Imagining and Reimagining the Arabs: Conclusions

By unfastening Arab identity from conventional cultural stereotypes, Bedouinism and ancient pre-Islamic Arabian bloodlines, this book sought to reveal the complexities and changing nature of historic Arab identity. The book was intended as an invitation to begin rethinking Arabness afresh, and by highlighting the shortcomings inherent in the static, monolithic manner in which historical Arab communities have often been discussed, our analysis sought to reappraise historic Arabness as an ethnicity, tracking its evolution and contextualising its development with close attention to the sociopolitical and ‘cultural stuff’ factors that sustain ethnogenesis....

Arabness from the Qur’an to an Ethnos

Pursuing the references to ‘Arabs’ in the Islamic-era poetry examined in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the processes by which Arab identity developed as a new form of community in early Islam. Analysis begins with the Qur’an, the first extant text to use the word ʿarabī to describe itself. It is revealed that the Qur’an’s Arabness is not a marker of ethnic identity, but it does mark key shifts which were amplified by new social processes following the Muslim Conquests. Employing models of ethnogenesis to interpret early Islam, this chapter demonstrates how the spread of Muslim communities and the centralisation of the Caliphate fostered an environment conducive to rethinking identities. The new social processes prompted early Muslims to experiment with various terms to define their community, and ‘Arab’ gradually gained traction during the later Umayyad period. The rise of Arabness as an ethnic identity thus closely intertwines with the maturation of Muslim community, but conflicting social pressures and imperfect communal cohesion meant that Umayyad-era Arab identity developed very unevenly in this formative period.

Pre-Islamic ‘Arabless-ness’: Arabian Identities

Developing Chapter 1’s findings on pre-Islamic Arabian society, this chapter proposes a new origin point for Arab communal consciousness. Chapter 2 seeks the first groups of people who called themselves ‘Arabs’ and explores how those people can be identified from historical records. We begin by appraising the evidence about Arabic language: when and where did it evolve and to what extent does Arabic-language use delineate Arab communal identity? We evaluate the surprising paucity of pre-Islamic Arabic records, and next turn to pre-Islamic poetry to examine its citation of the word ‘Arab’ alongside the senses of community the poets articulate. Pre-Islamic poetic reference to ‘Arabs’ is also almost non-existent, whereas alternative forms of communal identity are clearly expressed, in particular, a people known as Maʿadd. Marshalling theories of ethnogenesis to interpret the evidence, this chapter sheds new light on pre-Islamic Arabia’s fragmented communal boundaries. Chapter 2 closes with early Islamic-era poetry where poets first begin to call themselves ‘Arabs’, suggesting that Arab ethnogenesis was a result, not a cause of the rise of Islam.

Introduction

Arab identity is an intriguing conundrum. It is commonly presumed that Arabs originated as a distinct and essentially homogenous community of ancient Arabian Bedouin who were separate from other populations of the Middle East, yet modern Arab identity is multifarious and resists all scholarly attempts to generalise about Arabness. It thus seems that pre-modern Arabs are too simplistically conceptualised around monolithic stereotypes of Arabian nomadism, and the idea of ancient Arab identity is accordingly in need of new, theoretically grounded and critical scrutiny. The task inspires this book, and the Introduction sets the scene by discussing the problems of interpreting Arab history, and describes the theoretical models that can help resolve these problems. Ancient Arabs have not hitherto been studied as an ethnic group, and the Introduction discusses how anthropological theories of ethnogenesis enable fresh interpretation of textual and archaeological evidence to reorient our understanding of both Arab origins and the rise of Islam.

