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Episode 112, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.

There is a saying in Arabic that Ashir Dewan al-Arab, or

poetry, is the compendium of the Arabs. The adage is famous. It emphasizes not only that poetry

is central to Arab culture and history, but also that poetry contains

Arab history, too. One scholar translates the word Diwan, not as compendium, but as historical

and genealogical register. Inviting us to remember that the further back into the past

we go, the more Arabic poetry holds much of what we know about the earliest Arabs,

the tribes in which they lived, intertribal politics, and the major events that affected the peninsula during antiquity.

From pre-Islamic times onward, Arabic poetry has been a powerful repository of wisdom, history, and wonder, wherever Arabs have lived, written, and read, a bridge through time and space to the long ago and far away.

In this program, we will start at the beginning and consider the work of about 20 poets

who lived in and around the Arabian Peninsula, mostly during the 500s CE.

The corpus of pre-Islamic poetry, sometimes called Jahili poetry, that has come down to us from

late antiquity, is a marvelous body of work, with disciplined attention to rhyme and meter,

a variety and richness of literary devices like metaphor, simile, consonants, and assonance,

an encyclopedia of place names and references to the flora, fauna, and topography of the ancient

peninsula, and a variety of well-developed genres,

demonstrating that by the year 600, Arabic poetry was a refined art form that had already been around for a long time.

The story of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, however, is also a complicated one, especially for newcomers.

While the period's most famous works are still

taught to students and studied by scholars all over the Arab world, Jihili Arabic poetry was

...