Rajaz

For the 1999 album by Camel, see Rajaz (album).
A manuscript of an urjūza (versification) of Muqaddimat Ibn Rushd ("The Introduction of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd," grandfather of Ibn Rushd the philosopher)

Rajaz (رَجَز, literally 'tremor, spasm, convulsion as may occur in the behind of a camel when it wants to rise'[1]) 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.[2]

  1. ^ The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, ed. by Robert Irwin (London: Penguin, 1999).
  2. ^ Bruno Paoli, 'Generative Linguistics and Arabic Metrics', in Towards a Typology of Poetic Forms: From Language to Metrics and Beyond, ed. by Jean-Louis Aroui, Andy Arleo, Language Faculty and Beyond: Internl and External Variation in Linguistics, 2 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009), pp. 193-208 (p. 203).