This study examines the religious poetry of the contemporary Iraqi poet Muhannad Jamal al-Din from a stylistic perspective, confined to the phonetic level. Four poems were selected, totalling ninety-eight verses and representing together the principal axes of his religious orientation: prophetic praise, the Prophetic Mission, Alid devotion, and the Imami succession. The study proceeds from the hypothesis that this religious orientation is constituted not only in content but also in the phonetic layer of the text, so that metre, rhyme and repetition become carriers of doctrinal meaning rather than external ornament. .The study adopts the descriptive-analytical method and departs from the impressionistic description that dominates Arabic phonetic scholarship: alongside the prosodic scansion it conducts an exhaustive count of the 3,710 phonetic segments of the corpus, classified according to the enumeration given by Sibawayh, and subjects its central finding to a robustness test by recalculating after removing the rhyme word from every verse..The central finding is that the proportion of voiced sounds varies across the four poems in a regular order governed by the degree to which the self is present in the discourse: it rises to 82.5% where collective doctrinal proclamation prevails and the first-person singular is absent, and falls to 75.9% where the bewildered self and a lexicon of dispersion prevail. This ordering survived the robustness test and was confirmed by three further independent measures. The study also establishes the dominance of the light metre in three of the four poems - a departure from the tradition of prophetic panegyric - the internal rhyming of all four opening verses, and the governance of each poem by a dominant sound answering to its subject. It concludes that the phonetic level constitutes an independent semantic level, and offers a procedural contribution: that claims in Arabic phonetic stylistics can be formulated so as to be verifiable and refutable..
Keywords: Stylistics, Phonetic Level, Muhannad Jamal al-Din, Religious Poetry Repetition.
Introduction
Arabic religious poetry has always been bound up with recitation. It is chanted at gatherings and on religious occasions, and its audience is usually a group of listeners rather than a single reader. Its sound is therefore part of what it does, and a poet who writes on the Prophet or the Imams chooses his metre, rhyme and sounds with the listeners in mind as much as for their beauty. The contemporary Iraqi poet Muhannad Jamal al-Din is a clear case. The son of the poet-jurist Mustafa Jamal al-Din, he grew up between Najaf and Qom, two cities where religious learning and devotional chanting go hand in hand, and he kept to the classical two-hemistich ode, renewing it from the inside instead of abandoning it. Since this renewal does not show in the outward form, it has to be sought in the texture of the verse, and the phonetic level is the natural place to begin.
Earlier work on the poet has dealt with the religious content of his poems and with their figurative language; none has given the phonetic level a study of its own. There is also a wider problem. Much Arabic writing on phonetic stylistics stops at impressions: a poet is said to favour voiced sounds, or a poem to have a strong ring, with nothing offered that a reader could check. Salah Fadl, Abd al-Salam al-Masaddi and, before them, Ibrahim Anis all pointed to this weakness. The present study tries to avoid it by stating its claims in a form that the data could contradict.
The study starts from the hypothesis that the poet's religious orientation is built into the sound of his poems as well as their content, so that metre, rhyme and repetition carry doctrinal meaning. It asks three questions: why the poet turns from the metres usual in Arabic religious poetry to one metre in particular, and what this says about his discourse; how the rhyme position comes to carry doctrinal content, and why every opening verse is internally rhymed (taṣrīʿ); and how the levels of repetition, together with paronomasia and parallelism, produce a meaning that the words alone do not.
Materials & methods
The study is descriptive and analytical and is confined to the phonetic level. The corpus consists of four poems, 98 verses in all: Raḥmatun lil-ʿĀlamīn on the Prophet (31 verses), Qāfiyatun fī al-Mabʿath al-Nabawī on the Prophetic Mission (28), al-Wuqūf bi-Bāb ʿAlī on devotion to Imam Ali (16), and Min ʿAliyyin al-Amīr ilā ʿAliyyin al-Sulṭān on Imam al-Jawad (23). The last is taken from the diwan Qasa'idi (Beirut, 2023) and the other three from the poet's official page. Three considerations guided the choice. Together the poems cover the main lines of the poet's religious writing; they are close in length but differ in metre and rhyme letter, so that the differences found between them are differences between texts and not between sizes; and none of them had been examined for its sound before.
Every verse was scanned, and the metre, the permitted variations (ziḥāfāt and ʿilal), the type of rhyme and the treatment of the opening verses were recorded. Beyond scansion, every sound in the corpus was counted: 3,710 segments in total, counting written consonants and long vowels, leaving out short vowels and counting a doubled consonant twice. The sounds were classified after Sibawayh into voiced and voiceless, and into plosive, fricative and medial. Single-sound frequencies, word repetition, refrains, paronomasia and parallelism were then read against the theme of each poem.
The main result was put through a robustness test. Because the rhyme letter recurs in every verse, it could by itself produce the differences between poems; the whole count was therefore repeated with the rhyme word removed from all 98 verses. The ranking of the poems was also checked against three further measures built differently from voicing: the share of medial sounds, of plosive sounds and of long vowels.
Discussion & Result
Scansion shows only two metres in the corpus. Al-khafīf is used in three poems, 62 of the 98 verses, and al-kāmil in the one poem of pure praise to the Prophet. This matters because prophetic panegyric has mostly been composed in the long and weighty metres; al-Būṣīrī's Burda is in al-basīṭ, and most later panegyrics followed it. By preferring al-khafīf the poet moves religious speech away from formal praise toward something closer to private address and supplication. His return to al-kāmil for the poem of direct praise shows that he knows the tradition well and departs from it only where the occasion calls for it. His handling of al-khafīf points the same way. Khabn affects the middle foot so regularly that mustafʿilun seldom appears in full, the final foot alternates between its sound form and the tashʿīth form, and many verses run on across the hemistich. The metre is drawn toward the rhythm of speech, which suits prayer, since prayer does not stop at the end of a half-line.
