5 - The role of parallelism in Arabic prose

Summary

In any fully evolved literary culture – and this includes both Arabic and English – one tends to think of the prose–verse antithesis as a primary and fundamental dichotomy. Yet on a broader view, and taking into account the pre-literate antecedents of the literary culture, an even more fundamental dichotomy is that between everyday discourse on one hand, and on the other hand elevated styles of diction, no matter whether they be verse or formal prose. Within the domain of the elevated style, there is a gradation to be observed. One may have straighforward narrative, or utterances which seek to arouse the hearers' emotions by the use of linguistic devices. These devices are not necessarily those of rhythmical regularity (i.e. metre) which constitute, in Arab and European thought alike, the essential feature of “verse”. Ancient Near Eastern literatures, and above all the Hebrew Old Testament, employ for this purpose a style of elevated diction which European scholars have not hesitated to call “poetry”.

The fundamental appeal of that style lies not in acoustic effect but in a semantic patterning, which has been described by Eissfeld as follows:

The poetic texts consist of verses [here the conventional divisions of the biblical text, not anything to do with the prose-verse antithesis] formed from two – or more rarely three – stichoi combined, in which the stichoi or members are in some way “parallel” to each other, in that they offer variations on the same idea. […]