Poetry as a Social Document: The Social Position of the Arab Woman as Reflected in the Poetry of Nizâr Qabbânî

No other people in the world, perhaps, have given more information in their poetry on their cultural and social life than have the Arabs over the centuries. Many years before the advent of Islam and long before they had any national political organization, the Arabs had developed a highly articulate poetic art, strict in its syntax and metrical schemes and fantastically rich in its vocabulary and observation of detail. The merciless desert, the harsh environment in which the Arabs lived, their ever shifting nomadic life, left almost no traces of their social structure and the cultural aspects of their life. It is only in their poetry – these monuments built of words – that we find such evidence, and it speaks more eloquently than cuneiform on marble statues ever could.