The Qur’an, as it entered Arabia, did not fall upon a silent world. It arrived in a soundscape already structured by poetry: measured speech, breath disciplined into meter, voices trained to carry praise, blame, and memory. To hear an early Sufi repeat a divine Name in rhythmic unison with others is to hear the faint after-echo of that older art, now pointed in a different direction.

This essay explores how early Sufi dhikr—remembrance of God—inherits and quietly recodes structures from pre-Islamic poetic culture. The question is not whether Sufis “borrowed” from poetry in an external sense, but how a deeply embedded civic practice of breath, rhythm, and public voice could be turned into a technology of presence and ethical accountability before God.

Breath, Meter, and the Pre-Islamic Civic Ear

Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, especially the qasida, was not literature in the modern, text-bound sense. It was a performed architecture of sound. Verses were memorized, improvised, and delivered before audiences who knew the meters and expected the conventional turns of theme. The throat, chest, and breath were trained instruments, and meter (ʿarūd) was a way of disciplining that instrument according to socially recognized forms.

The classic tripartite structure of the qasida—nasib (the elegiac prelude at the abandoned campsite), rahil (the journey), and madih (praise and boasting)—is often described as a thematic sequence, but it is also an ordering of affect and attention. The listener is led from personal loss and nostalgia, through motion and hardship, toward the culminating act of praise that reaffirms tribal bonds and honor.

This structure trains the civic ear. It teaches a community how to move, emotionally and cognitively, through a shared sonic ritual:

• The nasib lingers over absence and ruins: vocalized loss, controlled by meter, keeps grief articulate and socially legible.
• The rahil animates movement, animals, landscape, and danger: it gives rhythm to endurance and resourcefulness.
• The madih culminates in praise of the tribe, chief, or self: voice secures honor, remembers generosity and courage, and binds the group through narrative.

Breath here is not merely physiological. It is civic. A poet’s measured breathing carries the tribe’s memory, honor, and moral codes. The oral-formulaic nature of much pre-Islamic verse—the reliance on recurring phrases, stock epithets, and well-known imagery—makes speech itself a kind of communal archive, lodged in tongues and lungs rather than in pages.

When Islam appears, and later when Sufi circles develop, this is the cultural ground on which they speak about recitation, remembrance, and the disciplined tongue.

From Tribal Praise to Tawḥīd: Redirecting the Object of Voice

The Qur’an both inhabits and critiques this poetic universe. It adopts measured, sonorous language, but it persistently redirects praise and awe from human patrons and tribal heroes to the singular God. It also repositions the ethical stakes of speech: the tongue becomes an object of judgment.

Early Islamic teachings on speech are unambiguous. The Prophet is reported to have said, “Whoever believes in God and the Last Day, let him speak good or remain silent.” The Qur’an warns that not a word is uttered without a watcher ready to record it (Q 50:18). The tongue, previously the primary weapon in the economy of boasting and lampooning, becomes a site of moral danger and spiritual practice.

This brings the pre-Islamic civic art into a new frame. The power of the tongue is acknowledged, but its field of reference changes. Praise is re-coded: where the madih section of a qasida secures the honor of a chieftain and his lineage, Qur’anic rhetoric relentlessly channels exaltation towards God alone. The very vocabulary of pre-Islamic praise—generosity (karam), protection (jiwār), nobility (sharaf)—is retained but elevated to describe divine attributes.

Early dhikr emerges in this setting. At its most basic Qur’anic sense, dhikr is remembrance: recalling God, His signs, and the moral stakes of human action. But remembrance in an oral society is not a quiet interior memo. It is voiced, recited, shared. The prophetic model of communal Qur’an recitation, the call to prayer (adhan), and formulaic praises such as subḥān Allāh, al-ḥamdu li-llāh, Allāhu akbar all inhabit the same register as poetic formulas: portable verbal units, meant to be repeated, internalized, and deployed in patterned ways.

What shifts is the social function of those patterns. Instead of defending tribal prestige, they articulate and reinforce a community under God, bound by shared invocation rather than lineage alone.

