Arabic, Qurʾān, and the Poetic Licence

ARABIC, QURʾĀN, AND THE POETIC LICENCE: RECITING THE WORD OF GOD, by Shady Hekmat Nasser. New York: Routledge, 2025, 444pp . Ebook ISBN: 978-1003501565.

Shady Hekmat Nasser’s Arabic, Qurʾān, and Poetic License is an ambitious and dense work that considers the question of how the language of the Qurʾān relates to Arabic poetry, and from this, the implications of their stylistic and grammatical affinities to our understanding of divine speech. Thus, the book explores the similarities between the Qurʾān and the pre-Islamic Arabic poetic tradition including aspects such as rhythm, rhyme, syntactic structures and grammar. The book also explores how early grammarians and Qurʾānic reciters responded to this similarity through the application of the concept of poetic license (ḍarūrah). The book is structured around two main objectives . First, to provide a historically grounded and systematised list of grammatical irregularities in classical Arabic poetry and the Qurʾān and, secondly, to demonstrate how the rules of Qurʾānic recitation (tajwīd), along with the canonisation of variant readings (qirāʾāt), served as tools to preserve the sanctity of the Qurʾān in light of its poetic ancestry.