Arabic literature from its origins to 132/750

Ancient Arabic poetry used two elaborated structures that acquired considerable prestige and became recognized as classic structures of Arabic poetry: one reserved strictly for the funeral elegy, the marthiya, and the second one, the qasida (the ode) serving as the framework for all thematic developments. The remarkable development of Arabic poetry at the end of the 7^th century and the beginning of the 8^th century was accompanied by a major renewal of literary prose which took the form of a diversification of the art of rhetoric, a new definition of the epistle and the acclimatization of a borrowed genre, the fable.