Hajjaj Salama

Some ancient and modern researchers believe that female Arabic poetry has been wronged and its rights diminished, neglected by the early scholars and followed in those tracks by later ones. Some have ne so far as to say that the presence of women’s poetry in the anthologies of poets, such as the Hamasas of Abu Tammam and Al-Buhturi among the ancients, and even the anthologies of Al-Barudi and his peers among the moderns, was a rare occurrence.

However, the book "Arab Poetesses in Pre-Islamic Times and Islam" by Bashir Yamut, first published in 1934, along with other ancient and contemporary sources, collected for us much of the poetic heritage of ancient Arab poetesses, whose lives and poems have recently become a focus for researchers and scholars. It has become clear how well they excelled in poetry, and some studies have even begun to track the linguistic achievements in their poems and how some of them went beyond composing poetry to contributing their efforts to the sciences of the Arabic language.

An Egyptian academic linguistic study monitored the efforts of Arab women in the field of establishing grammatical rules and collecting the language. It collected and verified many "women's Rajaz" and their poems during the so-called "Age of Protest", showing how women contributed to preserving the Arabic language and establishing its grammatical foundations.

The study, titled "Grammatical Phenomena in Women's Poetry and Its Effect on Guiding the Rule in the Age of Protest"—for which the Egyptian researcher Ahlam Ahmed Abdel Wahab, an academic in the Arabic Language Department at the Faculty of Arts, South Valley University in Qena, Upper Egypt, earned a Master's degree with Excellent distinction and a recommendation to print and circulate the thesis in Egyptian universities—pointed out the injustice of many modern language researchers and investigators towards Arab women in the fields of language, whereas heritage books and early researchers were fair. She recommended the necessity of conducting further studies and research in various aspects of the Arabic language to track more contributions of Arab women in the linguistic field.

The study tracked, through collection and verification, what women’s poetry provided during the "Age of Codification and Language Collection," known as the Age of Protest. Ahlam Ahmed Abdel Wahab collected poems presented by several of the most important sources of Arab heritage, whether the poetess's name was identified or disputed. The study defined the poems that played a role in citation and codification for Arabic, provided an analysis of those poems, and presented their impact on the chapters of grammar in particular and language in general. She balanced the collected poems of cited women against several famous dictionaries dedicated to gathering the largest number of Arabic evidences, in order to reach the maximum number of women's poems with an impact on the grammatical and linguistic heritage.

The study presented the collected female Arabic poetic evidence by describing the most widespread and used grammatical phenomena in poetic sentences, analyzing those phenomena in their positions, while indicating which of them had an effect on citation or grammatical guidance. It also dealt with the Age of Protest by defining it and presenting its features and controls, collecting and documenting the poems and Rajaz attributed to the women of this era through statistics and analysis, and examining the impact of women's evidence on the Arabic language.

The Egyptian researcher reached a set of results in her study, including: that the poems and Rajaz cited in the study and attributed to women were varied and widespread across all branches of Arabic. Also, there are many verses attributed to women that were not cited on the surface, yet were a reason for confirming the validity of another piece of evidence, or explaining what was difficult to understand or clarifying a different meaning. This is a function performed by the evidence in its meaning and use, which indicates the flexibility of heritage in its ability to grant a greater amount of evidence that clarifies rules and enriches it with breadth and diversity to confirm a single opinion.

Grammatical phenomena are widespread and employed in different structures in women's poetry in general and evidence in particular. Phenomena such as deletion, separation, and fronting/deferring were clearly prevalent in women's evidence and had a clear effect on strengthening the structure, enriching the significance, and completing the meaning. Many were subjects of citation, and she also uncovered matters worthy of being singled out for their own research, such as poetic necessity. Furthermore, non-cited poems, as an anthology reflecting the nature of language, literary purposes, and artistic features, need linguistic, semantic, rhetorical, and structural studies.

Tracking the verses attributed to women in fifty Arabic sources produced more than a thousand verses between poems and Rajaz, including more than two hundred and fifty pieces of evidence. In contrast, the maximum number of evidences attributed to women counted by a citation dictionary prior to the research was one hundred and fifty-two in the Dictionary of Arabic Evidences by the master of investigators, Abdel Salam Haroun. The total number of cited verses from the verses attributed to women in the four dictionaries used for balance against the women's poetry dictionary reached one hundred and ninety-two evidences. The statistical results of the study indicated more than fifty verses that appeared in citation positions while no reference was made to them in the other four dictionaries.

What has been tracked of the female contribution is but a drop in the bucket. Heritage did not wrong women by clarifying their influence in the linguistic field as much as many modern linguistic researchers and investigators did when they isolated their efforts from research and excavation into what the ancients did not reveal. Due to their interest in the text more than verifying its speaker for fear of questioning the text or diminishing it because of its author, convictions that have nothing to do with truth became widespread, built neither on evidence nor proof, regarding the absence of impact that deserves the trouble of this research and the effort of that excavation. Women's contributions in the linguistic field are still in need of many more studies.