This paper will explore the reception of the form of lampoon poetry known as naqaid of the eighth-century Umayyad poets Jarir and al-Farazdaq. Much scholarship on this poetry focuses on literal interpretation of the text by extracting details from it that corroborate historical events or reveal “facts.” This approach reads the poetry literally, mining it for the information it contains. When scholarship does take philological aspects of this poetry into consideration, it often does so in order to demonstrate its inferiority to pre-Islamic naqaid, focusing on the decline of the genre over time. This paper proposes a new reading of Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqaid. Rather than attempting to uncover historical facts or to recapture Umayyad-era Basra (Iraq—whence Jarir and al-Farazdaq), or even to shed light on the poets themselves, I propose to examine the reception of their naqaid by those who came later. I will show that subsequent historians and copyists preserved the naqaid selectively in accordance with their own ideologies. Specifically, I will explore how Abbasid historians preserved certain portions of the naqaid in order to present the Umayyad dynasty in an unfavorable light. The result of this approach is a text that has been re-interpreted and used as a vehicle of another era’s prejudices and ideologies. The naqaid as we currently know them are more a result of a later reconfiguration than a factual account of an impossible-to-know “original.” I divide the paper into two parts. In the first I will conduct a close reading of selections from Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqaid to identify specific elements that suggest a re-interpretation of the text by later generations. In the second part I will examine akhbar (“reports,” “stories”) sources that comment on some aspect of Jarir and al-Farazdaq’s naqaid, including the poetry itself, the venue of its performance, and the relationship of the audience to it. These akhbar showcase the new interpretation of the naqaid. This paper is significant not only for the new reading it brings to the naqaid, but also for framing the Abbasids’ role in shaping thought about Jarir and al-Farazdaq in particular, and the Umayyads in general, which in some cases persists to this day.