[1]: 83 Maqṭūʿ poems are mostly of two lines, but occasionally as short as one or as many as ten; they are composed in the classical metres of Arabic prosody and are characterised by a premise-exposition-resolution structure,[1]: 17–19 frequently including play on words and double entendre.
your saliva) is like ice’; She’d say, ‘What a chilly/dull simile!’” Arabic literature has a rich tradition of pithy two-line poems; these were composed for centuries without being thought of as maqāṭīʿ, and the term maqṭūʿ seems, prior to becoming the name of a poetic form, to have meant 'metrical feet in a line of poetry'.
[1]: 17 Poets also exchanged maqāṭīʿ, whether in mutual admiration (such as al-Shihāb al-Ḥijāzī and Taqī ad-Dīn al-Badrī) or as invective (such as al-Nawājī and Ibn Ḥijjah), enabling sophisticated artistic collaborations across a series of poems.
[1]: 120–27 Later anthologists presented as important case studies of the genre by Adam Talib include Muḥammad Khalīl al-Murādī (d. 1206/1791), who took a detour from the biography of his paternal uncle Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-Murādī (d. 1142/1730) in his biographical dictionary Silk ad-durar fī aʿyān al-qarn ath-thānī ʿashar, to offer what Talib calls a 'micro-anthology' of maqāṭīʿ-poems on the juice of myrtle berries (māʾ ḥabb al-ās), almost all ending in the line Arabic: هو أحلى مِنْ ماعِ حَبِّ آﻻَسِ ('sweeter even than the juice of myrtle berries') The collection orders poems creatively to explore how poets respond to one another, and to reveal continuities and contrasts of style and metaphor.
[1]: 96–115 Meanwhile, a micro-collection of 42 maqāṭīʿ-poems from Rawḍ al-ādāb by Shihāb ad-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī al-Khazrajī (d. 875/1471) 'treats many common mujūn subjects including humiliation at the hands of a jester, pesky bugs, stubborn animals, and above all sexual matters that were considered shameful at the time: impotence, infidelity and cuckoldry, and what we now call bottoming (in male-male anal sex)'.