The authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry is hardly a problem of recent formulation, for as early as 'Abbasid times effort was expended by Arab philologists in sorting out the authentic from the forged. In 1925 a frontal attack was launched, which claimed to show that all or practically all pre-Islamic poetry had been forged in Islamic times. The call to battle was sounded simultaneously yet independently by the Egyptian scholar Taha Husain and the British Orientalist D. S. Margoliouth. The former cut the Gordian knot by the publication of his book Fi sh-shi'r al-jdhili ('On Pre-Islamic Poetry'),2 and two years later he summed up his position that the general mass of what we call 'pre-Islamic' literature had nothing to do with the pre- Islamic period, but was simply fabricated after the coming of Islam...