Summoning the Religious Characters in Nizar Qabbani's Poetry

The art of summoning religious characters is among important issues that has attracted the attention of the contemporary Arab poets and has been reflected in their works. Nizar Qabbani is among the poets who has made use of this art in all parts of his literary works, and has had the aim of expressing his targets via his works, as the political suffocation and social conditions of his time didn’t allow him to express his aims clearly and explicitly. The above mentioned reasons and many unmentioned ones will be considered. The paper concentrates on the quality of these characters in Qabbani's poems and explicitly explains his aims of this summoning. To achieve this aim, we have analyzed his seven-volume poetry collections. We found that Nizar employs religious characters such as prophet Muhammad, Jesus, and Imam Hussein to express hope for the future, freedom, causing revolutionary fervor, evoking a sense of patriotism and contemporary expression of human suffering.