The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
The Origins of Arabness
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In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Dr. Peter Webb who is a university lecturer of Arabic literature at Universiteit Leiden. Dr. Webb’s research focuses on literature and culture of pre-modern Islam and in this podcast, we discuss the origins of Arabness and his book Imaging the Arabs – Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam.
Welcome to the foreigncy podcast. Forensic.us is a language training website for Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian designed specifically for intermediate to advanced learners. Our daily lessons prepare you to read real foreign language news articles and listen to actual foreign language media on a wide variety of subjects to put you on the path to language mastery. In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Dr. Peter Webb, who is a university lecturer of Arabic literature at the University of Leiden. Dr. Webb's research focuses on literature and culture of pre-modern Islam. And in this podcast, we discuss the origins of Arabness in his book, Imagining the Arabs, Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam. Hope you enjoy the show. I'm here today with Dr. Peter Webb, who's a university lecturer of Arabic literature at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Thanks for joining me today. So we're here to talk about your research into the origins of Arab identity and specifically your book, Imagining the Arabs, Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam. When did you initially start taking an interest in the origins of Arab identity?
SPEAKER_01The origins of Arabness kind of dawned on me as I was a PhD student. I had started a project that was trying to look at how Muslims think about pre-Islamic Arabia and how they've built sort of bits of origins for Islam. And I had sort of the proper PhD project all set up to do that. And then halfway through, I started realizing that there were problems with the way that they were describing the main protagonists. And that the Arab community that they were intoning was the basis of pre-Islamic Arabian culture and population and civilization and everything was actually a sort of pastiche of many different ideas. And it was getting kind of tricky to put them all into one neat box. And then I sort of started digging a bit further into the question of well, what do we actually know about Arabs and the community and how it gets defined? And I found that it it was a topic that hadn't really been critically analyzed before. And so halfway through my PhD, I sort of just dawned on me, and then I had a rather sort of tricky task of re-jigging everything, and a new thesis arrived that really focused on the origins of Arab identity and trying to think about them through theories of what does community mean and anthropological ideas of how people come together and how we can talk about unities and ethnicities and identities.
SPEAKER_00And what was the process like of writing a book of that magnitude?
SPEAKER_01Well, I guess I had a first go at it with my PhD. And so that sort of enabled me to think about what were the things that needed to be done, what were the parameters of the work that I could do, and what were the problems with my sources. And so my PhD came out in a sort of a semi-baked format, which was maybe sort of three-quarter baked, and not too happy for it to be read too much, because it's sort of the ideas were still very much in development at that point. But then I kind of tore it all apart and after my PhD, and then I spent another year and a half or so really focusing on the topic at hand. And so I feel a bit lucky because the evidence that I was looking at and the problems that I was finding in the sources all kind of helped support the general thesis I had. And so there's certainly a lot more that could be read, and I think there's a lot more that needs to be done, but the indicators that I kept finding kept kind of going in the right direction. So it was it was a positive experience that way because it sort of felt you take a stand and think, oh, maybe this will work, maybe it won't. Then you read some text and you find that actually your initial hypothesis is kind of working out. And so that gave some optimism as I was uh going forward and trying to finish the book.
SPEAKER_00When we're talking about the ancient world, what are the first references we see to Arabs?
