Riddles (Arabic) facts for kids

Riddles are historically a significant genre of Arabic literature. The Qur’an does not contain riddles as such, though it does contain conundra. But riddles are attested in early Arabic literary culture, 'scattered in old stories attributed to the pre-Islamic bedouins, in the ḥadīth and elsewhere; and collected in chapters'. Since the nineteenth century, extensive scholarly collections have also been made of riddles in oral circulation.

Although in 1996 the Syrian proverbs scholar Khayr al-Dīn Shamsī Pasha published a survey of Arabic riddling, analysis of this literary form has been neglected by modern scholars, including its emergence in Arabic writing; there is also a lack of editions of important collections. A major study of grammatical and semantic riddles was, however, published in 2012, and since 2017 legal riddles have enjoyed growing attention.

Terminology and genres

Riddles are known in Arabic principally as lughz (Arabic: لُغز) (pl. alghāz ألغاز), but other terms include uḥjiyya (pl. aḥājī), and ta'miya.

Lughz is a capacious term. As al-Nuwayrī (1272–1332) puts it in the chapter on alghāz and aḥājī in his Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab:

Lughz is thought to derive from the phrase alghaza ’l-yarbū‘u wa-laghaza, which described the action of a field rat when it burrows its way first straight ahead but then veers off to the left or right in order to more successfully elude its enemies (li-yuwāriya bi-dhālika) so that it becomes, as it were, almost invisible (wa-yu‘ammiya ‘alā ṭālibihī). But in fact our language also has many other names of lughz such as mu’āyāh, ’awīṣ, ramz, muḥāgāh, abyāt al-ma’ānī, malāḥin, marmūs, ta’wīl, kināyah, ta‘rīd, ishārah, tawgīh, mu‘ammā, mumaththal. Although each of these terms is used more or less interchangeably for lughz, the very fact that there are so many of them is indicative of the varied explanations which the concept of lughz can apparently support.

This array of terms goes beyond those covered by riddle in English, into metaphor, ambiguity, and punning, indicating the fuzzy boundaries of the concept of the riddle in literary Arabic culture.

Overlap with other genres

Since early Arabic poetry often features rich, metaphorical description, and ekphrasis, there is a natural overlap in style and approach between poetry generally and riddles specifically; literary riddles are therefore often a subset of the descriptive poetic form known as waṣf.

To illustrate how some epigrams (maqāṭīʿ) are riddles Adam Talib contrasts the following poems. The first, from an anonymous seventeenth-century anthology, runs:

The second is from the fifteenth-century Rawḍ al-ādāb by Shihāb ad-Dīn al-Ḥijāzī al-Khazrajī:

In the first case, the subject of the epigram is clearly stated within the epigram itself, such that the epigram cannot be considered a riddle. In the second, however, the resolution 'depends on the reader deducing the point after the poem has been read'.

Muʿammā

The term muʿammā (literally 'blinded' or 'obscured') is sometimes used as a synonym for lughz (or to denote cryptography or codes more generally), but it can be used specifically to denote a riddle which is solved 'by combining the constituent letters of the word or name to be found'.

The muʿammā is in verse, does not include an interrogatory element, and involves clues as to the letters or sounds of the word. One example of the form is a riddle on the name Aḥmad:

Another example, cited by Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī, has the answer 'S^aʿīd'. Here, and in the transliteration that follows, short vowels are transliterated in superscript, as they are not included in the Arabic spelling:

The first known exponent of the muʿammā form seems to have been the major classical poet Abu Nuwas, though other poets are also credited with inventing the form: Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (noted for his cryptography) and Ali ibn Abi Talib.

It appears that the muʿammā form became popular from perhaps the thirteenth century.

Muʿammā riddles also include puzzles using the numerical values of letters.

Chronograms

A subset of the mu‘ammā is the chronogram (تأريخ, taʾrīkh), a puzzle in which the reader must add up the numerical values of the letters of a hemistich to arrive as a figure; this figure is the year of the event described in the poem. The form seems to have begun in Arabic in the thirteenth century and gained popularity from the fifteenth; as with examples of the same form in Latin, it was borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic texts using the same device, possibly via Persian. The following poem is by the pre-eminent composer in the form, Māmayah al-Rūmī (d. 1577):

The letters of the last hemistich have the following values:

These add up to 974 AH (1566 CE), the year of the drought which al-Rūmī was describing.

