Rithā'

Along with elegy proper (marthiyah, plural marāthī), rithā’ may also contain taḥrīḍ (incitement to vengeance).

[3] The subjects of the rithā’ are (almost) invariably dead male warriors (fursān) and lords (sādah), predominantly those who fell in battle.

[4] The genre is prominent in the corpus of the earliest surviving Arabic poetry; it 'provides some of the most moving examples of the poetic voice, as in the poems of al-Khansā' (d. ca.

644) for her brother, Ṣakhr, killed in tribal combat':[5] Alongside al-Khansā', major female exponents of the rithā’ poems of whose survive include the pre-Islamic Janūb Ukht ‘Amr dhī-l-Kalb, Laylā al-Akhyaliyya (d. 706 CE), and Laylā bint Ṭarīf (d. 815 CE).

'Most of the elegy composed by men, however, resembled the eulogistic qaṣīdah in general pattern'.

Rithā written in Arabic, 1863