SPEAKER_01The first reference is traditionally and specifically dated, I think, to 853 BC. There's a Assyrian king Shalmanesser III, and he's fighting a battle somewhere in southern what's now southern Syria, and he lists various people who were on the other side, and one of these people was somebody called Jindibu of the Arba'a. And so the Jindibu might be the Arabic name, sort of Jundab or Jindab, and also the people he's associated with are called Arbaa. And so scholars have alighted on this and say, okay, this is the first arrival of Arabs into recorded history. And so any history of the Arabs is going to have to begin with that. But it gets kind of complicated because we need to then ask the sort of a more anthropological question of, well, what does this community mean? And what does the word Arbaa mean? Why was he called that? Did Jindibu himself call himself an Arbaa, or was that just what the Assyrian administrators who were living a long way away thought? And if Jindibu was a member of some sort of community, how long did that last? And how much is it connected with other communities? How big was his community? And so what we have is we have this sort of typical problem in ancient history where you have the name of a group, but you don't have a lot of that sort of important information surrounding the name that sort of describes what inclusion to that identity might have meant. And so what I started doing, as the first sort of chapter in the book, is it kind of looks at all of the different Arab-like Arab-sounding names that we have in ancient history. And there are plenty. I mean, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and then the Greeks and the Romans all participated in using this term to label peoples who lived in what we call sort of pre-Islamic Arabia. But it's intriguing that there's not so much reference of self-use of the word Arab, that it's always administrators living outside of the fertile crescent who, or sort of in the fertile crescent, looking into Arabia, who are very happy to label populations as Arabs, but it's not necessarily something that those Arabian populations use for themselves. And you know, we don't have inscriptions from inside Arabia where lots of people are calling themselves Arabs or where there's awareness of a sort of a pan-Arabian community. And so it seems that it was easy for people who weren't living in Arabia to generalize about the population, but it's harder if we go in and ask the people in pre-Islamic Arabia, like, well, who do you think you are? And if you look at their inscription, or as I did their poetry in the sort of late pre-Islamic period, it gets intriguing because you see this idea of a fragmented geographical region between many different communities. So we've got this first Arab in 853 BC, but we don't really know what kind of Arab he is and why even he was called that. And it gets interesting as well if you sort of go into the why maybe did they pick the word Arbaa. And the it might actually be a word that the Assyrians invented, because it has connotations of outsiders, it has connotations of people who live in the West, and it has potentially even connotations of locusts. And so they might have an idea that there were unidentifiable peoples that lived in the western desert, i.e., in what's now the Syrian desert in the Sham, and that were sort of getting involved with border clashes with the Assyrians. And so it's easy to just give a blanket term for these people. And that's sort of the impression I have. And it's it's precedented in in other cultures, for instance, you know, the use of the word Celts by the Greeks and the Romans, kind of just anybody living out in the woods to the north of us can be called a Celt. And in a later time, the origin of the Germans, right? The Germani as a sort of a Roman idea of everybody living on the other side of the Rhine, but it was that's from the perspective of an empire, not from the perspective of people themselves.
SPEAKER_00Right. And so when they're being referred to in the ancient world or in pre-Islamic inscriptions or in pre-Islamic writings, are they necessarily referring to uh people or are they referring to people that they're encountering on the fringes?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that sort of is a good way of looking at it, that it's the sense of an ethnic unity underneath that term. It's not always really there in the pre-Islamic records. For instance, the Assyrians had many different words that sound like Arab. They had arba'a, eribu, aribi. They used a kind of a whole cocktail of words to try to describe these people. And so they didn't have pure terminological unity. And it's also been shown in the Greek period when they they talk about Arabs, it's very clear, they actually place them in lots of different areas. And so it's a word that sometimes connotes an idea of being a Bedouin, but sometimes it just connotes an idea of being an outsider, and sometimes it connotes someone who is resident in a geographical area that the writer has chosen to call Arabia. And you know, the problem is Arabia doesn't have as easily definable boundaries. Like how far north does it go into Syria and Iraq? Herodotus was the first person to really talk about Arabia as a geographical entity, but at that point he didn't know there was such a thing as the Red Sea. So he reckoned that Arabia began on the eastern bank of the Nile and went all the way to the Euphrates. And of course, then the Greeks found out that the Red Sea was in the middle, so they kind of changed their definition of Arabia. But so as they changed the concept of what was Arabian space, the label starts getting used for different people. And so it's that sort of outsiders in charge of applying the word and having a array of different ideas about what that word means, which cause a lot of Arabs to turn up in ancient history, but we don't know if they are speaking about a cohesive community of people who thought of themselves as Arabs and use that idea of ethnic identity to unify themselves or at least think of themselves as a corporate unit.
