Early Arabic poetry (sixth to mid-eighth century) differs significantly and in many respects from the poetry of the Abbasid era (750–1258) and later times. The early poetry mirrors the worldview and concerns of pre-Islamic and early Islamic Bedouin society; by contrast, Abbasid poetry is urban and reflects the ideas and values of the elites of the Muslim empire. Another major element that distinguishes Abbasid from pre-Abbasid poetry is its rhetorical texture, that is to say, the various tropes, figures of speech and other rhetorical embellishments employed in the poems. Early Abbasid poets are generally believed to have used tropes and figures of speech more frequently than and differently from their predecessors, so that their style was perceived as novel/original (badīʿ). The Abbasid prince, litterateur and critic Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 296/908), who devoted a monograph to the “New Style” (badīʿ), recognized five figures as its most typical phenomena: the metaphor, the antithesis, the paronomasia, anticipating the rhyme-word by means of a cognate used earlier in the verse, and “dialectical [i.e. complicated] reasoning”. In his view, however, the New Style was nothing novel, since previous poets, too, used figures of speech; the only difference was that the “moderns” employed rhetorical elements consciously and more frequently. Modern scholars interpret this view as an attempt by Ibn al-Muʿtazz to legitimize the New Style.

Hussein sets out to examine how different the rhetorical texture of Abbasid from that of pre-Abbasid poetry really was. To do this, he compares two odes of almost equal length (c. 55-lines long) by two poets representative of the two periods, focusing on the rhetorical fabric of the poems: ʿAlqama al-Faḥl (d. c. 603) is one of those pre-Islamic poets known to have assiduously worked on their poems for long periods of time, with a view to achieving artistic excellence (these poets were dubbed ʿabīd al-shiʿr, “the slaves of poetry”); Bashshār b. Burd (d. 167/784), on the other hand, belongs to the forerunners of “modern” (muḥdath) poets, those who launched and cultivated the New Style. Both poems are traditional qaṣīdas, i.e. long, polythematic, monorhyme odes.

In chapter 1 (“The historical development of the Badīʿ in Classical Arabic criticism”, pp. 1–27), Hussein gives an overview of Classical Arabic works addressing issues related to rhetoric and the New Style in particular (works on grammar, Quranic exegesis, literary criticism, rhetoric and stylistics), sketching the growth of rhetorical theory to the fourteenth century. To illustrate how classical authors discussed rhetorical issues, he analyses passages from the Quranic commentary of the philologist and theologian al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144). As he points out, however, when discussing poetry, critics hardly ever considered whole poems; rather, they concentrated on isolated verses taken out of context. In chapter 2 (“Modern theories on the Badīʿ style”, pp. 28–41), he surveys the state of the art, dwelling especially on three modern leading scholars’ views on the New Style, namely Wolfhart Heinrichs, Suzanne Stetkevych and Ewald Wagner. While Heinrichs and Stetkevych saw specific tropes (a particular kind of metaphor and “dialectical reasoning”, respectively) as epitomizing the Badīʿ style, Wagner rather follows Ibn al-Muʿtazz in that he thinks the difference between pre-Abbasid and Abbasid poetry in this respect lies in the enhanced and more conscious use of rhetorical figures. Chapter 3 (“Terminology”, pp. 42–59) includes “clarifying remarks” on the main figures found in the two poems. As there is much confusion and inconsistency in the use of the terms employed by classical authors for the various rhetorical figures, these remarks are essential. Hussein explains how he himself applies the terms metonymy, simile, metaphor, analogy and loose trope, and what the various sub-categories of these figures are.

Chapters 4 and 5 (“ʿAlqama's Poem”, pp. 60–121; “Bashshār's Poem”, pp. 122–74) are verse-by-verse analyses of the two odes. The Arabic text is followed by a rather literal translation into English, which aims to spotlight the use of rhetorical figures, as well as by detailed comments on the tropes and figures employed in each verse. Chapter 6 (“The literary images in the two poems”, pp. 175–233) systematically evaluates and interprets the findings of the previous two chapters. The figures found in the two poems are discussed in groups: metonymy, simile, metaphor, analogy, loose trope. This brings out the differences in the use of rhetoric between the two poets. Hussein also discusses the frequency of occurrence of rhetorical figures in each theme/section of the polythematic ode. Chapter 7 (“Beautifying the sense and embellishing the sound”, pp. 234–51) deals with figures that primarily concern the syntactical structure of the verses and their acoustic effect (antithesis, multiple contrast, multiple balance, paronomasia/punning, derivation and repetition, echo, double rhyme). These figures are on average commoner in Bashshār's ode.

Chapter 8 (“Conclusions: The rhetorical fabric in the two poems”, pp. 252–66) draws conclusions from the previous chapters, especially chapters 6 and 7, and presents the findings in the form of four tables. What Hussein wanted to show and what his analysis and statistics prove is that pre-Abbasid poetry was not less elaborate than later poetry in terms of rhetoric. While “[t]he total number of rhetorical usages in Bashshār does not significantly exceed that in ʿAlqama”, his analysis shows that early Abbasid poetry “started ignoring two significant rhetorical elements from the pre-muḥdath poetry, namely the metonymy and the simile, slightly favouring the metaphor and the analogy”. In addition, Bashshār repeatedly uses some figures that hardly ever occur in ʿAlqama (antithesis, derivation, echo, double rhyme). The study thus vindicates Ibn al-Muʿtazz's view that pre-Abbasid poetry, too, used rhetorical ornaments extensively, even though later poets used certain tropes more often. As Hussein himself avows, to corroborate his findings one has to check them against larger corpuses of poems, but his analysis is sound, thorough and convincing. Moreover, it is the first such rigorous analysis.