ABSTRACT
Old Arabic poetry is dominated by the figure of simile. This feature has been observed by experts on Arabic literature, but they failed to deduce the poetic consequences of this fact. Some scholars hold that the dominance of the simile and the relative semantic independence of the verse in a poem, closely related to the simile as a stylistic dominant, is a consequence of the inability of pre-Islamic Arabians to perceive a close relation between accidences and content transcended beyond the material world.
