The Architecture of Parallelism and the Construction of Meaning in Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad's Elegy to Himself

Abstract

This research involves deconstructing the poetic text from within and understanding its structure based on a central question: How was Al-Mu'tamid Ibn Abbad's poem, in which he eulogizes himself before his death, composed in terms of the parallelism structure? The poem in which Al-Mu'tamid Ibn Abbad elegized himself is considered a poem with a certain artistic structure, semantic depth, and suggestive intent built upon a sorrowful idea—namely, a person mourning himself. From this standpoint, the study sets out to uncover the poetic craftsmanship, the architecture of parallelism and structure, the hierarchy of meaning, and the poet's method of presenting all of this in his poetic text at the level of vocabulary, syntactic structure, meter, rhythm, prosody, and rhyme, across two chapters: the theoretical chapter, which includes two sections: the first section—operational and methodological framework (abstract, methodology, research questions, and study boundaries), and the second section—the conceptual framework (definition of structure and parallelism, and introduction to the poet). The second chapter is the applied chapter, in which the researcher studies the architecture of parallelism and the construction of meaning in the self-elegy composed by Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad before his death. Ultimately, this study seeks to deepen our understanding of Arabic poetic form and the aesthetic mechanisms of self-representation and lamentation.