What is "tawil"

Ṭawīl (, literally 'long'), or al-Ṭawīl , is a compound meter used in classical Arabic poetry.

It comprises distichs (bayt) of two 'lines' (in Arabic usually written side by side, with a space dividing them, the first being called the sadr (صدر, literally "chest") and the other the ʿajuz (عجز, literally "belly"). Its basic form is as follows (the letter L representing a long syllable, S representing a short syllable, and X representing a syllable that can be short or long):

S L X | S L L L | S L X | S L S L | S L X | S L L L | S L X | S L S L |

This form can be exemplified through the traditional mnemonic

The final syllable of every distich rhymes throughout the whole poem; a long poem might comprise a hundred distichs. In Classical verse, each distich is a complete syntactic unit.

Ṭawīl was one of the most popular metres in early classical Arabic poetry, comprising over half the surviving corpus of pre-Islamic poetry. One early exponent was Imru' al-Qais, whose Mu‘allaqāt is in the metre. Its famous opening distich runs:

Stay—Let us weep at the remembrance of our beloved, at the sight of the station where her tent was raised, by the edge of yon bending sands between Dahul and Haumel.

Ṭawīl is often used alongside another meter called basit .

Tawil may refer to:

• Adel Tawil (born 1978), German singer, songwriter and producer
• Helga Tawil-Souri (born 1969), Palestinian American media scholar and documentary film-maker
• Issam Al Tawil (born 1989), Syrian tennis player
• Joseph Tawil (1913-1999), archbishop, Melkite Greek Catholic eparch for the United States, teacher and theologian.
• Macarius IV Tawil (or Taouil), Patriarch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church from 1813 to 1815.
• Rosarita Tawil, beauty pageant, elected Miss Lebanon
• Suha Tawil or Suha Arafat, widow of former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat