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Arabic riddles

Traditional form of word-play in Arabic

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Through Muhammad

Although in 1996 the Syrian proverbs scholar Khayr al-Dīn Shamsī Bāshā published a survey of Arabic riddling, analysis of this literary form has been neglected by modern scholars, including its emergence in Arabic writing; there is also a lack of editions of important collections. A major study of grammatical and semantic riddles was, however, published in 2012, and since 2017 both legal riddles and verse riddles have enjoyed growing attention.

Terminology and genres

Riddles are known in Arabic principally as lughz (Arabic: لُغز) (pl. alghāz ألغاز), but other terms include uḥjiyya (pl. aḥājī), and ta'miya.

Lughz is a capacious term. As al-Nuwayrī (1272–1332) puts it in the chapter on alghāz and aḥājī in his Nihāyat al-Arab fī funūn al-adab:

Lughz is thought to derive from the phrase alghaza ’l-yarbū‘u wa-laghaza, which described the action of a field rat when it burrows its way first straight ahead but then veers off to the left or right in order to more successfully elude its enemies (li-yuwāriya bi-dhālika) so that it becomes, as it were, almost invisible (wa-yu‘ammiya ‘alā ṭālibihī). But in fact our language also has many other names of lughz such as mu’āyāh, ’awīṣ, ramz, muḥāgāh, abyāt al-ma’ānī, malāḥin, marmūs, ta’wīl, kināyah, ta‘rīd, ishārah, tawgīh, mu‘ammā, mumaththal. Although each of these terms is used more or less interchangeably for lughz, the very fact that there are so many of them is indicative of the varied explanations which the concept of lughz can apparently support.

This array of terms goes beyond those covered by riddle in English, into metaphor, ambiguity, and punning, indicating the fuzzy boundaries of the concept of the riddle in literary Arabic culture.

Overlap with other genres

Since early Arabic poetry often features rich, metaphorical description, and ekphrasis, there is a natural overlap in style and approach between poetry generally and riddles specifically; literary riddles are therefore often a subset of the descriptive poetic form known as waṣf. Indeed, some of the riddles included by Abū al-Maʿālī Saʿd ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥaẓīrī in his seminal, twelfth-century CE collection of riddles are verses selected from longer poems, in whose original context they are indeed metaphorical descriptions rather than riddles; likewise Abū Naṣr Aḥmad b. Ḥātim al-Bāhilī's Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī, while focusing on verses rendered enigmatic by the removal of their context, also included purposeful riddles.

To illustrate how some epigrams (maqāṭīʿ) are riddles Adam Talib contrasts the following poems. The first, from an anonymous seventeenth-century anthology, runs:

في دجاجة مشوية [من السريع]
دَجاجَةٌ صَفْراءُ مِن شَيِّها\\حَمْراءُ كالوَسْدِ مِن الوَهْجِ
كأَنًّها والجَمْرُ مِن تَحْتتِها\\أُتْرُجَّةٌ مِن فوقِ ناسَنْجِ

Translation:

On a roasted chicken (in sarīʿ metre):
A chicken that's golden from roasting
and red like a rose from the flame.
It appears, as the coals beneath it glow,
like a citron atop a bitter orange.

}}

The second is from the fifteenth-century Rawḍ al-ādāb by Shihāb ad-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī al-Khazrajī:

شهاب الدين بن الخيمي في الملعقة: [من المتقارب]
ومَهْدودةٍ كَيَدِ المُجْتَدي\\بِكَفٍّ عَلَى ساعدٍ مُسْعَدِ
تَرَى بَعْضَها في فَمِي كالِلسانِ\\وحَمْلَتُها في يَدِي كاليَدِ

Translation:

Shihāb ad-Dīn Ibn al-Khiyamī on a spoon (in mutaqārib metre):
Feeble like the hand of a beggar,
his palm laid against the arm of a fortunate man.
You see part of it in my mouth like a tongue,
while I hold the handle in my hand like a hand.

}}

In the first case, the subject of the epigram is clearly stated within the epigram itself, such that the epigram cannot be considered a riddle. In the second, however, the resolution 'depends on the reader deducing the point after the poem has been read'.

