The scientific terms

01The scientific terms

• The school of Revival and Resurrection and the generation of development (Neoclassical school): a pioneering literary movement led by Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi to revive and resurrect Arabic poetry from its grave after centuries of stagnation in the Mamluk and Ottoman ages, by emulating the great poets of the brilliant ages (Jahili and Abbasid) in the strength of words, the force of wording and the classical canon (ʿamuud al-shiʿr); his pupils — Ahmed Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim and Ahmed Moharram — developed it by joining the sound Arab heritage to the treatment of the issues of their age, the problems of their society and of the Islamic world.
• The emotional (Romantic) trend in Arabic poetry: a current whose foundations were laid by Khalil Mutran in 1908, imitating French Romanticism; it starts from the individual's discovery of the self, pride in one's culture, care for the sincere feeling-experience, and the fusion of the poem's parts into an organic unity — artistic and psychological — that rejects the ready old models and artificial occasion-poetry.
• The school of al-Diwan: a critical and poetic school founded in 1921 by Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, Ibrahim Abdel-Qader al-Mazini and Abdel-Rahman Shukri; influenced by English Romanticism, they called for expressing the self and its emotion with a philosophical, rational, contemplative bent in which the mental idea outweighed emotion, and they invented the practice of giving a title to the whole poem and to the whole diwan.
• Apollo and Mahjar: Apollo was founded by Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi in 1932 and included Ibrahim Nagi, Ali Mahmoud Taha and Abu al-Qasim al-Shabibi, marked by using language in a new way in its symbolic senses, personification, and longing for the lands of memory. Mahjar are the Arab poets who emigrated to the Americas — the Pencil League in New York (Gibrán, Mikhail Nuayma, Elia Abu Madi) and the Andalusian League in Brazil — marked by the human and spiritual bent, introspection, and latitude in language and metrics.
• The Realist school and free verse / the poetry of the tafʿīlah: a school that appeared after the Second World War as a reaction against excess Romanticism; it gave up the single metre and single rhyme and the equal halves of the line, and relied on the tafʿīlah (active foot) as a free musical unit whose number changes in each line according to the emotional flow; it expressed the worries of the masses, the questions of liberation and justice, death, symbol and myth.
• The arts of modern Arabic prose: four major genres — (1) the essay, a prose form that treats a given idea in an engaging style (subjective and objective); (2) the novel, a long narrative prose work imitating reality with characters, events and a detailed time-and-place setting and living language; (3) the short story, marked by concentration and heavy compression, creating one intense impression in a flash of insight; (4) the play, a dramatic story presenting an event and a conflict through the dialogue of characters to build an ascending dramatic structure.