SUFI POETRY IN SOMALI

VIII

Formal Characteristics of Sufi Poetry

in Somali

Since Somali Sufis both use and compose poetry in Classical

Arabic, one might expect that they would be influenced by

the methods of versification and scansion prevalent in
that language when they use their mother tongue as their
poetic medium. This however does not happen at all, and

with one minor exception, the Sufi poetry in Somali is

totally free from such influence. Instead, it has

exactly the same formal features as the highly developed

secular poetry in Somali. Like the secular poets; the

Sufi poets use the alliterative technique the rules .of

which are identical with that of early Germanic verse such

as Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse: consonants alliterate with

identical consonants, all vowels are regarded as alliterative

with each other, and there is a ban on the use of constantly

recurrent words such as conjun~tions for the purpose 6f

alliteration. Unlike its early Germanic counterpart

Somali verse normally sustains the same alliteration

throughout the whole poem. Thus a poem composed of 150

lines, with two hemistichs each, must contain 300 alliter-

ative word·s. In some Sufi poems this rule is sometimes relaxed

and the alliterative sound changes in every two or four

lines, a feature which is sometimes found in the light

genres of secular poetry (see Johnson 1974). Such relax-

ation of the rules of alliteration is particularly common