A Literary Exposition of the Sources of Arabic Proverbs

Abstract

Proverbs excited the interest of the learned right from the inception of Arabic literature; historians and philologists vied with one another in collecting and explaining them. Indeed, to their works this generation owe most of the legendary and historical materials. This paper, therefore, examines the main sources of Arabic proverbs vis-a-vis the Qur’an, the hadith of the Prophet (PHOH) and the gamut of Arabic literature, with a view to establishing their literary worth and values. It argues that familiarity with the background of the proverbial expressions is very essential to comprehension since a number of them are so tied to the stories and tales behind them.