SPEAKER_00Are there pre-Islamic inscriptions in Arabia that refer to Arab or Arabi?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, this is uh sort of the kind of the million-dollar question because we're finding lots of new inscriptions in Arabia. So actually, when I started my project, it's around sort of 2011, there have been a lot more inscriptions that have been found since. So I'm sort of constantly checking to see what's coming up. And the short answer is that you don't find a lot of inscriptions in Central Arabia where people talk about big concepts of community and they don't talk about themselves being Arabs. And so the word isn't there. However, there are people that have sort of in Jordan which have left some inscriptions that talk about the Arab. But the problem with these ones is that the Romans created a province called Arabia when they took over the Nabataean kingdom in the early first second century, 105 AD. And so they created a province of Arabia, and so there are people that live there who left names of me being an Arab, but it's presumably showing that they were born in the province of Arabia and are not necessarily saying that they're ethnically the same as the people on the outside of that border. And you have the same in South Arabia, where you have inscriptions that talk about people as sort of what we might pronounce it as Arab, which I think it means kind of mercenaries or Bedouin armies that live on outside of the South Arabian empires. And so people that were labeled by certain imperial groups as Arabs did use the word to talk about themselves when they were living within those groups. It seems that it's about provincial belonging and it's sort of local specific, and it doesn't necessarily entail that we should extrapolate from these that we've got a whole bunch of people who think of themselves as Arabs, because as soon as you walk out into Central Arabia outside of the imperial boundaries, that's a word that isn't used to describe people. And then in the pre-Islamic poetry in the 150 years before Islam, that it sort of survives from that period, they don't use the word at all to talk about themselves. And so as you're putting these points together, you start seeing that Arabness is really tricky to make claims that there's a very strong sense in pre-Islamic Arabia that the people have this ethnic unity as Arabs. And we need to kind of then start, I think, using theories to think about like how do we articulate an identity? What is an ethnicity, and how can we know that we're finding one? And uh, these are the indicators that I see lacking in pre-Islamic Arabia, where we should be finding Arabs but aren't.
SPEAKER_00And what's the closest thing that we see to some sort of collective identity in pre-Islamic Arabia?
SPEAKER_01So I think that there's several collective identities in pre-Islamic Arabia. Certainly in the south, uh, what's now Yemen, you have an empire, Hemiar, and I think that people had an idea of the Sebah and Hemiar of these various sort of couple empires that were there from the 7th century BC to just before the rise of Islam. And I think that they established a sense of imperial identity, which was something that's kind of local to the realm that they took over. In Central Arabia, I think probably one of the more important points in my thesis was that in pre-Islamic poetry, we don't have people calling themselves Arabs, but you do have them calling themselves by the name of Mad. And they use this as a kind of not as a tribal name. In Arabic, tribal names have sort of benu something, the sons of somebody. But in pre-Islamic poetry, mad is just referred to on its own. It's not referred to as the Benu Mad. And so what we kind of have the idea is that there were a bunch of Central Arabian tribes that seem to think that collectively they constituted mad. And this word appears in inscriptions as well. It's also in Greek literature and in South Arabian inscriptions about who is living out there in Central Arabia, and the word mad comes up. But I think what's most important is that the pre-Islamic poetry talks about mad in this sort of very metaphorical sense. Like if you want to articulate everybody knows something, then you would use the Arabic expression Lakanda Ali Mat mad, sort of mad knows this. And so mad kind of stands for everyone. Or there are other poets where somebody says, like, I've met all of mad and this guy is the best I've ever seen. And so, kind of in elaborate praise where you want to try to set the boundaries of what is the biggest constituency in which someone is praised, mad is the word that is used. And it's used that way in dispraise as well. Like, you're the worst person in all of mad. And so if we sort of think like, okay, so the poet is trying to be rhetorical here, and he's trying to be exaggerate, and he's trying to sort of say really sort of either very positive or very negative, and it's interesting that they really had recourse to the word mad when they wanted to think about a community. And so, from a theoretical perspective, that's quite important because here we have someone who is trying to say something about himself, trying to say something about his community, and he has a word for that. But interestingly, the word isn't Arab, it's mad. And you only start finding poets using the word Arab to talk about themselves and their community in much the same way that they used to talk about mad, but you only start finding that in the Islamic period. It's in the first, after you know, 75-ish years, it starts entering poetry, and then by the beginning of the eighth century, it's everywhere.
