@Nightey04386956 @jricole @shahanSean Poetry: absolutely. Shoemaker uses the "veda elephant in the room" to argue that the pre-islamic poetry are Abbasid era recompositions that have little to nothing to do with pre-islam. Which is just wrong.

@Nightey04386956 @jricole @shahanSean Like, for any one verse of a poem we can't really know if its preislamic if it contains nothing useful. But there are significant pieces of content that clearly are poorly understood by the collectors but make perfect sense from lir knowledge of the pre-Islamic period.

@Nightey04386956 @jricole @shahanSean There are also all kinds of grammatical constructions in the poetry which are full of rare and unusual usage (as is the quran) that really doesn't align with abbasid grammatical intuitions. So that we can be sure those lines were not recomposed in the Abbasid period.

@Nightey04386956 @jricole @shahanSean I'm curious if @azforeman has anything to say on the question of: "the oral tradition is totally reremembered/recompozed the last time it was articulated in non-literate societies" as memory studies/historian people try to uphold in light of obvious massive linguistic archaism.