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'.