Offering a vast panorama of the history of Arabic verse in its relation to Semitic verse, this work follows stages of its evolution from parallelistic pattern to the emergence of the three basic rhythms and then of the unique system of ‘Arūḍ.
It proposes a new interpretation of the original Arabic metrical theory including the famous "circles of Khalī as a kind of generative device and traces its relation to the grammatical and lexicographical theories of al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad.
The monograph provides the largest so far statistical data of the metrical repertory of Classical Arabic poetry, puts forward a hypothesis about the existence of the archaic Hiran metrical school side by side with the Bedouin school and describes main metrical types of Arabic poetry: Bedouin, ḥīran, (‘Abbasid), Classical, Andalusian.