Abyat al-ma'ani

Abyāt al-maʿānī is a technical term related to the genre of alghāz. In a chapter on alghāz, Al-Suyuti defines the genre as follows:

There are kinds of puzzles that the Arabs aimed for and other puzzles that the scholars of language aim for, and also lines in which the Arabs did not aim for puzzlement, but they uttered them and they happened to be puzzling; these are of two kinds: Sometimes puzzlement occurs in them on account of their meaning, and most of abyāt al-maʿānī are of this type. Ibn Qutaybah compiled a good volume on this, and others compiled similar works. They called this kind [of poetry] abyāt al-maʿānī because it requires someone to ask about their meaning and they are not comprehended on first consideration. Some other times, puzzlement occurs because of utterance, construction or inflection (iʿrāb).

Legal riddles (alghāz fiqhīya)

There is a significant tradition of literary riddles on legal matters in Arabic. According to Matthew Keegan, 'the legal riddle operates as a fatwā in reverse. It presents an apparently counterintuitive legal ruling or legal outcome, one that might even be shocking. The solution is derived by reverse-engineering the situation in which such a fatwā or legal outcome would be correct'. He gives as an example the following riddle by Ibn Farḥūn (d. 1397):

If you said: A man who is fit to be a prayer leader but who is not fit to be a congregant?
Then I would say: He is the blind man who became deaf after learning what was necessary for him to lead prayer. It is not permissible for him to be led by a prayer leader because he would not be aware of the imām’s actions unless someone alerted him to them.

Legal riddles appear to have become a major literary genre in the fourteenth century. Elias G. Saba has attributed this development to the spread of intellectual literary salons (majālis) in the Mamlūk period, which demanded the oral performance of arcane knowledge, and in turn influenced written texts. By the fourteenth century, scholars were starting to gather existing legal riddles into chapters of jurisprudential works, among them Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 1370) in an eclectic chapter of his Kitāb al-Ashbāh wa-l-Naẓāʾir.

The earliest anthologies specifically of legal riddles seem to have been composed in the fourteenth century, and the erliest known today are:

• al-Isnawī (d. 1370), Shāfiʿī school: Ṭirāz al-Maḥāfil fī Alghāz al-Masāʾil.
• Ibn Abī al-ʿIzz (d. 1390), Ḥanafī school: al-Tahdhīb li-Dhihn al-Labīb.
• Ibn Farḥūn (d. 1397), Mālikī school: Durrat al-ghawwāṣ fī muḥāḍarat al-khawāṣṣ ('the pearl-diver's prize on the discourse of elites').

These show three of the four main schools of legal thought producing riddle-collections; the Ḥanbalī school, however, seems not to have participated much in legal riddling. The overlap between legal riddles and literature on distinctions seems to have been at its greatest in Mamlūk Cairo. A particularly influential example of a collection of legal riddles was ʿAbd al-Barr Ibn al-Shiḥna (d. 1515), who wrote al-Dhakhāʾir al-ashrafiyya fī alghāz al-ḥanafiyya.

The origins of the form stretch back earlier, however. According to some ḥadīth, the use of riddles to encourage thought about religious constraints in Islam goes back to the Prophet himself. The genre of legal riddling seems to have arisen partly from an interest in other intellectually challenging jurisprudential matters: ḥiyal (strategems for avoiding breaking the letter of the law) and furūq (subtle distinctions). It seems also to have drawn inspiration from literary texts: the Futyā Faqīh al-ʿArab ('The Fatwās of the Jurist of the Arabs') by Ibn Fāris (d. 1004) includes 'a series of fatwās that initially appear to be absurd and incorrect' but which can be rendered logical by invoking non-obvious meanings of the words used in the fatwās. This form was deployed soon after in the highly influential Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī of Basra (d. 1122).

