The Introductions of the Poems of the Pre-Islamic Mufaḍḍaliyat: Their types and Evolution

The Mufaaliyat have received great attention from scholars and critics. They dealt with them from a variety of perspectives that focused on specific issues according to the scientific methods they applied. This paper focuses on an aspect that has not been studied enough, which is the role of the poet consciousness in forming the preferred pre-Islamic Mufaaliyat poems and studies the manifestations of individual awareness in the form and content of them, based on the idea that the diversity of topics and poetic purposes resulted from individual subjective efforts that responded to the requirements of the age and the desire of public taste at that time. The most important thing that poets focused on was the introductions to the poems they composed, because they are the foundations on which the artistic construction of the poem rests. Hence, the paper is concerned with studying these introductions categorizing them into categories, and analyzing them to reveal their forming properties. The most important conclusions of the paper is that the introductions of these poems reveal a deep awareness of the reality through the various elements of artistic formation and that there is a development in the construction of these introductions that reveals an active role of individuality in it.