[1][2] Arale is the son of Aw Diiriye Guled Warsame Guutaale, a famed poet who participated in the Silsilada Xaydha serial poems and who founded the town of Gashamo.
[3][4] Arale discovered that the classical Somali genres of Geerar, Gabay, Jiifto and Hees, were not to be scanned by tones or stress patterns like the prosodic systems of the Greek and Arabic poetry.
The Mora is properly defined as a unit on the line of poetry which is the temporal duration of a syllable containing a vowel.
His discoveries revolutionized Somali studies and numerous other scholars such as John William Johnson and Francesco Antinucci built on and revised his theories.
[7] Around the same time poet Gaariye, a friend of Arale, independently made the same discovery.