“When news of al-Zubayr arrived, low bowed
The city’s wall and the humbled mountains.”

Another poet says:

“They walked as spears sway, their tips
Stirred by the passing, gentle winds.”

Another says:

“The souls’ wrongdoing turns the blessings of both
To woes, though they wander blindly, long beguiled.”

In the first verse, sūr (“wall”) is treated as feminine because it is joined in a genitive construction to al-madīna (“the city”); in the second, marr (“passing”) because it is joined to al-riyāh (“the winds”); and in the third, baghy (“wrongdoing”) because it is joined to al-nufūs (“souls”). This follows the feminine gender of the second term, although the masculine is primary and the feminine secondary. If the primary may follow the secondary, then it is all the more permissible to treat a feminine noun as masculine because it is joined in a genitive construction to a non-feminine noun: this makes the secondary follow the primary.

Another example of the first case is the poet’s saying:

“You choke on the very thing you have divulged,
As the spear’s head choked on blood.”

He treats sadr (“head”) as feminine because it is joined in a genitive construction to al-qanāh (“the spear”). One of our companions recited to me the following lines on this theme by Abū Muhammad ibn Hazm, with a chain of transmission I cannot now recall:

“Avoid a friend like mā, and beware the one
Whose tawāh is like Amr among Arab and non-Arab.
For an evil friend brings ruin; my witness is:
‘As the spear’s head choked on blood.’”

Another example is the saying of al-Nābigha:

“Until, out in the open, they sought help from al-Milh’s people,
Galloping, the knots of their girth-straps loosened.”

And the saying of Labīd:

“He moved on, urging her ahead; it was his way,
Whenever she turned aside, to drive her forward.”

Although several learned scholars have approved this approach, it is not strong. This usage is known principally from poetry, and only rare examples occur in eloquent prose, such as their saying, “Some of his fingers were lost,” with the verb treated as feminine. What lends it force here is the close connection of