Introduction

Oral traditions are a rich source of information, provided they are eventually written down and preserved. With the exception of (some of) the elite, people in most of the Arab world were largely illiterate until the twentieth century, and their literary traditions were oral, transmitted through storytelling, reciting or singing. Arab society has always had a plethora of vernacular traditions: poetry, epic legends, tribal histories and genealogies. Andrew Shryock (1997) explored the present-day importance of oral traditions in two tribes of Jordan, the Adwan and the Abbadi, and he found that they are (or were during the 1980s) still vital for the sense of community and the continuation of tribal loyalty, asabiyyeh.

Over time, but mostly in recent years, much of this oral heritage has been written down, sometimes by the poets and storytellers themselves, often by travellers, historiographers and anthropologists. What we know of pre-Islamic literature is limited because of its oral nature. Some of it is preserved, however, and many pre-Islamic genres persisted until the nineteenth and even twentieth century (Bailey 1991; Hoyland 2001: 211–28).