"Al Aaraaf" is thick with allusions and, because of this, is often avoided by scholars because, as writer Arthur Hobson Quinn notes, it can be "unintelligible".
The poem draws from Sura 7 (Arabic الأعراف) in the Qur'an;[REF] Poe also drew upon the Qur'an in other works, including "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" [REF].