Praise be to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah. To proceed:
The Qur’an is the Word of Allah, revealed to His Prophet Muhammad ﷺ through the Angel Jibril (Gabriel), peace be upon him. Allah explicitly denied that His Prophet was taught poetry. He says:
“We have not taught him poetry, nor is it fitting for him. This is only a Reminder and a clear Qur’an.” [Ya-Sin 36:69]
Allah also says:
“And this is not the word of a poet. Little do you believe!” [Al-Haqqah 69:41]
Thus, Allah explicitly denies that the Qur’an is poetry or that the Prophet ﷺ was a poet.
The Arabs who were experts in language and poetry were highly knowledgeable about poetic meters and styles, yet they recognized that the Qur’an was not poetry.
Unays, the brother of Abu Dharr, may Allah be pleased with them both, was himself a poet. After hearing the Qur’an, he said:
“I compared his words with the meters of poetry, but no one could reasonably consider them poetry.”
Al-Walid ibn al-Mughirah, one of the most eloquent men of Quraysh, also acknowledged that the Qur’an was neither poetry nor soothsaying. He said:
“Indeed, there is sweetness in what he says and beauty upon it; it rises above and nothing rises above it.”
The enemies of the Prophet ﷺ were extremely eager to discredit him, and they were experts in Arabic eloquence and pre-Islamic poetry.
Had they found even a single piece of evidence that the Qur’an had been taken from the poetry of Imru’ al-Qays or anyone else, it would have been one of their strongest arguments against him and would have become widely known.
Yet nothing of this sort occurred.
Instead, they accused him of magic, soothsaying, and madness, but they were unable to prove that he had taken the Qur’an from a poet.
Many of the poetic lines circulated by skeptics are not found in reliable collections of Imru’ al-Qays’s poetry. Rather, they are fabricated verses composed by later people and then falsely attributed to him.
The fabrication and false attribution of poetry to famous poets is a well-known phenomenon in the history of Arabic literature.
Therefore, the mere existence of a verse attributed to Imru’ al-Qays does not prove that the attribution is authentic.
The Qur’an was revealed in the language of the Arabs, so naturally it shares certain words and expressions with Arabic speech because they belong to the same language.
Sharing words, however, does not mean borrowing.
What matters is the meaning, style, eloquence, and context. The distinction between the Qur’an and pre-Islamic poetry is evident to those familiar with the Arabic language.
Some of the lines they cite include:
“The Hour has drawn near and the moon has split.”
Researchers have pointed out that such lines are stylistically weak and do not resemble authentic pre-Islamic poetry. Rather, they appear to borrow from the Qur’an, not the other way around.
It is therefore more plausible that later writers took expressions from the Qur’an, turned them into lines of poetry, and falsely attributed them to Imru’ al-Qays.
The Qur’an is the Word of Allah and is not poetry, and the eloquent Arabs who lived during the time of the Prophet ﷺ recognized that it did not belong to the genre of poetry.
No Qur’anic verse has been reliably established as having been borrowed from the poetry of Imru’ al-Qays or any other poet, and many of the verses used by skeptics as evidence are fabricated or falsely attributed.
Furthermore, similarities in certain Arabic words do not demonstrate borrowing. The Qur’an was revealed in Arabic, so naturally some vocabulary will be shared with other Arabic speech.
Truth cannot be established merely through verbal similarities. Rather, the authenticity, historical transmission, attribution, and literary style of the texts must be carefully examined.
And Allah knows best.