The Image of Child in Pre-Islamic Poetry

This research revolves around the image of the child in pre-Islamic poetry and consisted of an introduction, a preface, three chapters and a conclusion. In the introduction the researcher talked about the reasons behind choosing this study and it purpose. In the preface, she addressed the childhood term, its meaning, as well as its stages in ancient and modern ages. The first chapter has been divided into two parts. In the first part, the researcher discussed the issue of the child in ancient human intellect and the status it occupied among the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Greek and the Romans. The researcher has found that those people have looked at the child as being holy, and believed that the gods are the ones who create the child and bring them to life; they support him in every step of his life. They revered the child so much so that they made their gods in the form of children. In the second part of the first chapter, the researcher presented the image of the child in the pre-Islamic intellect and has found no difference between their view of the child and that of the nations that preceded them. In the second chapter, the researcher addressed the presence of the child in the pre-Islamic poetry and divided the chapter into six parts. In the first part, the researcher presented the moral characteristics of the child such as generosity, bravery, sovereignty…etc. In the second part the child’s physical characteristics have been discussed including height, skin color, size, teeth color….etc. While in the third part the researcher mentioned the child’s games such as the Mikhraq (a sort of a napkin used by children as a game), toy top, ball…etc. In the fourth part, the researcher discussed the relationship between child and war, and how the latter affected the childhood world. In the fifth part, the researcher established a link between child and love and how poets used childhood as a means to express their feelings and emotions because the childhood world is more pure and honest than the others. In the last part, the researcher addressed the methods that Arabs use to raise the child and how they cared about this matter. The third chapter addressed the image of the child in the pre-Islamic poetry and has been divided into four parts. The first part discussed the language of childhood poetry, while the second one addressed music in the childhood poetry. The third part was dedicated to the discussion of the impact of the child in forming the artistic image; the researcher also mentioned the elements upon which the child’s artistic image is based which include movement, sound and color. The fourth part addressed the different religious, psychological and social dimensions of the child’s image in pre-Islamic poetry. The researcher ended the study with a conclusion in which she presented the main results and included a list of the major references and resources which she used in the study arranged alphabetically.