TY - JOUR
AU - Monroe, James T.
AB -  ORAL COMPOSITION IN PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY* THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY The authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry is hardly a problem of recent formulation, for as early as "Abbasid times effort was expended by Arab philologists in sorting out the authentic from the forged. Although we may smile today, we can hardly refrain from applauding the objective rigor of the critic al-Jumahi for having branded as spurious those ancient Arabic poems attributed to the peoples of 'Ad and Thamad.1 The medieval Arabic tradition, in possession of far more material for study than is available to us at present, proceeded with exemplary caution and restraint in so ticklish a matter. But in 1925 a frontal attack was launched, which claimed to show that all or practically all pre-Islamic poetry had been forged in Islamic times. The call to battle was sounded simultaneously yet independently by the Egyptian scholar Taha Husain and the British Orientalist D. S. Margoliouth. The former cut the Gordian knot by the publication of his book Fi sb-sbi'r al-jähill ('On Pre-Islamic Poetry'),2 and two years later he summed up his position that the general mass of what we call 'pre-Islamic' literature had nothing to do with the pre- Islamic 
TI - Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry
JF - Journal of Arabic Literature
DO - 10.1163/157006472X00017
DA - 1972-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/brill/oral-composition-in-pre-islamic-poetry-gYbT2Oe8Lo
SP - 1
EP - 53
VL - 3
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -