Hazaj meter

Hazaj meter is a quantitative verse meter frequently found in the epic poetry of the Middle East and western Asia. A musical rhythm of the same name is based on the literary meter.

Like the other meters of the al-ʿarūḍ system of Arabic poetry, the basic rhyme unit of hazaj meter compositions is a closed couplet—a bayt "distich" (literally "tent")—of two hemistichs known as miṣrāʿs ("tent flaps").

Characteristic of the hazaj meter (in relation to the other al-ʿarūḍ meters) is its leading iamb, that is, the first two syllables of its prosodic feet are short-long. This syllable pair (the watid, "peg") is then repeated at fixed points along the length of a line, and two variable syllables (the sabab, "guy-wire"s) are "tied" to each instance of it. The hazaj measure is thus nominally tetrasyllabic. Its two common variations are:

In classical Arabic the hazaj is generally used in a dimeter version of four feet. There is also a catalectic version in which the last syllable of the second miṣrāʿ is omitted: The complete bayt is as follows ("x" indicates a syllable of variable length):

An example is the qasida of the 10th-century poet Abu Firas al-Hamdani which begins:

The hazaj is one of the less common Arabic meters. It is only very rarely used in early Arabic poetry, and does not occur at all in Stoetzer's collection of 130 8th-century poems, and in fewer than 10 of Vadet's collection of 2300 poems and fragments of Bedouin poetry of the 1st-3rd centuries AD.

The hazaj meter is perhaps also be the base metric of contemporary Arabic band compositions, but this is uncertain.

The hazaj meter may be compared to the wāfir meter which has the following rhythm, in which u u may be replaced in any foot by a single long syllable:

One difference between them is that the wāfir is quite commonly used in Arabic poetry but never used at all in Persian, Turkish or Urdu. However, in its contracted form, where both pairs of short syllables in a hemistich (half-line) are replaced by a long one, it closely resembles the Persian 11-syllable hazaj:

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