Beyond Prosody: Reconfiguring the Quatrain as a Literary Form in the Arab-Islamic World

The Arabic–Persian quatrain (Pers. robāʿī; Ar. rubāʿī/dūbayt) has long been approached primarily through a prosodic lens, often discussed within debates on the autonomy or dependence of Persian and Arabic metrical systems. This article argues that this perspective obscures a more consequential development: the gradual transformation of the quatrain from a metrically codified structure in Persian into a conceptually and rhetorically flexible poetic form within Arabic literary discourse. Through philological, prosodic, and rhetorical analysis, the study examines the persistent terminological ambiguity between rubāʿī and dūbayt, the instability of its assimilation into the Khalīlian metrical system, and its broader conceptual reconfiguration across linguistic and literary contexts. Rather than a simple instance of formal borrowing, the quatrain emerges as a mobile poetic structure circulating across a multilingual Islamic literary sphere in which poetic authority and form were continually renegotiated. By foregrounding these dynamics, the article proposes a reassessment of the quatrain as a literary form shaped by interliterary exchange and, more broadly, invites a reconsideration of premodern literary entanglements beyond modern system-based models of world literature.