All four poems use an unrestricted rhyme, a vowelled rhyme letter followed by a long vowel; there is no quiescent rhyme anywhere in the corpus. In three of them a long vowel also precedes the rhyme letter (ridf), as in ḥayātī, al-ṣalawātī, al-nahāru and al-anwāru. The last syllable of the verse is thus stretched at both ends, and the verse closes on an open sound. This fits the themes of the two poems where it is most marked: a mercy that reaches everyone and a light that spreads. In the poem on Imam al-Jawad the rhyme does more than sound. The nisba ending -iyy places names and attributes of allegiance at the end of the verses (li-l-ʿAliyy, Raḍawiyy, al-Nabiyy, al-ʿAlawiyy), so the listener comes to expect one of them in every closing position. All four openings are internally rhymed. In poetry recited to a gathering this has a practical use: it fixes the rhyme in the listeners' ears from the first line, so that they can follow it and join in.
Each poem has one sound that is more frequent in it than anywhere else in the corpus, and that sound suits its subject. In the poem on the Mission it is the trilled rāʾ (7.0%, twice its share in al-Wuqūf), in a poem about light breaking out and spreading; the same poem has eleven words from the field of light against six from that of darkness. In al-Wuqūf it is lām (11.6%, the highest share of any consonant in the corpus), a smooth, flowing sound in a poem about manifestation and abundance; the opening verse alone contains nine. In the poem on Imam al-Jawad it is yāʾ, the sound of the nisba. In Raḥmatun lil-ʿĀlamīn it is the voiceless plosive tāʾ (6.6%), which occurs six times in a single verse describing the speaker's confusion and dispersal. The claim is kept narrow. A sound does not carry a meaning on its own; what counts is that the highest rate of a sound, a matching vocabulary and a matching theme meet in the same poem. Were a poem to show a high rate of rāʾ without the vocabulary of spreading, the link would fail.
Voiced sounds make up 78.8% of the corpus. The more telling result is how this share varies from poem to poem. It is highest in al-Wuqūf (82.5%), followed by the poem on the Mission (79.6%) and the poem on Imam al-Jawad (79.4%), and lowest in Raḥmatun lil-ʿĀlamīn (75.9%). The order follows the degree to which the individual speaker is present. Al-Wuqūf is a collective declaration of loyalty in which the first person singular all but gives way to "we"; Raḥmatun lil-ʿĀlamīn opens with a lost and troubled "I"; the other two move between declaration and confession. Other possible causes were weighed. Topic does not account for the order, since the poems on the Mission and on Ali differ in subject yet are close in voicing, and the singular "I" is absent from both. Metre is not decisive either, for the two al-khafīf poems on Imam al-Jawad and on Ali are three points apart. Length shows no consistent pattern.
The rhyme objection is a serious one here, because the rhyme letter of the lowest poem, tāʾ, is voiceless. With the rhyme words removed, the ranking did not change: al-Wuqūf stayed at 82.5%, the two middle poems fell slightly, and Raḥmatun lil-ʿĀlamīn rose by only 0.4 points and remained the lowest. The test worked against the hypothesis, since removing voiced rhymes lowers the top three poems and removing a voiceless rhyme raises the fourth, and still the order held. The medial and plosive measures gave the same order, the first falling and the second rising across the four poems. Long vowels agreed for the two highest poems and were reversed by 0.3 points for the two lowest, an exception the study reports. The test does not prove the hypothesis. It removes one competing explanation, the rhyme letter, and shows that the result survived a test it could have failed.
Repetition operates on four levels: the single sound, the word, the phrase and the whole verse. Hāhunā occurs three times in the rhyme of the poem on the Mission, twice side by side in one verse. At the top of the scale stands the refrain, which frames the Husaynid section of one poem on both sides and, in another, returns as a block of three verses, more than a tenth of the text, dividing the poem and holding it together at once. In the poem on Imam al-Jawad the second hemistich of the last verse repeats that of the first, and both echo the title, so that "from Ali to Ali" becomes a pattern of sound for the continuity of the Imamate. Paronomasia and parallelism are used in the same way, to carry meaning rather than to decorate.
Conclusion
In these four poems the phonetic level works as a level of meaning in its own right. The choice of metre depends on where the speaker stands toward the addressee, not on habit. The rhyme system is built to open the verse rather than close it, and the internal rhyme of the openings serves group recitation. The share of voiced sounds rises and falls with the presence of the individual self, and each poem is dominated by a sound suited to its subject. Repetition is a structural principle and not verbal ornament.
The study also gives measurable form to an earlier remark by Muna Jabir Mijbil that the "I" is largely absent from the poet's work: the poems from which it is absent are the most voiced of the four. Its methodological point is that claims in Arabic phonetic stylistics can be stated so that they can be tested and, if need be, rejected.
The findings rest on four poems by a single poet. They describe a feature of this corpus, not a rule of the language or of the genre. The same procedure could be applied to the rest of the poet's religious poetry, to other contemporary religious poets writing in Arabic and Persian, and to a comparison with the poetry of his father, Mustafa Jamal al-Din.