SPEAKER_00And so you really can see that happening. Does the root of the word ma'ad give us any indication of what it could possibly mean?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is uh an issue that has been debated by Arabic sort of grammarians and philologists in the Middle Ages, because they were really interested in trying to work out what Arabic words meant. There were two options. Either it comes from the idea of numbers, madad, and so it's sort of a multitude. It also might come from this, the root is sort of emain dad, so mad, which means something like sort of strength or sort of idea of some hardness, something sort of hard and solid. The grammarians never quite worked it out. There are actually verbs that were used for mad. There was a verb tamad, which means to be like mad, and then there was a diminutive of mad, mu'aidi. And so these words imply that the M is part of the root, which would say it maybe wasn't about numbers, and it's more about this strength and solidity. But at the same time, the Arabic grammarians were kind of guessing as much as we were. And they were born a long time after this name became a watchword for our community, and so they might have lost it. I kind of like the idea of thinking of mad as the multitude, and it's a pretty nice word that a community would want to give itself, but equally so, the strong, the strength is not a bad name for yourself either. And so I think either work, I don't think anyone perfectly has an answer because we don't have grammarians in pre-Islamic Arabia telling us what these new words mean.
SPEAKER_00Are there any Quranic references to Arab as a people?
SPEAKER_01The interesting thing in the Quran is it talks about itself as something Arabic. So it says Quran un Arabi un bi, which is usually translated as a Quran in the Arabic language. But what is intriguing is that the Quran never uses the word Arabi in a definite sense. So we would say the Quran is written in Arabic, i.e. sort of a certain language that is definite. But the Quran always refers to itself as an Arabic Quran. And then the question is, well, what does the Arabi mean of the Quran Arabi Mubi? A clear Arabi Quran. The thing that's missing is any reference to Muhammad's community as being Arab. And that is emphatically not there in the Quran. The only sort of other use of Arabi in the Quran is as an adjective for a judgment from God. And there's a verse that says, Hukmut Arabi. And so this is an idea that the believers should be doing something that's sort of a judgment that is correct from God. And so what the Arabi means there and how it relates to the idea of the Quran is intriguing. Certainly, from the perspective of the Quran, Arabi is actually an adjective that is reserved for the Quran and God Himself or the righteous judgments of God. And so it's not something that's particularly terrestrial. What it could mean, however, is that it could have some linguistic meaning because in pre-Islamic times, the Romans set up this province of Arabia, and potentially that the language that was spoken there became known as Arabi. We don't really have a lot of other good evidence for that. You know, pre-Islamic poets don't refer to their language as Arabi. Nobody does. It just emerges in the Quran, and the Quran reserves it for God, but at the same time, it it could be referring to a language that's spoken in the province of Arabia, which is a long way north from where Mecca and Medina is. And so that's also kind of a funny reason. That if it's referring to a language that is specific to the province of Arabia, that's quite a long way from where Muhammad is. And there are certain people that think maybe the genesis of certain ideas of the Quran or certain verses in the Quran or certain discourses in the Quran are coming from further north, and they kind of made their way south, and then Muhammad picked up on them and then avoused the religion. So that's sort of a tricky issue because we don't really know, but it comes to a question of who is the original Quranic audience and when it's using its vocabulary, is it speaking to Meccans, or is it using vocabulary of some sort of monotheist that led further to the north? And then all this got sort of mished together when Muhammad sort of unified the community and created a political state, and then all these people kind of joined and they want to unify themselves, and then it all kind of became a monolith. But at that moment when the Quran is revealed and is using these terminologies, it's quite unclear what it's speaking about, but it's certainly not using the word Arabi to talk about people. And I think that it's a it's a rather serious misreading of the Quran to say that it has this ethnic Arabness built into it, because it really doesn't do that. Also intriguingly, the Quran doesn't address mad. The Quran doesn't like nomads very much. It has a few verses where it doesn't like the A'rab. Now these could be interpreted in several different ways. Like what does it mean by Arab? But there is a long tradition of using that word to talk about nomadic things. And so the Quran talks about them as being outside of the community. So it's interesting that the Quran uses Arabi to talk about itself and itself alone, but it talks about Arab as outsiders in the community, never talks about mad, and then 200 years later, when everything gets kind of consolidated and homogenized, then the Quran is assumed to be in the Arabic language addressed to the Arab people.
