al-Māghūt, Muḥammad - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Fakhreddine, Huda J.
Leiden
Brill
(737 words)
Muḥammad al-Māghūt (1934-2006), a Syrian poet, is credited with being one of the first proponents of the prose poem ( qaṣīdat al-nathr ), the first poetic form in Arabic to do away completely with metre. The prose poem was introduced into Arabic poetry in the late 1950s through the literary journal Shiʿr , founded by the poets Yusūf al-Khāl (d. 1987) and Adūnīs (ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd, b. 1930). Unlike other proponents and theorists of this new form, al-Māghūt was not invested in theorising the prose poem, nor did