Folk riddles

Riddles have been collected by scholars throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and we can arguably 'speak of the Arabic riddle as a discrete phenomenon'. Examples of modern riddles, as categorised and selected by Chyet, are:

• Nonoppositional
  • Literal: Werqa ‘ala werqa, ma hiya? (l-beṣla) [leaf upon leaf, what is she? (an onion)] (Morocco)
  • Metaphorical: Madīnatun ḥamrā’, ǧidrānuhā ḩaḍrā’, miftāḥuḥa ḥadīd, wa-sukkānuhā ‘abīd (il-baṭṭīḩ) [a red city, its walls are green, its key is iron, and its inhabitants are black slaves (watermelon)] (Palestine)
  • Solution included in the question: Ḩiyār ismo w-aḩḍar ǧismo, Allāh yihdīk ‘alā smo (il-ḩiyār) ['Ḩiyār {='cucumber'} is its name and green its body, may God lead you to its name [=to what it is] (cucumber)] (Palestine)
• Oppositional
  • Antithetical contradictive (only one of two descriptive elements can be true): Kebīra kēf el-fīl, u-tenṣarr fī mendīl (nāmūsīya) [big as an elephant, and folds up into a handkerchief (mosquito net)] (Libya)
  • Privational contradictive (second descriptive element denies a characteristic of the first descriptive element): Yemšī blā rās, u-yeqtel blā rṣāṣ (en-nher) [goes without a head, and kills without lead (a river)] (Algeria)
    • Inverse privational contradictive: Gaz l-wad ‘ala ržel (‘okkaz) [crossed the river on one leg (walking stick/cane)] (Morocco)
  • Causal contradictive (things don't add up as expected; a time dimension is involved): Ḩlug eš bāb, kber u-šāb, u-māt eš bāb (el-gamra) [was born a youth, grew old and white, and died a youth (the moon)] (Tunisia)
• Contrastive (a pair of binary, non-oppositional complements contrasted with each other): mekkēn fī kakar, akkān dā ġāb, dāk ḥaḍar (iš-šams wil-gamar) [two kings on a throne, if one is absent, the other is present (the sun and the moon)] (Sudan)
• Compound (with multiple descriptive elements, falling into different categories from those just listed): Šē yākul min ġēr fumm, in akal ‘āš, w-in širib māt (in-nār) [a thing which eats without a mouth, if it eats it lives, and if it drinks it dies (fire)] (Egypt)

Collections and indices

• Giacobetti, A., Recueil d’enigmes arabes populaires (Algiers 1916)
• Hillelson, S., 'Arabic Proverbs, Sayings, Riddles and Popular Beliefs', Sudan Notes and Records, 4.2 (1921), 76–86
• Ruoff, Erich (ed. and trans.), Arabische Rätsel, gesammelt, übersetzt und erläutert: ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde Palästinas (Laupp, 1933).
• Littmann, Enno (ed.), Morgenländische Spruchweisheit: Arabische Sprichwörter und Rätsel. Aus mündlicher Überlieferung gesammelt und übtertragen, Morgenland. Darstellungen aus Geschichte und Kultur des Ostens, 29 (Leipzig, 1937)
• Quemeneur, J., Enigmes tunisiennes (Tunis 1937)
• Arberry, A. J., A Maltese Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 1–37 (riddles alongside proverbs, folktales, etc., in English translation)
• Ibn Azzuz, M. and Rodolfo Gil, 'Coleccion de adivinanzas marroquies', Boletín de la Asociación Española de Orientalistas, 14 (1978), 187-204
• Dubus, André, 'Énigmes tunisiennes', IBLA, 53 no. 170 (1992), 235-74; 54 no. 171 (1993), 73-99
• El-Shamy, Hasan M., Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification, 2 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)
• Heath, Jeffrey, Hassaniya Arabic (Mali): Poetic and Ethnographic Texts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), pp. 186–87
• Mohamed-Baba, Ahmed-Salem Ould, 'Estudio de algunas expresiones fijas: las adivinanzas, acertijos y enigmas en Hassaniyya', Estudios de dialectología norteafricana y andalusí, 8 (2004), 135-147
• Mohamed Baba, Ahmed Salem Ould, 'Tradición oral ḥassāní: el léxico nómada de las adivinanzas' [Ḥassāní oral tradition: the nomadic lexicon of the riddles], Anaquel de Estudios Árabes, 27 (2016), 143-50 .

Influence

Arabic riddle-traditions also influenced medieval Hebrew poetry. One prominent Hebrew exponent of the form is the medieval Andalusian poet Judah Halevi, who for example wrote

(The answer is 'a pen'.)