Vision and Structure in Pre-Islamic Prose: Literature of wills as a Model

Abstract

Arabic prose heritage has always been the subject of attention of researchers and scholars, especially prose of the Abbasid eras, although lesser to poetry all over its history. Although pre-Islamic prose is comparatively smaller in survived amounts than poetry, it stores the thought patterns, life attitudes, and moral values of the Arabs at that time. Prose was closely connected to social life as it was the literary records of the aspects of this social life. It was a good pointer of the intellectual life too especially in the case of the literature of wills which was related to other prose forms like orations and proverbs. Although each of these prose forms has its special identity as literary genres, they all maintain the same prose form and share the same ends, which are not totally literary as much as expressions of life and its demands. This study seeks to identify the thematic and structural characteristics of the literature of w It falls into three sections: the first deals with wills between art and morality, the second is about the subject-matter of wills,, notably, the ethical function, and the third section deals with the aesthetic aspects of this prose form like aesthetic structure and artistic style.