ibn Hajjāj” had been celebrated in a woman’s song. He had the young man’s hair cut, but still found him handsome, so he banished him to Basra, saying, “No man whom women celebrate in song shall remain here with me.” How, then, would ‘Umar have reacted had he seen someone singing such metrical verses about beardless youths, amid widespread wickedness, openly committed indecencies, and so little enjoining of right and forbidding of wrong? Such people oppose Allah, His Messenger, and His religion. They invite people to what Allah has forbidden, turn them away from what Allah has commanded, and bar them from Allah’s path, seeking to make it crooked.

“The third consideration” is that this metrical speech is corrupt, both in its individual words and in its composition. They have altered and distorted the speech of the Arabs with expressions such as “mā‘ū, badaw, ‘adaw,” and others like them, which hearts and ears reject, and which repel sound minds and natural dispositions.

As for its “composition,” it does not conform to Arabic metres. It is neither poetry nor an example of any of its sixteen metres, nor does it belong to the forms of rhymed prose, epistles, or oratory. It is well known that “learning and teaching Arabic” is a communal obligation. The early generations used to discipline their children for grammatical errors. We are therefore commanded, either by way of obligation or recommendation, to preserve the rules of Arabic and correct speech that departs from them. This preserves our means of understanding the Book and the Sunnah and of following the Arabs in their manner of expression.

Even leaving people to persist in their grammatical errors would be a deficiency and a fault. What, then, of people who take sound Arabic speech and well-formed metres and corrupt them with such words and rhythms, spoiling the language and replacing pure Arabic with forms of gibberish babbled only by brazen, inarticulate foreigners?