Orientalists and the Claim of Literary Plagiarism in the Quran

Western scholars of the Qurʾān have posited many origins and sources for the Holy Qurʾān, including pre-Islamic poetry. Among these, the most controversial are the poems of two pre-Islamic poets of the ‘age of ignorance’, Imruʾ al-Qays and Umayyah ibn Abī al-Ṣalt, which are claimed to have influenced the thoughts of the Prophet (s) and the formation of the text of the Holy Qurʾān. However, a study of the chains of transmission and the text of these poems show that such a claim is baseless because of the false attribution of the poems to their supposed authors, their weakness in structure, and their incompatibility with the social and cultural conditions of the pre-Islamic Arabs.