Dhikr as Re-Coded Qasida: Absence, Journey, and Praise

By the time we meet early Sufi circles in Basra and Baghdad, dhikr has begun to crystallize into more focused practices: repetition of divine Names, Qur’anic phrases, or formulaic prayers; sometimes in unison, sometimes individually but within a group setting. While these practices vary, many share structural resonances with the qasida’s affective progression.

Consider the movement from absence to presence that marks both the nasib and Sufi discourse around ghafla (heedlessness) and ḥuḍūr (presence). The pre-Islamic poet stands at the deserted campsite, weeping over what has passed; the ruins become a trigger for remembering lost love and departed companions. Early Sufi texts similarly begin from the recognition of distance from God, lamenting the self’s forgetfulness. But where the poet’s lament tends to circle around a temporal loss, the Sufi diagnosis targets a spiritual amnesia: the heart’s abandonment of its primordial covenant with God.

Dhikr aims to reverse that amnesia. The repeated Names or phrases function as sonic “ruins” that the heart visits again and again, each utterance an attempt to re-inhabit the forgotten nearness of God. The breath that carries these repetitions is trained not only to sustain melody or meter but to sustain attention, to tether a wandering consciousness.

The rahil section of the qasida—its journey—also finds a muted analogue. Early Sufis often describe the wayfarer (sālik) who traverses “stations” (maqāmāt) and undergoes “states” (aḥwāl). This journey is inward, but it is narrated with the same sense of hardship, endurance, and changing landscapes that fill the pre-Islamic travelogues. Dhikr becomes a kind of sonic tread: each repetition is a step; the rhythm of the breath marks the pace of an invisible journey.

Finally, the culmination in praise. In the qasida, praise of the tribal chief is both art and contract. It secures reciprocal obligations: the poet memorializes generosity and courage; the patron provides gifts and protection. In Sufi dhikr, the culminating praise is directed toward God alone, who neither needs nor is changed by it. The economy shifts from mutual obligation to unilateral dependence. Yet the form—verbal exaltation, enumeration of qualities, celebration of generosity and mercy—shadows the older civic praise.

In this sense, dhikr can be read as a re-coded qasida, stripped of tribal partisanship and reoriented toward tawḥīd (divine oneness). The underlying skills—control of breath, sensitivity to rhythm, emotional arc—are continuous. What changes is the addressee and the ethical horizon.

Breath and Rhythm as Discipline

Both the early grammarians and prosodists of Arabic—figures like al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad in ʿarūd—treat language as something that unfolds in time through the modulation of breath. Meter is essentially a patterning of long and short syllables, which correlate with how the mouth and chest release air. To master meter is to master one’s breath within culturally sanctioned rhythms.

Sufi dhikr inherits this premise. Even when Sufi handbooks are not explicitly prosodic, they treat the breath as a moral and spiritual vector. Some early authors describe the ideal of not breathing out except with remembrance, or counting breaths as one might count verses. There are discussions of dhikr khafī (silent or hidden remembrance), where the tongue may be still but the breath carries an inward repetition of the divine Name.

The difference from poetic recitation lies in orientation, not in the basic techniques. Where the poet’s regulated breath serves an audience and secures a reputation, the Sufi’s regulated breath is a training in self-surveillance before God. The ear that matters most is no longer the tribe’s but the divine witness. The pause, the intake, the steady exhalation of Name after Name—these micro-gestures are lived as a continuous exposure to that witness.

In this context, early Sufi discussions of sobriety (saḥw) and intoxication (sukr) gain a technical resonance. Intoxication is not merely emotional excess but a kind of overflow of remembrance that outpaces conventional self-control; sobriety is the re-established ability to remain present, measured, and ethically responsive even in intense states. Both occur in and through the medium of the voice and breath. The disciplined rhythmic repetition of dhikr can lead to altered states, but the acknowledged ideal in much early Sunni Sufism is to let those currents pass through a body trained in composure.

Collective Chanting and Proto-Samāʿ

Collective recitation is not unique to Sufism; it was integral to the pre-Islamic poetic gathering. A skilled reciter could elicit audible responses, echoes, and refrains from his audience. The performance was social, and its effects—rousing courage, consoling grief, inciting rivalry—were understood as collective.

