Riddles are historically a significant genre of Arabic verse, and extensive scholarly collections have also been made of riddles in oral circulation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of this literary form has, however, been neglected by modern scholars.
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Terminology
Riddles are known in Arabic principally as lughz (pl. alghāz), but other terms include uḥjiyya (pl. aḥājī), and ta'miya. The term mu‘ammā (literally 'blinded' or 'obscured') is sometimes used as a synonym for lughz (or to denote cryptography or codes more generally), but it can be used specifically to denote a riddle which is solved 'by combining the constituent letters of the word or name to be found'.
Lughz is a capacious term. As al-Nuwayrī (1272–1332) puts it in the chapter on alghāz and aḥājī in his Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab:
Lughz is thought to derive from the phrase alghaza ’l-yarbū‘u wa-laghaza, which described the action of a field rat when it burrows its way first straight ahead but then veers off to the left or right in order to more successfully elude its enemies (li-yuwāriya bi-dhālika) so that it becomes, as it were, almost invisible (wa-yu‘ammiya ‘alā ṭālibihī). But in fact our language also has many other names of lughz such as mu’āyāh, ’awīṣ, ramz, muḥāgāh, abyāt al-ma’ānī, malāḥin, marmūs, ta’wīl, kināyah, ta‘rīd, ishārah, tawgīh, mu‘ammā, mumaththal. Although each of these terms is used more or less interchangeably for lughz, the very fact that there are so many of them is indicative of the varied explanations which the concept of lughz can apparently support.
This array of terms goes beyond those covered by riddle in English, into metaphor, ambiguity, and punning, indicating the fuzzy boundaries of the concept of the riddle in literary Arabic culture.
Early attestations
Riddles are attested in early Arabic literary culture, 'scattered in old stories attributed to the pre-Islamic bedouins, in the ḥadīth and elsewhere; and collected in chapters. These collections include al-Zahra by Ibn Dā’ūd al-Iṣbahāni (ch. 89), al-ʿIqd al-Farīd by Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih (book 25, section entitled Bāb al-lughz), and Ḥilyat al-muḥāḍara by al-Ḥātimi. 'The works of Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Mar‘arrī are riddled with riddles', and al-Mar‘arrī's lost work Gāmi‘ al-awzān is also thought to have contained many riddles, some of which are preserved by later scholars, principally Ibn al-‘Adīm. Several stories in One Thousand and One Nights involve riddles. The Koran, however, does not contain riddles as such, though it does contain conundra.
One of the leading exponents of the riddle in medieval Arabic was Al-Hariri of Basra (1054–1122), whose Maqāmāt (Assemblies) contains several different kinds of enigmas (assemblies 3, 8, 15, 24, 29, 32, 35, 36, 42 and 44). Al-Hariri built in this respect on the use of riddles in the earlier Maqamat Badi' az-Zaman al-Hamadhani (for example, assemblies 3, 29, 31, 35).
According to Pieter Smoor, discussing a range of ninth- to eleventh-century poets,
There is a slow but discernable development which can be traced in the Arabic riddle poem through the course of time. The earlier poets, like Ibn al-Rūmi, al-Sarī al-Raffā’ and Mutanabbī composed riddle poems of the 'narrow' kind, i.e. without the use of helpful homonyms ... Abu ’l-‘Alā’'s practise, however, tended toward the reverse: in his work 'narrow' riddles have become comparatively rare ... while homonymous riddles are quite common.
It appears that the mu‘ammā form and riddles using the numerical values of letters become popular later, from perhaps the thirteenth century.
Since early Arabic poetry often features rich, metaphorical description, and ekphrasis, there is a natural overlap in style and approach between poetry generally and riddles specifically; literary riddles are therefore often a subset of the descriptive poetic form known as wasf.
Modern attestations
Riddles have been collected by scholars throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and we can arguably 'speak of the Arabic riddle as a discrete phenomonen'. Examples of modern riddles, as categorised and selected by Chyet, are:
Abyat al-ma'ani
Abyāt al-maʿānī is a technical term related to the genre of alghāz. In a chapter on alghāz, Al-Suyuti defines the genre as follows:
There are kinds of puzzles that the Arabs aimed for and other puzzles that the scholars of language aim for, and also lines in which the Arabs did not aim for puzzlement, but they uttered them and they happened to be puzzling; these are of two kinds: Sometimes puzzlement occurs in them on account of their meaning, and most of abyāt al-maʿānī are of this type. Ibn Qutaybah compiled a good volume on this, and others compiled similar works. They called this kind [of poetry] abyāt al-maʿānī because it requires someone to ask about their meaning and they are not comprehended on first consideration. Some other times, puzzlement occurs because of utterance, construction or inflection (iʿrāb).
mu‘ammā
The first known exponent of the mu‘ammā form seems to have been the major classical poet Abu Nuwas, though other poets are also credited with inventing the form: Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (noted for his cryptography) and Ali ibn Abi Talib. The mu‘ammā is in verse, does not include an interrogatory element, and involves clues as to the letters or sounds of the word. One example of the form is a riddle on the name Aḥmad:
Influence
Arabic riddle-traditions also influenced medieval Hebrew poetry. One prominent Hebrew exponent of the form is the medieval Andalusian poet Judah Halevi, who for example wrote
(The answer is 'a pen'.)