Muʿammā

The term muʿammā (literally 'blinded' or 'obscured') is sometimes used as a synonym for lughz (or to denote cryptography or codes more generally), but it can be used specifically to denote a riddle which is solved 'by combining the constituent letters of the word or name to be found'.

The muʿammā is in verse, does not include an interrogatory element, and involves clues as to the letters or sounds of the word. One example of the form is a riddle on the name Aḥmad:

awwaluhu thālithu tuffāḥatin
wa-rābi‘u ’l-tuffāḥi thānīhī
Wa-awwalu ’l-miski lahū thālithun
wa-ākhiru ’l-wardi li-bāḳihī

Translation:

Its first is the third of [the word] tuffāḥa (apple) = A;
and the fourth of [the word] tuffāḥ (apples) is its second = Ḥ;
and the first of [the word] misk (musk) is its third = M;
and the last of the word ward (roses) is the remainder of it = D

Another example, cited by Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī, has the answer 'Saʿīd'. Here, and in the transliteration that follows, short vowels are transliterated in superscript, as they are not included in the Arabic spelling:

فَاخر الترس له أول\\وثالث الدرع له آخر
وخامس الساعد ثانٍ له\\ورابع السيف له دابر

Translation:

The end of "turs" [shield] is for him the beginning / The third of "al-dir‘" [armor] is for him the end
The fifth of "al-sā‘id" [arm] is for him the second / The fourth of "al-sayf" [sword] is for him what follows

}}

The first known exponent of the muʿammā form seems to have been the major classical poet Abu Nuwas, though other poets are also credited with inventing the form: Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (noted for his cryptography) and Ali ibn Abi Talib.

It appears that the muʿammā form became popular from perhaps the thirteenth century.

Muʿammā riddles also include puzzles using the numerical values of letters.

Chronograms

A subset of the mu‘ammā is the chronogram (تأريخ, taʾrīkh), a puzzle in which the reader must add up the numerical values of the letters of a hemistich to arrive as a figure; this figure is the year of the event described in the poem. The form seems to have begun in Arabic in the thirteenth century and gained popularity from the fifteenth; as with examples of the same form in Latin, it was borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic texts using the same device, possibly via Persian. The following poem is by the pre-eminent composer in the form, Māmayah al-Rūmī (d. 1577):

وله تأريخ: مطر هلّ بعد يأس [من الرجز]
قَدْ جاءَنا صَوْمٌ جليلٌ قدرُهُ\\والحقُّ فينا قَدْ أرانا قُدْرَتَهْ
وعَمَّنا الانسانَ في تأريخِهِ\\وأَنْزلَ اللهُ عَلَيْنا رَحْمَتَهْ

Translation:

A chronogram-poem on rainfall after despair set in:
We were visited by a period of abstention of great duration
The Truth showed us his power.
And then it encompassed every human on that day (taʾrīkh)
that God rained down on us his mercy.

}}

The letters of the last hemistich have the following values:

These add up to 974 AH (1566 CE), the year of the drought which al-Rūmī was describing.

Abyāt al-maʿānī

Abyāt al-maʿānī ('verses of [ambiguous or obscure] meanings') is a technical term related to the genre of alghāz. Ordinarily, abyāt al-maʿānī are verses quoted from longer compositions in anthologies called kutub abyāt al-maʿānī ('books of abyāt al-maʿānī'), which in their original context were not especially obscure, but which are hard to interpret when taken out of context. However, kutub abyāt al-maʿānī could also include purposefully enigmatic verses. In a chapter on alghāz, Al-Suyuti defines the genre as follows:

There are kinds of puzzles that the Arabs aimed for and other puzzles that the scholars of language aim for, and also lines in which the Arabs did not aim for puzzlement, but they uttered them and they happened to be puzzling; these are of two kinds: Sometimes puzzlement occurs in them on account of their meaning, and most of abyāt al-maʿānī are of this type. Ibn Qutaybah compiled a good volume on this, and others compiled similar works. They called this kind [of poetry] abyāt al-maʿānī because it requires someone to ask about their meaning and they are not comprehended on first consideration. Some other times, puzzlement occurs because of utterance, construction or inflection (iʿrāb).

