I found the verses quoted below ¹. Though they contain some obvious blunders, I think it best to give them without correction. The passages marked with a line above them occur also in the Qur'an (Surah LIV., Al Qamar, 1, 29, 31, 46; Surah XCIII., Adduha', Surah XXI., Al Anbiya 96; Surah XXXVII., As Saffat, 59), except that in some of the words there is a slight difference, though the meaning is the same. It is clear therefore that there is some connexion between these lines and the similar verses of the Qur'an.

There seems good reason to doubt whether Imrau'l Qais is the author of the lines in question. They may have been borrowed from the Qur'an instead of having been inserted therein from an author who lived before Muhammad's time. On the one hand it is difficult to suppose that at any time after the establishment of Islam any one would have the daring to parody the Qur'an by taking passages from it and applying them to the subject to which these lines of poetry refer. On the other hand, it is very customary even in comparatively modern times to quote verses of the Qur'an and work them into later compositions of a philosophical or religious character, to which class, however, these Odes do not belong. It would be difficult to imagine Muhammad venturing to plagiarize from such a well-known author as Imrau'l Qais (even though, as we shall see later, he did so from less known foreign sources); though this may be in part met by supposing that, as these Odes formed no part of the Mu'allaqat they were not as generally current as poems contained in the latter collection were. The account generally given of the Mu'allaqat is that, whenever any one had Composed an especially eloquent poem, it was suspended on the wall of the Ka'bah, and that the poems in this celebrated collection owe their name, which means "The suspended Poems," to this custom. Good authorities ¹, however, deny that