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

Abstract 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 ar-gues 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 persis-tent terminological ambiguity between rubāʿī and dūbayt, the instability of its assimila-tion into the Khalīlian metrical system, and its broader conceptual reconfiguration across linguistic and literary contexts. Rather than a simple instance of formal bor-rowing, the quatrain emerges as a mobile poetic structure circulating across a multi-lingual 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, in-vites a reconsideration of premodern literary entanglements beyond modern sys-tem-based models of world literature. Keywords: Arabic literature; Persian literature; robāʿī/rubāʿī; multilingualism; Ar-ab-Islamic literary world; literary ontology; comparative poetics