The emergence of Nathaniel Miller's book

Nathaniel Miller wrote The Emergence of Arabic Poetry to counter Margoliouth 1925, to defend (some) "preIslamic" / "jâhil" poetry. The book follows Wansbrough in calling the genre unIslamic, on account "preIslamic" assumes (ironically) Margoliouth that all of it was composed in praeparatio for the coming Prophet. Even the Muslims should shun the term "preIslamic". (Some Muslims would in fact invent such work, most-notably - to Ibn Warraq anyway - as ascribed to Umayya. But not all the unIslamic poetry reads like ps-Umayya.)

For Miller, classical Arabic poetry starts in the northeastern Arabian highland called “Najd” – in Riyadh, for Saudis. The Arabs came to prefer the tripart qasîda genre. That genre is (mostly) absent from the Hijaz before Hassan (and Ka’b b. Zuhayr and Umayya) pp. 12, 84. Eventually p. 158 must note: Qasîda itself is artificial; so asks, why this form at all? Such couldn’t exist in the Hijaz without a patron, p. 86. Even in pro-Roman Jâbiya (tent city? p. 70) the qâsida arrived after the 584 dissolution of the monarchy p. 71, 302 n5: unless Nâbigha, pp. 83-4, is he who brought it there.

On this basis pp. 74-7 a qasîda to the eastern king al-Mundhir (d. AD 554) is raised as authentic. Also authentic will be extraMeccan references to hajj with details as do not appear in the Islamic hajj nor in the Islamic memory of the pagan Meccan hajj; and Hijazi references to a Meccan hajj where the poet swears by the sacrifice instead of by the God to Whom is sacrificed. With such poems permitted, likewise are permitted many more in that style. Thus, Wansbrough is vindicated.

I have so far read Miller up to chapter 6. Hijazi poetry exists; for Miller, the best western exemplar is the diwân of the Hudhayl tribe, which Miller sees as a reaction to the (greater, and in Islam better-regarded) Iraqi corpus. The poet Abû Jundab plays the same role for this book p. 135 as Umayya did for Spengler and Huart.

To get to that summary, one must wade through poor editing, such as repetitions - such as al-Sukkarî's complaint p. 86 then p. 201. Against p. 70 and unlike phantom Jâbiya, al-Hîra is just Kûfa which site does have archaeologic support, where possible to excavate. Nâbigha - Miller says - was a poet of Ghassân who did qasida; but we are also told that qasîda came to that region only after Ghassân's dissolution p. 71 vs. 83-4. The text introduces Ma‘add before we get support of whether it existed p. 47; consistently the text proffers terms like "Ghassânid" and "Lakhmid" before, hey, the neoGhassân of Late Antiquity was a mere poetic fiction p.73. Bipart qasîda is noted pp. 84-5; up to now p. 11 had led to qasîda as defined as tripart – so here is where we need to explain what a qasîda is, nasib and all; not at p. 75. Then I went to the index which lacks Jâbiya entirely, and p. 11 on qasîda. Abû Dhuayb is noted as Sâ'ida's râwî p. 197; this needs noting much earlier, like p. 88. Mecca in the 570s p. 52 is “urban”; but per p. 85, Mecca barely existed then. A glaring omission comes where discussing 'Awf's poem #35, where pp. 269-70 does a full commentary on ll. 6f. ... after the earlier text (p. 188) was somehow unaware of ll. 4-5 with its comment on the Qurashi hajj (read it instead in Peter Webb um, twice). One shudders to imagine the draught which beta-reader Philip Wood encountered.

On to philology, p.54 flips between Roman and Semitic terms for various cities. The linguistic evidence in Qurân brought p. 52 is incoherent: it claims mostly south Semitic only but it turns out overshadowed by NW Semitic (ie. mostly Aramaic). The page's claim of Iranian as "very rare" in the Qurân is amusing given p. 37 which records two Iranian lexemes; I suppose it depends where you look, like Q. 55-56. I feel like the substantive-adjective discussion at the “counterpoetics” pp. 152-3 could have been noted earlier where are the (“Najdi”) poetics; ditto such constructs as dhû-hashif p. 157.

As far as I can judge, most mistakes are clustered early. From ch. 3f the book translates text and argues therefrom; 'Awf excepted, both the translations and the extrapolations, to me, seem fair. I am left with nitpicks – for instance, kârim / karîm might not mean generous p. 123, nor honorable; although the poem is about a “widow’s mite” – so, giving honour to others is a good middle-ground. Also p. 145 I might delay the Arabic parenthesis to the end of the verse. We don't need "the Bechdel test" in the main text p. 239; this can go to a footnote. Ibn Qays al-Ruqayyât is 'Ubayd Allâh not "Ibn 'Ubayd Allâh" as indexed; and why is he "Ibn Qays" in the text and not "al-Ruqayyât" like al-Farazdaq?

Given all that, I would defer a decision on the Abû Jundab / sûrat al-Kafirûn synopsis p. 136; p. 137 rather than “proto-Qurânic” I prefer paraQurânic .