ABSTRACT
Early Arabic attempts at elucidating the word's etymology betray a strong environmental and sociological but also literary, interpretative bias coupled with some philological credulity. The nature of pre-Islamic Arabic literary heritage being poetic, the available semantic and stylistic contexts for the earliest occurrence of such vocabulary are preserved old poems, scraps of poems, loose verses, until we reach the text of the Qurʾan—which may not in each instance be prose, yet which is not form-defined verse either. However, in Dhu al-Rummah's poem, the formal function of the camel stallion simile as a subtheme of the raḥil is at variance with the very nearly categorical observation that within the Arabic poetic canon of themes and their corresponding styles and diction there should be no such thing as a camel stallion subtheme.
