of this type, for Allah says:

“And do not cooperate in sin and aggression.” [Quran 5:2]

Poetry is permissible in principle, even though most poets are not upright. Allah says:

“And the poets—the deviators follow them. Do you not see that they wander aimlessly through every valley, and that they say what they do not do? Except those who believe, do righteous deeds, and remember Allah often.” [Quran 26:224–227]

How many a poem has had verses sharper than arrows against enemies, and how many a poem has had a single line worth hundreds of dinars. It is said that there was a tribe called the Nose of the She-Camel; when you hear this name, you recoil from it. But one of the poets said of them:

A people who are the nose, while all others are the tail—
And who would equate the nose of a she-camel with its tail?

Thus he raised their standing. How many a word, or line of poetry, has elevated a nation or brought one low. Poetry therefore held an important place in the early period of Islam and thereafter. What is meant, however, is genuine poetry that stirs the emotions.

As for the unmetered verse produced by these later writers, when they proved incapable of composing the poetry of old, they said: Leave it, and bring us unmetered poetry, one hemistich of which is two lines and another of which is a single word, then call it poetry! This does not stir anyone’s emotions; indeed, when a person reads it, he finds it distasteful, and it does not move his feelings at all. Strangely enough, some people have come to regard it as good. Yet they regard it as good only because they are incapable of anything better and do not know how to produce anything like the Muʿallaqāt of the Arabs or Abu Talib’s Lāmiyyah. Ibn Kathir praised it in al-Bidāyah wa al-Nihāyah (The Beginning and the End), saying: “This is what ought to have been counted among the Muʿallaqāt, for it is an immensely great poem rhyming in lām.”