Early Sufi circles in places like Basra and Baghdad also adopted collective modes of dhikr. Reports describe groups who gathered to repeat certain Qur’anic verses, to chant liturgical formulas, or to listen to sung poetry that evoked divine love and longing. These practices, later theorized under the rubric of samāʿ (audition), emerge in a continuum with older Arab habits of listening to recited verse together.

Yet the civic function changes. Instead of consolidating tribal identity, these gatherings rehearse a shared vulnerability before God. The rhythm and resonance of many voices repeating the same Names generate a soundscape where individual egos are, at least temporarily, de-centered. The techniques of unison, call-and-response, or escalating tempo—familiar in pre-Islamic milieus of war songs and panegyrics—are repurposed to produce a sense of shared ḥuḍūr, a collective presence before the divine gaze.

It is important not to flatten all dhikr into one form. Some early Sufis preferred quiet, solitary repetition; others cultivated more expansive, musical gatherings. But across this diversity, the continuity with Arab sonic culture remains: the body is an instrument; breath and voice are the strings; the shared ear is part of the practice.

The Ethics of the Tongue: From Satire to Self-Accountability

In pre-Islamic society, the tongue was a weapon, especially in hijāʿ (satire). A poet could injure a rival’s honor with a few well-placed lines, and the fear of being skewered in verse had real social consequences. Speech was thus both treasured and feared, a power that had to be matched by counter-speech.

Islamic teaching reframes this dynamic as an interior warfare. The primary rival to be restrained is not another tribe but the self’s own propensity to lie, slander, or indulge in idle talk. Hadiths about the tongue emphasize restraint; Qur’anic verses conceive of speech as a trace that will be replayed and judged. Early Sufis take this seriously, developing an ethics of ṣamt (silence) and muraqabah (vigilance) over each utterance.

Within that frame, dhikr functions as a disciplined allocation of speech. Instead of leaving the tongue to its default habits—boasting, gossip, complaint—it is given a narrow field of utterance: Names, praises, supplications. The very repetitiveness of dhikr, sometimes critiqued by outsiders as mechanical, is part of its strategy. It aims to wear grooves in the habits of speech, so that what once rushed easily towards satire or self-exaltation now finds itself redirected towards remembrance.

There is an echo here of the old oral-formulaic system. Just as pre-Islamic poets drew on a repertoire of stock phrases to improvise within meter, the Sufi adept acquires a repertoire of divine formulas that can be called up in varying situations. The difference again lies in the function: the stock phrase no longer secures honor vis-à-vis rivals but grounds the self’s awareness vis-à-vis God.

Dhikr as Civic Reorientation

To call dhikr a “mystical technique” is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Historically, it is also a reconfiguration of a civic practice. The arts of breath, meter, and praise that once organized tribal memory and honor are gradually turned toward organizing a community of remembrance.

When a group of early Muslims sit together repeating, “lā ilāha illā Allāh” (there is no god but God), they are not only performing a doctrinal affirmation. They are learning to breathe together under a shared negation of all other ultimate loyalties. Their tongues, once trained in the subtleties of boasting and reproach, are drilled instead in a single, absolute phrase of allegiance. The civic stakes of sound have shifted.

Islamic literary theory (balāgha) and prosody (ʿarūd) recognize and codify many of these continuities. But Sufi practice inhabits them in a distinct way. It takes the same human capacities—breath, voice, rhythmic perception, susceptibility to collective emotion—and binds them to an ethics of presence: ḥuḍūr with God, self-scrutiny in speech, and a sobriety that can withstand both silence and ecstasy.

If pre-Islamic poetics gave Arabia a civic ear, early Sufi dhikr re-tuned that ear toward an unseen auditor. The poem became a prayer without necessarily losing its craft; the breath that once upheld tribal honor now measures the distance between heedlessness and remembrance.

How might our own inherited arts of public speech—political slogans, anthems, protest chants—be reoriented into practices that cultivate not only solidarity, but also a deeper sense of ethical presence?