There is a particular kind of theft that does not announce itself. It does not burn manuscripts or ban languages. It simply rewrites a poet until his God disappears, and hands the world a softer, saleable version of him. This is what has happened to centuries of Islamic poetry. In many ways, this poetry was not simply translated into Western languages—it was rewritten to fit Western expectations. The result has been the gradual colonisation of one of the richest literary traditions in human history. To understand how Islamic poetry was colonised, one has to look at two moments: the moment Islam shaped Arabic poetry into a canon, and the much later moment the West un-shaped that canon to make it palatable for itself.

Poetry before the canonBefore Prophet Muhammad’s (Peace Be Upon Him) arrival, poetry was the principal cultural institution of Arabia. Tribes preserved their history, honour and values through verse. Poets were public intellectuals whose words shaped collective memory. With the advent of Islam, poetry did not disappear; rather, it underwent a moral and intellectual transformation. While the Qur’an distinguished divine revelation from poetry, it did not reject poetry itself. Instead, poetry became infused with new ethical concerns, spiritual reflection and a profound consciousness of God. The frank descriptions of women’s bodies and wine that filled pre-Islamic verse became unacceptable; a poet like Labid ibn Rabia, who lived long enough to convert, simply stopped writing about what the new faith forbade. Others, like Hassan ibn Thabit, turned their pens entirely toward defending the Prophet, treating verse as a weapon as serious as the sword. Later, under the Umayyads and Abbasids, poetry became a tool of statecraft. None of this was a betrayal of poetry’s pre-Islamic soul; it was a continuation of it, reshaped by a new moral universe. The........

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