Wafir

Wāfir (وَافِر, literally 'numerous, abundant, ample, exuberant') is a meter used in classical Arabic poetry. It is among the five most popular metres of classical Arabic poetry, accounting (alongside ṭawīl, basīṭ, kāmil, and mutaqārib) for 80-90% of lines and poems in the ancient and classical Arabic corpus.

The metre comprises paired hemistichs of the following form (where "–" represents a long syllable, "u" a short syllable, and "o" one long or two shorts):

Thus, unlike most classical Arabic metres, wāfir allows the poet to substitute one long syllable for two shorts, an example of the prosodic element known as a biceps. Thus allows wāfir lines to have different numbers of syllables from each other, a characteristic otherwise only found in kāmil, mutadārik and some forms of basīṭ.

Wāfir is traditionally represented with the mnemonic (tafāʿīl) Mufāʿalatun Mufāʿalatun Faʿūlun (مُفَاعَلَتُنْ مُفاعَلَتُنْ فَعولُنْ).

Historically, wāfir perhaps arose, along with ṭawīl and mutaqārib, from hazaj. In the analysis of Salma K. Jayyusi, the 'Umayyad poet Jarir ibn Atiyah used the metre for about a fifth of his work, and at that time "this metre was still fresh and did not carry echoes of great pre-Islamic poets as did ṭawīl and baṣīt. Wāfir had therefore a great potential for introducing a diction nearer to the spoken language of the Umayyad period."

The metre, like other Arabic metres, was later borrowed into other poetic traditions. For example, it was adopted in Hebrew, where it is known as hamerubeh and became one of the pre-eminent metres of medieval poetry. In the Arabic and Arabic-influenced vernacular poetry of Sub-Saharan Africa it also features, for example in Fula and Hausa. It also underpins some oral poetic traditions in Palestine today. However, it was not used in Urdu, Turkish, or Persian (or perhaps, rather, it can be said to have merged for linguistic reasons with hazaj).

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