SPEAKER_00So the people inside of Arabia at that time were referring to Arabs as an other people, people on the on the outside, similar to what we saw elsewhere.
SPEAKER_01It's tricky to figure it out because it uses this word Arab a couple times to talk about people who are not really proper Muslims, or they say they're Muslims, but they're not mukminin. They're not proper believers and they don't live on the inside of your community. So yeah, and the Quran there, it's participating in this long tradition of using the word Arab to talk about outsiders. And so it's almost like the Assyrian records of uh 1500 years before. Exactly. And then it never says that those people come into the community and become proper Muslims. And now, does it entail that Arab for the Quran means Bedouin, or does it mean sort of mercenaries that were fighting that weren't properly part of the community? That is kind of unclear because in in South Arabian documents, the word Arab means outsider mercenaries that you bring in and they fight for you and then they go off. But of course, also Arab is different from the word Arab. And so when in the early Islamic period people start talking about themselves, they don't say that I'm Arabi, they say I'm Arabi. And so, you know, also for the Arabian audiences of the Quran and the period afterwards, there's quite a strong distinction between Arab and Bedouin. And this is another really sort of interesting point, which is that in the early Islamic period, it seems that the first people that kind of called themselves Arab spent a lot of time trying to say that they're not Bedouin, they're not Arab. And so Bedouin have kind of a lesser rights in Islamic law. They don't have to do all the things that other Muslims have to do. And so it's kind of funny that the people who sound like Arabs in nation Islam are actually outsiders to the community, as you mentioned.
SPEAKER_00And when did the idea of Arabness start to form?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that the Arabness that we think about today, I mean, we've got to sort of think about well, what do we mean by it? And if you mean sort of what is an Arab today, the idea of kind of an Arabian Bedouin that's somehow connected with Muhammad's community and the rise of Islam and then conquest that happened after that. I think that that form Of a collective identity is something that is emerging in the early Islamic period. And what I think ended up happening was Muhammad unified a bunch of different people under a religious message. Also, conquest started happening and money started getting made. And so people started joining. I think this is a time when Mad kind of imposed itself on the Islamic community and said, okay, we want to participate in this. South Arabians, who never called themselves Arabs, had all these different words themselves, also joined in. And so you had this mass of people with this basic monotheism and a military outlook that took over this vast empire. And so they became sort of a conqueror elite. And then the question emerged as to, well, how are we going to talk about ourselves? How are we going to maintain communal boundaries that keep ourselves separate from the people we've conquered? And so there was this period in early Islam of experimenting with who are we going to call ourselves? And I think it's quite important to stress how much experimentation was necessary because these people in pre-Islamic Arabia were not part of one cultural system. Yemenis had their kingdoms, there were settled people and agriculturalists in areas like Mecca and Paif. You had Bedouin living in Central Arabia. You've got people in Oman who were like seafaring people who also participated in the conquests. And none of these people really knew each other that well or don't give much evidence that they knew each other intimately in the pre-Islamic period. But suddenly they find themselves unified by virtue of being the elite of the conquerors. And then the early Islamic conquests are also interesting because when they conquered territory, they tended to set up sort of cities for themselves only. And so we have these very fertile areas of ethnogenesis, you know, fertile areas of places where people can start feeling they're like each other. You know, they live together. They then people who never lived together before are now all living in one town. They share a common status in being the elite. They have more money than anybody else. They have a religion that is their own, that's nobody else's. And so these sorts of ingredients of cultural commonality, political unification, so to speak, living in geographically close to each other are all new. And then in a way, this is