The ancient Arabs used poetry not only to entertain themselves in the midst of their harsh life in the Arabian desert, but also to proclaim their cultural values, which were the moral-spiritual and material basis of their nomad society. Composing poetry therefore was almost a sacred rite for them. Its recitation in particular, was a main feature of certain ritual customs held annually during the aswaq (sg. suq , festival) season. The most common themes touched upon were the attributes of which a tribe may have been particularly proud, such as its victories and generosity to the vanquished, the bravery of its heroes in battle and on hard journeys, the beauty of its women and of nature, the genealogy of the tribe, and prayers to the Almighty. / Through verse the ancient Arabs expressed how they conceived of their deities, whether, idols representing various gods and goddesses, or Allah. These verses make it clear that Allah alone was not represented by any idol, allowing us to infer that He was regarded as superior to other deities. This thesis, therefore, attempts to show how the ancient Arabs expressed through poetry their belief in Allah as the Lord of Gods, which was the true nature of their ancestral belief, the h&dotbelow;anifiyya, the religion of their forefathers Abraham and Ishmael.

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The dissertation investigates the medieval poetics of the amatory prelude beginning with the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah – or The Mantle Ode – by the poet Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294). Poets expanded the trope of the abandoned ruins to include urban space; incorporated sacred beloveds as poetic beloveds; and foregrounded the self-conscious authorial voice within the prelude. The first chapter locates the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah within the larger Arabic poetic legacy that extends to the ancient pre-Islamic period. The second chapter considers the discursive formation of sacred poetic beloveds, such as the Prophet Muhammad, incorporated among the repertoire of the amatory prelude’s classical and ancient poetic beloveds. The third chapter analyzes the authorial voice and role of the lyric “I” in the preludes of Shaʻbān al-Āthārī (d. 1425) and ʻĀʼishah al-Bāʻūniyyah (d. 1517) who pay homage to their literary predecessors including Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235), al-Būṣīrī, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 1349) by mirroring their metrical composition. The fourth chapter interrogates the intersection of poetics and literary criticism in the medieval Arabic-Islamic devotional invocation that is the hallmark of medieval prolegomena. The preludes within the genre of instructive poems on rhetoric known as the badīʿiyyāt encapsulated literary criticism’s definition of “ingenious beginnings.” Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 1362) demonstrates this intersection in his prose introduction to al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmiyat al-ʿAjam. I conclude by returning to modern iterations of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burdah in literary texts in order to further challenge and raise questions about the discontinuity of medieval Arabic poetics in modern culture.