Although the blind poet and litterateur of 10/11th century CE Syria, Ab? al-'Al?' al-Ma'arrM, is well known for pessimism and for ironic play with the religious and "philosophical" ideas of his day, particularly in his programatically double-rhymed Luzemiyymt ("Compulsories"), the ironic distance achieved in the poem that opens "Some day people will ask 'What is Quraysh and what is Meccar'" is nevertheless quite extraordinary. This paper argues that the source of this irreverent irony lies at the intersection of the two major components of the Ara-Islamic traidtion, the Qasida (poetry) with its roots in the Arab autochthony of the Jehiliyyah, and the Qur'hn with its roots in the Arab, but also broader Judaic, Christian and Near Eastern (including Persian) traditions. An intriguing anecdote recorded by al-Qiftn points toward this intersection. He tells us that when told of a Latin inscription discovered in the excavations of 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan for the foundation of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, al-Ma'arra recited this opening line (or a variant of it). In the Islamic and Qurvanic view of history, ancient peoples, such as 'wd and Thamyd, had perished as victims of divine wrath for straying from proper piety and devotion to Allrh. Islam, as the true and final religion, and its believers, the Muslims, were to supercede the failed peoples, religions, and civilizations of the past. Thus, from an Islamic perspective, the discovery of ancient ruins should reinforce the message of the triumph of the last and true religion and its community. Al-Ma'arrn's chilling response is altogether at odds with this. He does not celebrate the destruction of past peoples and civilizations as clear signs of the eternal triumph of Islam, but rather as forebodings of the inevitable demise of his own Islamic civilization as well. This paper will argue that the source of this perception lies in that most essential and conventional motif of the Arabic qasida tradition, the stopping at the ruins (al-wuqaf 'alt al-ailnl). Altogether at odds with the Qur?nic interpretation of extinct peoples of the past, the motif of the poet stopping at the ruined abode of his beloved expresses the poet's realization of his own mortality. He does not see in the ruined abode the divine destruction of the wicked "other," but rather the adumbration of his--and mankind's--own ineluctable fate.