should be expected to be a period when people are trying to wonder, well, what do we call ourselves? And the obvious answer is, well, maybe we just call ourselves Muslims. But the problem there is that people could convert to Islam who were not part of the conqueror communities. And so if you have this sort of radical equality that everyone's going to be called a Muslim, then sort of you and I, as descendants of the original conquerors, for example, kind of want to keep those people away from our set of status. And so then they experimented with a number of terms. Emigrant was one of the muhajir. A lot of the in the very early period, it seems that that was a way of talking about the early Muslim conquerors. But as time goes by, they end up settling on this sort of increasingly ethnic-looking idea of Arabi and Arab to do it. And it coincides rather neatly with politics because there's a big struggle within the Muslim community. It's what's known as the second fitna, which various different caliphs are sort of fighting with each other and counter-caliphs. And so eventually the Syrian caliphate of the Umayyad sort of re-establishes its control and they kind of try to organize society better, I think, to prevent further revolutions. And so I think one of the things they do is that these are the guys who start minting coins with the Arabic language on them. These are the people who are ascribed to making the administration in the Arabic language. And this is also precisely the period when you start seeing poets referring to the Muslim community as Arabi. And so I think it's quite telling that this is a very fertile period of kind of political necessity, social change, religious change, and all demographic change, and all this kind of comes together, and Arabness emerges as a kind of a consequence of the conquests.
SPEAKER_00And that's when it becomes quite strongly felt. And how big of a role did the fact that Arabic is seen as the holy tongue and the language of the Quran play in using that as a way to refer to themselves?
SPEAKER_01I think that that's quite critical because the Quran kind of already sets the bar that it says this is a Quran Arabi and it has Qukum Arabi in it. And so whilst the Quran kind of has this sort of non-terrestrial idea of Arabness, it certainly is sort of we think the cultural capital of the early Muslim conqueror community. I mean, what do they have that nobody else has? Well, they've got the Quran that says it's Arabic, and they're all speaking languages that are presumably close enough to each other, and certainly quite different from the Aramaic and the Syriac and the Persian languages that they interact with elsewhere. And so I think language becomes a natural way of articulating how we are different. And I think that our participation in a sort of like a Muslim religion and speaking an Arabic language and hailing from a conqueror community, these were all the ingredients that enabled them to find a successful strategy of distinction for themselves. And I think that that's when the name Arabi might have been borrowed from the Quran. It's hard to know for sure, though, because no one explains how that process comes up. And there's a lot of dictionaries written in medieval Islamic times where they talk about the origin of words and what words mean. And they have trouble defining the word Arabi or Arab. And so some people say Arab means anyone who speaks Arabic is an Arab. So that's that's how you do it. So that kind of goes with the linguistic argument. But there are other people that say no, it's actually if you come from a certain genealogical group of people that it's genealogy that makes you Arabi. But then if we go and look at the genealogists, they don't agree on the Arab family tree to start with either. And so you can see that the term kind of emerges and then the definition is not clear. And that's kind of how ethnicities work. You know, how do you define British or how do you define American or how do you define German today? Like it's political reality plus a bit of rewriting of history plus a lot of forgetting that kind of articulates what the identity is. So I think Arabness is exactly the same as that. And the Arab identity that we think about today comes from this period, and that's when kind of a communal memory of Arabness really got established as a culturally important phenomenon. And I think certainly borrowing from the Quran is there, but the language that they spoke coming from Arabia, which speaks different languages to the first oppressive, is also important. And that's where you know you have the Arab is kind of the opposite of Aja, sort of the non-Arabic speakers. So language is important, for sure.
