Medieval Arabs had manuscripts of many ancient Greek texts, which were translated into Arabic when there was a demand for them  Medieval Arab philosophers were very interested in Aristotle' s Poetics, an interest that evidently was not shared by medieval Arab poets, because a poet interested in the Poetics would certainly have wanted to read Homer, to whose epics Aristotle frequently refers
But Homer was not translated into Arabic until modern times
A number of medieval Arab translators possessed manuscripts of the Homeric epics in their original Greek.