The Authenticity of the Poems ascribed to Umayya Ibn Abī al-Ṣalt

Umayya Ibn Abī al-Ṣalt is a personality of some relevance both for religious and for literary history. As for the realm of literature, the poems ascribed to him are markedly different from what else is known of Arabic poetry of the early 7th century A.D. with respect to form and content: the polythematic qaṣīda with its typical sequence of topics is missing completely; instead he deals with such subject matters as the creation of the world, the angels’ service, the deluge, the resurrection of man and so on. These latter topics, on the other hand, are not likely to be dealt with by a pre-Islamic pagan poet and, as there is no evidence at all that the Ṭāʾifī Umayya was a Jew or a Christian, ¹ one has to ask what else he could have been.