SPEAKER_00And for people who aren't familiar with early Islamic history, if you can go into what the fitnas were and the civil war and the impact that had on the community and the need for social cohesion afterwards.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the fitna. So this word is often translated as civil war, but I'm actually not that happy with the translation because if we look at what the word fitna means, technically, or as we're told by the grammarians, it means a trial by fire. And it means specifically testing the purity of gold by setting it on fire. And so when the Muslim community, when Muslims start fighting other Muslims, they don't use sort of words like civil war because there is no chibitas, right? They're citizens that they're talking about. They use this word fitna. And it has this very strong religious undertone. Basically, that Muslim groups were vying for political power, they've taken over this vast empire, and then there are questions about well, who should be the caliph. And that was never really made clear at the beginning. So the caliph was always the person who kind of had the most authority from time to time, and certain clans emerged with interest in becoming caliphs. And so the caliphs, and I think it's a very strong argument that can be made that the caliphs didn't just show themselves as political leaders, but they showed themselves as kind of almost messiah-like saviors, and that if you side up with the caliph, then on Judgment Day, which I think they believed was going to happen really, really soon, for they were becoming quite clear that they thought judgment day was going to happen. And so they needed to be under the spiritual guidance of one leader, and that would guarantee your salvation on judgment day. So another counter-caliph will come along and say, no, no, I'm actually the one that can take you on into the afterlife, into heaven. And so this idea of civil war, it was about politics and it was about money, but at the same time, it was about salvation. You know, that's why sort of the Shiite and Sunni kind of splits that we have today come from this sort of milieu. A lot has happened in the meantime. But personal salvation is really at stake, and that's why they call this inter-Muslim conflict a fitna, because it's really about testing who is the pure Muslim and who is the impure Muslim. And all kind of wrapped up in this idea of judgment day and the end of the world. And uh they thought, I think, that these wars that they were fighting were actually going to usher in the end of the world. And so it's um a period where religion is really important in identity, and that's why I think it's another nice argument about the Quran's notion of Arabi being adopted by people because religion really was an important way of them thinking about who they were. The Quran says it's Arabi, and so, well, that must be us too. And it's so it's not such an ethnic idea at the beginning that, oh, well, we're related to so and so, and we have a complicated sort of genealogical history that we understand. It's like, no, we we we're a new community, we have a new religion, and Arabic is the way we're going to define it.
SPEAKER_00Was the rapid spread of the Arabic language and the way that it pushed out the other languages of the region so quickly? Was that part of some sort of wider social cohesion program or organized system, or did it just happen be naturally?
SPEAKER_01I think that politics and power were very important in this because the number of conquerors was actually really small. I mean, the number of people that came out of Arabia and and were part of the Islamic conquest were a tiny minority of the Middle East population. And if you think about how much territory they took over, they were spread pretty thin on the ground. And there's some interesting ideas that, you know, vast areas might be just controlled by a couple hundred horsemen based in one town. And so the situation in the post-conquest period is clearly Arabic is a very minority language. And it's not even really codified as a language, anyway. Various different dialects and sub-versions of Arabic. So these kinds of languages were being spoken in the conquered communities. I think because different people from Arabia kind of live together in these towns that they set up for themselves, that was a catalyst for standardizing Arabic because they need to talk to each other and it needs to be kind of a standard language. And so those towns also were the political centers of the provinces. And so they naturally were the more important towns and became, you know, the capitals we know today, like Cairo and Baghdad, all these are kind of new cities founded by the Muslims. And so the fact that they kind of were living together in an isolated community and that they had political power was important for the spread. But I think for several hundred years, the majority of the population had been speaking the pre-conquest languages. The official spread of Arabic is also tied to these Urayyad Caliphs after the Second Fitnah, where it's sort of we see the idea that they wanted to spread a kind of a uniform language, a uniform coinage. They weren't a bureaucratic state, they couldn't do it instantaneously, but there was a political will coming from that. I think it has an idea of trying to unify the community and to stop people from thinking they can just break away and start up new caliphates or start up new religious movements. So I think that there was a political will that took a generation or two to get going, and that starts like in the end of the 600s and early 700s, but then the process kind of gets more and more involved. And then I think there's just a lot of demographic change in the Middle East in the eighth and ninth centuries, whereby the cities built by the Muslims become the big cities and they attract people from other parts of the countryside. And so those people naturally have to learn Arabic in order to get on. But I think bilingualism or trilingualism and the survival of these minor languages should not be underestimated. That they did really well, but they're kind of little people, you know, they're the languages of people who are working on the fields or doing sort of modest trading, the language of political power and then the language of the intellectual system is Arabic. And so that's left its biggest imprint. But I'm sure if we went to Syria or Egypt in the 9th and 10th century and didn't know any Arabic but spoke sort of Coptic or some form of Aramaic, I think we'd do absolutely fine.
