Arabic nouns can be declined in the singular, dual, or plural forms. Shā'ir, shā'irayn, shu'arāʾ—poet, two poets, poets. So, too, may the history of Arabic lyric be conceived in singular, dual, and plural modes. Arabic lyric's development, beginning with the singular foundation of the qaṣīda form, mirrored the Islamic turn of Arabia and of Arabic, as would Franco-Arabic lyric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: some Franco-Arab poets worked exclusively with the qaṣīda, others with a Sufi lyric unfettered by monotheistic sanctity and blended over a pagan scope of reference. After Islam, the bifid tongue of Arabic poetry subsumed the monoform: from monolingual uniformity to a dual diglossic register. The Islamic dimension of Arabic lyric layered itself against the antecedent jāhilī idiom, but Arabic lyric's duality would go on to flourish in multiplicity over the course of subsequent centuries. Eastern Arabic lyric lands upon European shores.

Paradise lost

While Ibn ‘Arabī promulgated the later phases in the development of Sufism and the Arab lyric, he also perfectly straddled East and West, the world of early Islamic mysticism and the lyric and literary spheres of al-Andalus. Born in Murcia, Ibn ‘Arabī's youth and early works were firmly rooted in al-Andalus, and to this day he remains enshrined in Damascus. He never returned to his homeland after setting out for a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1201 and initiating his search for deeper mystical knowledge in North Africa and the Middle East. His permanent, self-imposed exile forms an integral part of the Andalusian literary story.

Al-Andalus provided Arabic literature with innumerable linguistic and literary innovations, which were subsequently exported to the Arab East. Chief among these was a new codification of the habitual poetic topoi that have long combined love, loss, and nostalgia. The new poetics of al-Andalus subsumed the desert-derived idioms of Eastern lyric with descriptions of the lush gardens of the Iberian Peninsula. For instance, in his famous Nūniyya, or poem in the n-rhyme, one of al-Andalus's preeminent poets, Abū al-Walīd Aḥmad ibn Zaydūn (Cordoba, 1003–1071), composed what now figures among Arabic lyric's most renowned poems of lovelorn nostalgia: