Al-Khansa' is one of the most respected Arab poetesses of Jahiliyya. Upon converting, at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, she succeeded in adapting to a new value system and gained poetic stature as a new Muslim poetess, earning even the Prophet's support for her laments. Poets who made this transition are called mukhadram and few have prospered under the two systems like al-Khansa'. Because of her success as a mukhadram poetess, her image has been appropriated as the ideal Muslima activist, to the extent that Hamas publishes a journal entitled Al-Khansa' with the goal of recruiting female suicide bombers. Yet the elegies of Al-Khansa' do not abandon the pagan, rather they fuse the pagan with the Islamic. In effect, her work and legacy complicates the very idea of conversion. In this paper, I will explore the omission, selection, evolution, reproduction and reception of her poetry to illustrate the political motivations that led to the representation of Al-Khansa' as the ideal Muslima. Then, I will examine the rhetorical devices of repetition, use of religious epithets, and pagan references in three of her most widely circulated elegies to illustrate how they serve the function of redeeming her family, her tribe, and the pagan values of the Jahiliyya. I will use Suzanne Stetkevych's work on women's elegies, where she argues that the function of elegy was to fulfill a social duty to incite the men folk of the tribe. Using this theory, I will illustrate how the elegies of Al-Khansa'in face-to-face performance shaped perceptions of masculinity and created a sphere of power through speech instead of violence. Speech rivaled the sword as a performance, or as a speech act. I will show that the poetry of Al-Khansa' was future conscious because the lament of her bygone brothers gives her sons the incentive to martyr themselves in the future. I will argue that this was a deliberate political move to both glorify the bygone era while at the same time earn respect as a martyr-by-proxy in the new world order by inciting her sons to die in the name of Islam. Furthermore, memorializing her kin through elegy served to memorialize the poetess herself for enduring their loss. This paper offers a new performance-based approach to mukhadram poetry, which will complicate our understanding of the transition from Jahiliyya to Islam.