Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry

Last updated: October 27th, 2023 at 3:02 pm

Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is a commonly used source to reconstruct the history of pre-Islamic Arabia.

Its use as a primary source has been controversial, though.  Skepticism about the use of ancient Arabic poetry as a primary source started as soon as this poetry was translated into English.¹  There were all sorts of questions.  Were Mu’allaqat and Mufaddaliyat poetry collections, written in 8^th century CE, really composed in pre-Islamic times?  Can poetry register a political or social event truthfully? ²  Some scholars started answering the questions.³  After a thorough debate, spanning over decades,  many scholars committed unequivocally to the use of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as a primary source.⁴  Hoyland, a renowned expert on pre-Islamic Arabian history writing in 2001, is fully confidant that the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was mainly composed in 5^th and 6^th centuries and can be used as a primary source of pre-Islamic history of Arabia.⁵

Lately, archaeological finds are helping in settling the debate to the side of use of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as a primary source.  A rock inscription discovered at ‘En ‘Avadat in present day Israel, and guessed to have been written not later than 150 CE, contains two lines of rudimentary Arabic poetry.⁶  Arabs had started composing poetry many centuries before advent of Islam and they had been refining it.  Not only this, they had devised means to transmit poetry orally without any distortions.  Ibn Qutayba (d. 889 CE) notes a poem and attributes it to Tubba’, the king of Yemen in pre-Islamic times.⁷  Now archaeologists have discovered this poem inscribed on a rock face near Mecca in modern Saudi Arabia.  The inscriber has taken pains to write down the year of inscription and that is 717 CE. ⁸  It simply means that what Ibn Qutayba picked out of oral traditions in circulation, was not a creation of his time.  The oral tradition existed at least one and three quarter centuries before the writings of Ibn Qutaybah.  Hoyland comments that this discovery gives ‘a little push to the idea that the mass of the material that we have ostensibly going back to pre-Islamic times, in particular a vast wealth of poetry, does genuinely belong to that period’.⁹

End notes

1. For an early skepticism see:  C. J. Lyall, “Ancient Arabian Poetry as a Source of Historical information”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 46 (Jul. 1914): 61 – 73.
2. For such questions from vigorous voices see: Taha Husayn, Fi’l-shi’r al-Jhili, Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1925 (in Arabic).  AND D. Margoliouth, “The Origins of Arabic Poetry”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 87, no. 3 (1925): 417 – 449.  AND Jonathan A.C. Brown, “The Social Context of Pre-Islamic Poetry:  Poetic Imaginary and Social Reality in the Mu’allaqat,” Arab Studies Quarterly 25, no.3 (2003): 29-50.
3. For the earliest example of a scholar answering such questions see: ‘Umar Farrūkh, Das Bild des Frūhislam in der arabischen Dichtung von der Higra bis zum tode ‘Umars: 1 – 23 DH./622 – 644 N. Ch, Leipzig: Pries, 1937. (This is a PhD thesis written in German).
4. For one such work see:  Suzanne P. Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual.  Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.  AND M. Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Peotry: Its Character and Implications, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978): 12 – 14. For the development and progress of Arabic poetry through the ages see:  Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005? 1998.  For a case study how historical authenticity of early Islamic poetry can be cross checked against textual sources see:  Gert Brog, “Poetry as a Source for the History of Early Islam: The case of (al-) Abbās b. Mirdās”, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 15 (2015): 137 – 163.
5. Robert G. Hoyland. Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (New York: Routledge, 2001), 251.
6. Avraham Negev, J. Naveh and S. Shaked “Obodas The God,” Israel Exploration Journal, 36, no. 1/2 (1986): 56 – 60 AND James A. Bellamy, “Arabic Verses from The First/Second Century: The Inscription Of ‘En ‘Avdat”, Journal of Semitic Studies, 35, (Spring 1990): 73 – 79.
7. Sa’d bin ‘Abd al ‘Azīz al-Rāshid, Kitābāt Islāmiyya Min Makkah al-Mukarramah, (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Malik Fahd al-Wataniyya, 1995): 60 – 66.
8. Muḥammad bin ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Rāshad al-Thenyian, Nuqūsh al Qarn al-Awwal al-Mu’rakhat fī Al-Mamlakah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Saudia, (Riyadh, 2015, Riyad): 91 – 92 Plate 13 (b).
9. R. Hoyland, “Epigraphy and the Linguistic Background to the Qur’an” in The Qur’an in its Historic Context, ed. G. S. Reynolds, (London: Routledge, 2008), 65.