The Emergence of Arabic Poetry

A new literary history of Arabic poetry from 500–750 CE that includes hundreds of lines of poetry never before translated into English To interpret the Quran’s Arabic, early medieval Muslims turned to pre-Islamic poetry, a corpus that the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin called “the archive of the Arabs.” While this principle seems straightforward, pre-Islamic Arabs did not, in fact, think of themselves as either pre-Islamic or Arab. The term Arab barely appears at all in pre-Islamic poetry. The Emerge