In discussions of orality and oral transmission, poetry, like other textual material we have dealt with, is a body of literature supposedly oral in its initial transmission (but here, over a longer period), to which similar rules would apply as do to the larger category of materials transmitted from the pre-Islamic and Paleo-Muslim period. Although the use of lines of authentication in poetry is meagre if compared to the prolixity of isnād, it might be reassuring to some scholars that lines of poetic transmission were not absent as isnād, nor were the lines of authentication of transmission a negligible subject for transmitters of poetry, philologists and compilers of poetical corpora who, like others, practiced takhrīj. But in this field as well, there has generally been an attitude of wholesale a priori scepticism towards the authenticity of the Arabic poetical corpus, one that will have required, as in the case of narrative Arabic sources, a prodigious effort of falsification – not only the falsification of single strophes or entire poems, but the invention of “a whole history of literature.”

Like historical narratives, poetry had been received in many redactions, and the question of authenticity was set in much the same terms, including the indication that falsification might be applied to both written and oral material. The process of collecting poetry (and, correlatively, the Arabic lexicon) was motivated by antiquarian and literary interest. ‘Abbāsid philological verification of and commentary upon this material parallels in many ways Alexandrian scholarship on Homer. In modern scholarship, the impulse to the investigation of the authenticity of poetry was given by the exemplariness, for philology, of work on the Homeric Question, initially associated with the name of Friedrich August Wolf, who sought by source and tradition criticism to unpick the question of Homeric authorship through the tangle of antique philology, leading up to establishing the question of authenticity. Nevertheless, we need to remind ourselves that the chronological gap obscuring authorship is mitigated in the case of Arabic poetry by greater historical proximity and ethnographic continuity. Recent work on the history of the Homeric texts, the vast length of time between the Archaic Age and Athenian and, later, the Alexandrian establishment of the Homeric koiné notwithstanding, displays a level of technical philological and conceptual sophistication from which scholars of Arabic Schrifttum could learn much.