Thievery Disputation in Literary Theory This paper looks upon several disputations throughout classical and medieval Arabic literature as pivotal intersections in a literary and historical formative process. What could be traced as response to gossip in pre-Islamic and early Islamic odes was bound to gain momentum in a growing corpus of written treatises, books, and interventions that focus on sariqat. Whether incited or provoked by a sincere philological concern or driven by malice or tribal there had been a growing semantic field over time that enlisted the contributions of the most recognized authorities. Although the term sariqah recurs quite often in books and epistles written in support of a specific poet and method or another, it has never got established as the right one for an intertextual space that rather demonstrates ongoing processes of memorization, reading, contrafaction, and anthologizing. As a contentious space, this semantic field is bound to spill into other fields that are delineated as a cultural marketplace that witnesses both dependency and freedom. Apart from the commissioned works to indict a specific poet from a pretentious philological robustness, there are many contending or compromising ones that express ongoing affiliations to one camp, like the ancients, or another like the modernists. The paper intends to show this raging competitiveness as central to marketplace economies where cultural production is another term for a displayed merchandise. The analogy is not farfetched, as the most famous market in pre-Islamic times was also the place for poets to recite and display their Odes, and also to reject accusations of thievery or lack of originality in poetic meanings. Formative processes can also be traced in the lexical field as lexicographers for over five centuries contributed to the buildup of terminology around the term sariqah or thievery. Critics, rhetoricians, grammarians, and certainly poets happened to be active participants in this field, driven and motivated by one factor and anxiety or another, and thus exhilarating disputation as a rigorous dynamic in a literary history and theory.