Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry

This poetry largely originated in Najd (then a region east of the Hijaz and up to present-day Iraq), with a minority coming from the Hejaz.

[3] Pre-Islamic poetry constitutes a major source for classical Arabic language both in grammar and vocabulary, and as a record of the political and cultural life of the time in which it was created.

The poets themselves did not write down their works: instead, it was orally transmitted and eventually codified into poetry collections by authors in later periods, beginning in the eighth century.

[5] Scholarship in poetry (al-ʿilm biʾl shiʿr) emerged as a distinct disciple around the end of the eighth century, and most of its participants were mawāli (offspring of non-Arab converts to Islam) engaged in the royal courts of the empire.

[9] Pre-Islamic Arabic and Greek poetry share some similar themes, such as the inescapability of death and the notion of self-immortalization through the accomplishment of heroic deeds in battle.

[10] Recent scholarship has identified that pre-Islamic poetry, to a degree, experienced Hellenization[11] and that it offers strong evidence for the integration of Arabia into the broader Mediterranean culture during Late Antiquity.

The central genres or motifs of pre-Islamic poetry included:[13]lamentation before the ruins of the camps (al-bukāʾ ʿalā l-aṭlāl), erotic prelude (nasīb), description of the poet’s journey (raḥīl), description of animals and nature (waṣf), panegyric (madīḥ), self-exaltation (fakhr), invectives (hijāʾ), and eulogies (rithāʾ)These motifs could be combined to produce well-known genres of pre-Islamic poetry, one example being the qasida.

The themes of Jahili poetry emphasize a heroic value system where the enjoyment of wine, amorous adventures, and fighting came together, as can be seen in the muʿallaqa of Ṭarafa:[15]If you can’t avert from me the fate that surely awaits me / then pray leave me to hasten it on with what money I’ve got.

/ But for three things, that are the joy of a young fellow / I assure you I wouldn’t care when my deathbed visitors arrive— / first, to forestall my charming critics with a good swig of crimson wine / that foams when the water is mingled in; / second, to wheel at the call of the beleaguered a curved-shanked steed / streaking like the wolf of the thicket you’ve startled lapping the water; / and third, to curtail the day of showers, such an admirable season / dallying with a ripe wench under the pole-propped tent, / her anklets and her bracelets seemingly hung on the boughs / of a pliant, unriven gum-tree or a castor-shrub.According to Pamela Klasova, the values expressed should not be seen as "values in themselves".

[18] In pre-Islamic Arabian society, the poets (al-shuʿarāʾ) were charged with the task of perpetuating the legacy of their tribe and transmitting knowledge of the past.

[19] This practice was thought to last until the Umayyad era, when some poets disassociated from their tribal framework and entered the royal court of the caliph.

It was also in this time that the authority of poets as conveyers of the past began to deteriorate in favor of other types of experts, such as hadith transmitters.

Most sources identify his father as Ḥujr ibn al-Ḥārith, who became the king of the Kinda tribe in 528 AD, shortly after Imru' was born.

According to his work, he adopted a lifestyle of poetry, wine, and women; he strayed from the conventional morality of the court which led to his expulsion.

The Arabian/Arab antiquities collector Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 976) also has scattered reference to eleven Jewish poets in his Kitāb al-agānī ("Book of Songs").

For example, he says Al-Samaw’al ibn ‘Ādiyā was a native of Tayma (in northwestern Arabia) whose father had ties to the Ghassanids.

Asides from Samaw'al, the only other Jewish poet to earn some renown was al-Rabī‘ ibn Abī l-Ḥuqayq, chief of the Naḍir tribe.

[30] The poet Al-Aswad ibn Ya'fur references Jewish written material, when he wrote: "the letters of two Jews from Taymāʾ or the people of Madyan on their parchments which they recite with accomplishment".

[40] According to Nathaniel Miller, the early corpus of surviving poetry underwent a number of semi-independent lines or strains of transmission: musical, exegetical, historiographical, lexicographical, and philological.

Hejazi poetry was especially utilized for musical purposes, as shown by the Kitab al-Aghani of Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 972).

Only 13 (10%) are from the southern Hejaz, with 2 from the Quraysh (who were ultimately not a poetically significant group in this period, though their status as-such would be inflated later[43]).

Both authors wrote numerous other works across a wide range of subjects, including lexicography, phonetics, Arabian topography, and more.

[56][57] The archaic ethnonym Ma'add, despite its absence past the Umayyad period (replaced by the word "Arab") is widespread in the poetry and semantically overlaps with uses of the same term in pre-Islamic inscriptions.

Likewise, pre-Islamic poetry centers the Hajj on Allah, as does the Quran, but unlike later Arabic histories which suggest it was incorporated into the rituals of a polytheistic pantheon.

[62] Criteria have been proposed to distinguish authentic from inauthentic material: lines attributed to pre-Islamic poetry are suspect if they use or depend on overtly Quranic or Islamic phraseology, or if they are recruited by the authors that record them as support for specific political or exegetical positions.

Likewise, heightened confidence might be placed on poems or lines which cluster with other poems or lines absent any suspicious material, lack anachronisms, and comport with beliefs held by pre-Islamic Arabs, especially when those are the views attributed by the Quran to its opponents but differ from the types of views attributed to Muhammad's opponents in later Arabic histories.

The chief difference between the two is instead in the moral values that they elevate for humanity across time: whereas this is belief (imān) for the Quran, it is manly virtue (murūwa) and tribalistic chauvinism in pre-Islamic poetry.

[71] Another similarity raised between the two, is that some pre-Islamic Arabian odes, like the Quranic punishment narratives, begin with evocations of ruined or destroyed historical sites.

Both Umayya and the Quran treat similar prominent topics in the domains of creation, eschatology, and episodes of biblical prophetology.

He then cites a line of poetry from Al-Nabigha to again offer an etymological derivation of the word for "surah" independent of Syriac or other non-Arabic languages.