Grounding Arabic Literary History and Literary Theory

This chapter looks upon eighth-century activity in transmission, authorship, and mentoring as being basic to theoretical and historical grounding. Ibn Sallām provides an emphasis on poetry as a combination of craft, perceptive subtlety, and informativeness. He reiterates that, for pre-Islamic society, poetry was the public register. In line with his prominent mentors, his Ranks of Champion Poets emphasizes the role of meticulous transmitters and philologists who were then bent on filtering and authenticating transmission to uncover forgeries. His attention to forgeries would soon become not only exciting material for new generations of critics and philologists, but also a basis for a tenth-century backlash aimed at ninth-century scholars who showed excessiveness in the random application of theft. Ibn Sallām’s notes on untrustworthy transmitters would become the mainstay of the accusatory discourse of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Orientalists like Margoliouth. Lyall’s response to Margoliouth’s blanket negation of ancient poetry as forgery modeled on the Qurʾān builds on logic and vast knowledge so as to demonstrate that forgery requires prior models that should have existed in pre-Islamic times.