The Issue of Pre‐Islamic Arabic Christian Poetry Revisited

ABSTRACT Is only very little Arabic Christian poetry extant from pre‐Islamic times? While distancing myself from Louis Cheikho's (1859–1927) view that almost all pre‐Islamic poets were Christians, I contend in this article that some of them indeed were. I begin by discussing the current evidence (in particular, epigraphic record) on the existence of Arabophone Christians before Islam. The documentation at hand suggests that Christianity had spread to most parts of Arabia and had an important foothold among Arabic‐speaking groups, though some were Jews and others remained ‘pagan.’ I then proceed to discuss the surviving corpus of pre‐Islamic Arabic poetry and pinpoint (often overlooked but explicit) Christian themes in it.