mustafʿilunfāʿilunmustafʿilunfāʿilunmustafʿilun: long long short long, fāʿilun: long short long, mustafʿilun: long long short long, fāʿilun: long short long
mutafāʿilunmutafāʿilunmutafāʿilunmutafāʿilun: short short long short long, mutafāʿilun: short short long short long, mutafāʿilun: short short long short long
Each foot opens with two quick shorts
Texts in Matn 1
Reading the scansion
A metre
A metre (baḥr) is a set pattern of long and short syllables. Every bayt of the poem keeps to it, with a few permitted changes. The system goes back to al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad of Basra, who described fifteen metres. A sixteenth, al-mutadārak, was added after him.
Long and short
A short syllable is a consonant with a short vowel: bi, ta. A long syllable has a long vowel, as in bā and qū, or ends in a consonant, as in bis and qal. Only what is pronounced counts, so the bayt is first written out as it is spoken.
Feet
The syllables fall into feet (tafʿīlāt). Each foot is named with a word built on the root f-ʿ-l, and the word has the foot’s rhythm: mus-taf-ʿi-lun is long, long, short, long.
Two halves
A bayt has two halves, the ṣadr and the ʿajuz. The last foot of the ṣadr is the ʿarūḍ and the last foot of the ʿajuz is the ḍarb. Some changes are allowed only in these two places.
Why al-rajaz
Each half-line has three matching feet, and each foot ends short, long. In a didactic urjūza (a poem in al-rajaz) the two halves of a bayt rhyme with each other, and the rhyme changes from one bayt to the next. Keeping one rhyme for a thousand bayts would have constrained the wording of every rule in Alfiyyat Ibn Malik. Al-rajaz is also the most permissive of the metres, so a rule of grammar or fiqh fits into it with little forcing.
The scansions were made by hand and cross-checked with pyarud 1.0.0. Permitted forms follow al-Damāmīnī, al-ʿUyūn al-ghāmiza ʿalā khabāyā al-Rāmiza. Reciters lengthen and pause freely.