The earliest stratum of Arabic literature is the corpus of pre-Islamic odes — the mu'allaqat ("the hung ones", traditionally said to have hung in gold lettering on the walls of the Ka'ba) — composed orally in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula in the sixth and early seventh centuries CE. The seven canonical mu'allaqat are by Imru' al-Qais, Tarafa, Zuhayr, Labid, ‘Antara ibn Shaddad, ‘Amr ibn Kulthum, and al-Harith ibn Hilliza.
These poems, fixed in writing in the Umayyad period, established the inherited shape of the Arabic ode: the nasib (lyric lament at an abandoned campsite), the rahil (description of the journey across the desert, often featuring the camel as protagonist), and the fakhr or madih (boast or panegyric). That tripartite architecture would dominate Arabic poetry for the next thirteen hundred years.
The Qur'an, revealed in the early seventh century, is not technically literature in the Arab tradition — it sits in a category of its own, kalam Allah, the speech of God — but its rhythmic prose and cadenced parallelism have shaped the prose imagination of every Arabic writer who came after.