Hijāʾ (invective, lampoon, satire) is one of the principal modes or genres of traditional Arabic poetry; it is synonymous with the less frequent hajw (the preferred term in Persian), muhājāt , and tahājī (the last-mentioned specifically meaning "mutual lampooning"), all derived from the same Arabic root. Invective in prose or sajʿ (rhyming prose) is not altogether absent but is rarely called hijāʾ . The original sense of the word may have been "murmuring," in particular "casting a spell"; the word hijāʾ also means "orthography" (cf. English "spell"). This would seem to