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DescriptionInvestigating the core questions about Arab identity and history, this book tackles the time-honoured stereotypes that depict Arabs as ancient Arabian Bedouin, and reveals the stories to be a myth: tales told by Muslims to recreate the past to explain the meaning of Islam and its origins.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsNote on the TextIntroductionPart 1: The Rise of Arab Communities1. The Rise of Arab CommunitiesI. Arabs and pre-Islamic Textual TraditionsII. Arabs in Arabia: ethnogenesis, interpretations and problemsIII. An Arabness pretence: pre-Islamic 'Arab'-cognates reconsidered2. Pre-Islamic 'Arabless-ness': Arabian IdentitiesI. The Arabic Language: a signpost to Arabness?II. The search for Arabs in pre-Islamic poetryIII. Contextualising the 'Arabless' Poetry: ethnic boundaries in pre-Islamic ArabiaIV. The rise of 'Arab' poetryV. Transition from 'Ma'add' to 'Arab': case study of Dhu QarVI. Pre-Islamic Arabian identity: conclusions3. Arabness from the Qur'an to an ethnosI. 'Arab': an ethnonym resurrected?II. The Qur'an and ArabnessIII. Early Islam and the genesis of Arab identityPart Two: The Changing Faces of Arabness in Early Islam4. Interpreting Arabs: defining their name and constructing their familyI. 'Arab' definedII. Arabness and contested lineageIII. Arab genealogy reconsidered: kinship, gender and identityIV. The creation of 'traditional' Arab genealogyV. Defining Arabs: conclusions5. Arabs as a people and Arabness as an idea: 750-900 CEI. Arabs in the early Abbasid Caliphate (132-193/750-809)II. Forging an Iraqi 'Arab Past'; III. al-Jahiliyya and imagining pre-Islamic ArabsIV. Arabs and Arabia: changing relationships in the third/ninth century6. Philologists, 'Bedouinisation' and the 'Archetypal Arab' after the mid-third/ninth centuryI. Philologists and Arabness: changing conceptions of Arabic between the late second/eighth and fourth/tenth centuriesII. The transformation of Arabness into Bedouin-nessIII. Bedouin Arabness and the emergence of a Jahiliyya archetypeIV. Conclusions; Imagining and Reimagining the ArabsConclusionsBibliography