Kutub abyāt al-maʿānī include the Kitāb al-Maʿānī al-kabīr by Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), Kitāb Maʿānī al-shiʿr by al-Ushnāndānī (d. 288/901), and a Kitāb Abyāt al-maʿānī by al-Bāhilī known now only through quotations by later scholars.

There is a significant tradition of literary riddles on legal matters in Arabic. According to Matthew Keegan, 'the legal riddle operates as a fatwā in reverse. It presents an apparently counterintuitive legal ruling or legal outcome, one that might even be shocking. The solution is derived by reverse-engineering the situation in which such a fatwā or legal outcome would be correct'. He gives as an example the following riddle by Ibn Farḥūn (d. 1397):

If you said: A man who is fit to be a prayer leader but who is not fit to be a congregant?
Then I would say: He is the blind man who became deaf after learning what was necessary for him to lead prayer. It is not permissible for him to be led by a prayer leader because he would not be aware of the imām's actions unless someone alerted him to them.

Legal riddles appear to have become a major literary genre in the fourteenth century. Elias G. Saba has attributed this development to the spread of intellectual literary salons (majālis) in the Mamlūk period, which demanded the oral performance of arcane knowledge, and in turn influenced written texts. By the fourteenth century, scholars were starting to gather existing legal riddles into chapters of jurisprudential works, among them Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 1370) in an eclectic chapter of his Kitāb al-Ashbāh wa-l-Naẓāʾir.

The earliest anthologies specifically of legal riddles seem to have been composed in the fourteenth century, and the earliest known today are:

  • al-Isnawī (d. 1370), Shāfiʿī school: Ṭirāz al-Maḥāfil fī Alghāz al-Masāʾil.
  • Ibn Abī al-ʿIzz (d. 1390), Ḥanafī school: al-Tahdhīb li-Dhihn al-Labīb.
  • Ibn Farḥūn (d. 1397), Mālikī school: Durrat al-ghawwāṣ fī muḥāḍarat al-khawāṣṣ ('the pearl-diver's prize on the discourse of elites').

These show three of the four main schools of legal thought producing riddle-collections; the Ḥanbalī school, however, seems not to have participated much in legal riddling. The overlap between legal riddles and literature on distinctions seems to have been at its greatest in Mamlūk Cairo. A particularly influential example of a collection of legal riddles was ʿAbd al-Barr Ibn al-Shiḥna (d. 1515), who wrote al-Dhakhāʾir al-ashrafiyya fī alghāz al-ḥanafiyya.

The origins of the form stretch back earlier, however. According to some ḥadīth, the use of riddles to encourage thought about religious constraints in Islam goes back to the Prophet himself. The genre of legal riddling seems to have arisen partly from an interest in other intellectually challenging jurisprudential matters: ḥiyal (strategems for avoiding breaking the letter of the law) and furūq (subtle distinctions). It seems also to have drawn inspiration from literary texts: the Futyā Faqīh al-ʿArab ('The Fatwās of the Jurist of the Arabs') by Ibn Fāris (d. 1004) includes 'a series of fatwās that initially appear to be absurd and incorrect' but which can be rendered logical by invoking non-obvious meanings of the words used in the fatwās. This form was deployed soon after in the highly influential Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī of Basra (d. 1122).

Mutayyar (bird-riddles)

The eleventh-century Andalusi poet Ibn Zaydūn is associated with another riddle form, of which at least five Arabic examples survive in his work, along with a pair of Andalusi Hebrew-language poems in the same form exchanged between Abū ʿUmar ibn Māthiqa and Yehuda HaLevi (though only Yehuda's side of the exchange survives in full). In this form of riddle, the poet composes a short poem. Each letter of the alphabet is then assigned the name of a species of bird, and the poem is encoded as a list of bird-names. The poet then composes a new poem, mentioning all these bird-names in the correct order, and sends that to its recipient, frequently claiming that it is being sent by pigeon post. The name mutayyar (Arabic: مُطَيَّر) given to such riddles, usually used of cloth, means 'ornamented with designs representing birds'.

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