There are many other works that were well known and often cited in Arabic literary circles. I shall name only Tha'alibi (died 1037), whose _Solitaire of Time_ had many continuations by later critics, and the famous _Fihrist_ or _Index_ by the Bookseller, Ibn Ishaq (tenth century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.
Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of Chaucer in the thirteenth century, devoted a number of chapters to poetry in the introduction to his famous history.
As a specimen of poetic criticism among the Arabs and as a corrective to the general impression that ornament and not ecstasy counted in Arabic poetry, I give the following English rendering from De Slane's French translation of Khaldun's _Prolegomena_:
One of the conditions imposed in the use of this art (of ornament) is that the embellishments appear in the piece quite naturally, without the author's labor in searching for them and without his being anxious about the effect that they should produce. If they present themselves naturally, there is nothing to object to them, for not being purposely introduced, they save the subject the fault of lapsing into barbarism; but when one imposes upon himself the task of painfully seeking these embellishments, he is led to neglect the principles which rule the combination of words, which are the foundation of the discourse; this injures the principles of clearness of expression and causes the distinctness and precision which ought to characterize the discourse, to disappear; nothing then remains but the embellishments. . . . Another condition which should be observed in regard to the science of ornaments is to make a rare use of it; that the poet apply it to two or three verses of a poem; that will suffice to give elegance and luster to the entire piece. The too frequent use of embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Rashiq and others have said. . . . All that we pointed out shows that the artificial discourse (or style), when one writes it laboriously and as a task, is inferior in merit to the natural discourse, for one neglects thereby too many fundamental principles of the art of speaking well. I leave it to good taste to judge thereof.
The Arabs then regarded poetry as ecstatic utterances emanating from the unconscious, embodying an idea, and produced with little ornament. This despite their belief that poetry must use the established forms of metre and figures. It is unfortunate that even to the present day these old forms are used, while Turkish literature has only very recently been emancipated from them. Even Arabian political articles are to-day written in rhymed prose. But as Chenery said, the history of rhymed prose is the history of Arabic literature. Rhyme is natural to the Arabic language, whereas it is really foreign to the English language.