The Flash Poem and the Haiku Poem in Arab and Japanese: A Comparative Study of Roots, Beginnings and Artistic Sources

LITERATURE

This paper studies the relationship between the Arabic Flash poem and the Japanese Haiku poem from a comparative perspective based on the principle of influence between civilizations and cultures, and the relationship between similar poetic forms in Arabic and Japanese literature, both in form and content, in an effort to avoid falling victim to the limitations of our own judgment and to guard against reading the literature of others in light of our understanding of our own heritage. In this way, we can avoid finding false similarities between our literature and that of others. The comparison will be based on the concept of modernism that has cast its shadows on both literatures with different results due to cultural, historical and religious particularity of both the Arabs and the Japanese. Although Arabs have known the Haiku poem for a relatively long time, they did not know the roots of the Japanese language or the history of Japanese poetry. For this reason, they failed to recognize, in depth, the historical context of Haiku poetry and, consequently, their attempts to produce Arabic Haiku poems were unsuccessful. Consequently, the comparison will not attempt to identify similarities; and will instead address the process of modernism in both literatures. Since poetry is not separable from the public mindset, our study will address the aesthetic essence of the Flash poem and the Haiku poem. The study aims to trace the development of the Flash and Haiku poetry and the state in which both have settled in the minds of their respective audiences. The study relies on the righteous values of Islam which provide for the nation to avoid being isolated from others. Islam has made intercommunication between nations a cultural requirement. It made the ties of civilization part of the tools necessary for the continuous building of culture, literature and even Man himself, relying on the concept of the unity of creation and truth and the multiplicity and diversity of human civilizations.

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