Philologists, ‘Bedouinisation’ and the ‘Archetypal Arab’ after the Mid-Third/Ninth Century

How was Arab identity imagined in a world where most Middle Eastern populations stopped calling themselves Arabs? After the mid-ninth century AD, descriptions of Arabs proliferated in Arabic literature, whilst Arab identity as a social/political asset was in decline. In this period, the key spokesmen for the idea of Arabness were philologists who fundamentally reworked impressions of Arab identity as part of new theories about the Arabic language. Diachronic survey of the development of Arabic philology from the late eighth to eleventh centuries reveals shifting intentions and values which standardised the Arabic language via a unique process that focused on the idealisation of Bedouin as paragons of the ‘original Arabs’. Studying Arabic philology within its socio-historical contexts reveals how the grammarians transcended language study and forged paradigmatic changes to the ways Arab history and culture are interpreted. The novel association of Arab with Bedouin became a popular theme in Arabic literature from the early tenth century, and the weight of the resultant writings comprehensively transformed Arabness from the former expression of urban/Muslim elite identity in early Islam to a desert/Bedouin pre-Islamic identity which has cast a long shadow on the notion of Arab identity to the present.

Interpreting Arabs: Defining their Name and Constructing their Family

Chapter 4 investigates the changing faces of Arabness in early Islam. As an identity, Arabness was a fluid intellectual construct, and because Arab communal consciousness developed unevenly in early Islam, Muslims faced manifold challenges when they tried to define the word ‘Arab’ and delineate the boundaries of Arab community. The uneven parameters of Arabness and the debates over the identity’s meaning manifest in this chapter’s findings from the evolving dictionary definitions of ʿarabī, the disputes over membership to the Arab community, and the protracted process by which Muslims constructed Arab genealogy by fusing disparate pre-Islamic groups into one consolidated Arab family tree. By the early tenth century AD, Arabic literature articulates a largely cohesive sense of Arab identity and genealogy traced through a succession of ancient prophets, Judaic and Arabian: this chapter questions how that archetype of Arabness emerged by undertaking comprehensive analysis of the earlier disagreements which accompanied the processes of imagining Arabness in Islam’s first centuries.

Imagining Ancient Arabs: Sources and Controversies

The study of Arab identity begins with the foundational question: when did people begin to call themselves Arabs and form an Arab community? The process of Arab community formation is much debated, and this chapter re-evaluates theories of Arab origins via critical survey of the ancient epigraphic and literary evidence about Arabia before Islam. The wealth of texts, spanning ancient Assyrian records, Greek/Latin literature and South Arabian inscriptions, give intriguing indications about pre-Islamic Arabian societies alongside enigmatic references to ‘Arab’-sounding words, but these sources have not yet been interrogated via theories of ethnicity and identity. Chapter 1 revisits the sources through a critical theoretical lens to offer a fresh interpretation of Arabian identities before Islam and a resolution to difficulties scholars face when trying to identify ‘Arabs’ in ancient history. The findings prompt us to question long-held theories of Arab origins and invite a wholesale rethink of Arabs and Arabia before Islam.

Arabs as a People and Arabness as an Idea: 750–900 CE

The early Abbasid Caliphate marked a climax of Arab ethnogenesis. Urbanization, the centralisation of power, and the mixing of populations in cosmopolitan Iraq cultivated fertile ground for Muslim elites to rally around the banner of Arab identity as a means to maintain their status. This chapter engages models of ethnogenesis to investigate the consolidation of Arab identity under the first Abbasids and provides fresh insight into the significance of the putative Arab-Persian friction (al-shuʿūbiyya). Akin to the formation of ethnic identities elsewhere in the world, the consolidation of an Abbasid-Iraqi Arab identity prompted writers to imagine new origins for their community, forgetting the Arabs’ early Muslim-era ethnogenesis by transplanting their roots into much more ancient pre-Islamic Arabian pasts. This chapter investigates salient aspects of inventing Arab pre-Islamic origins which established paradigms about Arabness that persist to the present day. The chapter closes with investigation of sweeping societal changes in Iraq after AD 800, when a remarkable retreat from Arabness began: Muslims shifted from identifying themselves as ‘Arabs’, fundamentally altering the definition of Arabness in the process.