. '') with common rhyme throughout the song, as well as a terminal kharja'' ( 'exit'), t

right|thumb|200px|The 7th Maqāma of Al-Hariri of Basra|Al-Hariri, illustration by [[Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti from the 1237 manuscript (BNF ms. arabe 5847).]]The maqāma (Arabic: مقامة [maˈqaːma], literally "assembly"; plural maqāmāt, مقامات [maqaːˈmaːt]) is an (originally) Arabic prosimetric literary genre of picaresque short stories originating in the tenth century C.E. The maqāmāt are anecdotes told by a fictitious narrator which typically follow the escapades of a roguish protagonist as the two repeatedly encounter each other in their travels. The genre is known for its literary and rhetor

Zajal () is a traditional form of oral strophic poetry declaimed in a colloquial dialect. The earliest recorded zajal poet was Ibn Quzman of al-Andalus who lived from 1078 to 1160. Most scholars see the Andalusi Arabic zajal, the stress-syllable versification of which differs significantly from the quantitative meter of classical Arabic poetry, as a form of expression adapted from Romance languages' popular poetry traditions into Arabic—first at the folkloric level and then by lettered poets such as Ibn Quzman.

thumb|A manuscript of an urjūza (versification) of Muqaddimat Ibn Rushd ("The Introduction of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd," grandfather of Ibn Rushd the philosopher) Rajaz (, literally 'tremor, spasm, convulsion as may occur in the behind of a camel when it wants to rise') is a metre used in classical Arabic poetry. A poem composed in this metre is an urjūza. The metre accounts for about 3% of surviving ancient and classical Arabic verse. Some historians believe that rajaz evolved from saj'.

Waṣf () (literally 'attribute' or 'description'; pl. ) is an ancient style of Arabic poetry, which can be characterised as descriptive verse. The concept of was also borrowed into Persian, which developed its own rich poetic tradition in this mode.

Wāfir (, literally 'numerous, abundant, ample, exuberant') is a meter used in classical Arabic poetry. It is among the five most popular meters of classical Arabic poetry, accounting (alongside ṭawīl, basīṭ, kāmil, and mutaqārib) for 80-90% of lines and poems in the ancient and classical Arabic corpus.