Geo-Poetic Analysis of Pre-Islamic Arabia

Objective

What was the world into which Muhammad spread Islam, and have we missed the richest source of evidence? Scholars have naturally expended great effort to understand Islam’s formative milieu in central Arabia c.600 CE, but the specifics of its society and political structures elude our grasp since the sources used to date lack the breadth of insight we need. There is, however, a vast and data-rich corpus that details the major tribes, their social structures, beliefs, territories, trade and much else besides, but it lies neglected because circumstances have not enabled scholars to profit from it. The source is pre-Islamic poetry, a corpus of tens of thousands of verses composed by central Arabians between 525-625 CE, and it is untapped because of long-standing doubts over its authenticity. But new circumstances today can at last resolve those doubts. Saudi Arabia has opened its borders to international scholarly collaboration, and the PI has been granted unprecedented permission by the Saudi Ministry of Culture to conduct fieldwork on pre-Islamic poetry in the heartlands of Islam’s genesis. The possibilities have transformative potential for understanding the poetry. By combining philological analysis of the corpus with ethnographic fieldwork in the poets’ original homelands, this project capitalises on the long survival of local toponymic traditions to re-link the poetry to the land. Reading poetry through the lens of geography, this project’s “geo-poetic” approach enables a method to verify and validate the authenticity and accuracy of pre-Islamic poetry. We will reconstruct the first empirically-grounded map of pre-Islamic Arabia’s tribes, spaces and routes, inaugurate a systematic method to extract poetry’s unique data, and pioneer dialogue between Arabic literature and the latest historical and epigraphic scholarship on Late Antique Arabia to illuminate Muhammad’s world with greater depth and insight than hitherto possible.