SPEAKER_00And when the process started of them really trying to cement Arabness or Arab identity, are there examples of them appropriating things from the past, events from the past that that weren't Arab, but then they adopted them as?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was sort of the big trick that they were able to pull off, in which they were able to present pre-Islamic Arabia as a cohesively Arab place. And so from the perspective of, let's say, a 9th or 10th century Muslim, it's kind of impossible to imagine that pre-Islamic Arabia was ethnically divided, because by this time they had worked out that everyone who participated in the conquest was an Arab, everybody in Arabia had participated in the conquest, and that the sort of culture of pre-Islam was kind of a unified Arab culture. But if you start digging into early historical records, you can see that this really was a homogenization process. And so one of the more interesting things that I found kind of recently was thinking about the people who lived in Oman. They are from the Azd tribe, and the Azd are assumed to be kind of original Arabs, and they kind of place them very prominently in the genealogy of the Arab family tree. However, that's from the perspective of 10th century records and books written about them. If you go back into the sort of 7th century or the 8th century, and you kind of look at poetry that's written about the Az tribe, or remarks about Az leadership, you actually see that the political leadership of the Islamic world, which was in the hands of the Quraysh and Muhammad's tribe and the people of Mecca, they actually didn't think the Al-Azd were Arabs at all. And they tried to give them kind of a secondary importance. And it said that, well, you guys live on the coast and you guys go around in boats, and you guys live a long way from everywhere else. And so you're not Arabs at all. And there's really interesting poetry in which people try to attack the legitimacy of Al-Azd. And one of the ways of doing it is saying you are not Arabs. And so we have this sort of appropriation of all pre-Islamic Arabian culture and its homogenization within one Arab whole, but that was a process. And I think at the very beginning, it was kind of unclear who was going to be an Arab and who wasn't. And that's also matched in the definition of where Arabia is. I use the word Arabia just constantly, but what specific space do we mean by that? And if you look at the Arabic sources that try to define where Arabia is, intriguingly, in a really early period, some people said Arabia was just Mecca and Medina and that area of the Hejaz. And that's Arabia. So that's the Arab homeland. And anyone that comes from outside of that is not from the Arab homeland. But then as the conqueror communities sort of want to get along, Arabia starts expanding in the sort of Arabic geographical imagination. And then you know Yemen and Oman and everything else gets included into it. But I think that's also a process that we could research more.
SPEAKER_00And what are the biggest arguments that you've run into, or the big or the most resistance that you've run into in your hypotheses?
SPEAKER_01Oh, the biggest ones, there's obviously a huge tradition of scholarship which thinks about Arabs as this cohesive ethnic group that lived in Arabia. And so the idea that it was something that people cobbled together and invented in the Islamic period is really challenging quite a lot of established opinions. And so, you know, there's a certain kind of, well, what are we talking about here? Sort of response that some people get because they're they're very accustomed to assuming that we can just speak of everybody pre-Islamic Arabia as Arabs. And so kind of got to get over that hurdle is one of the things. There are a lot of people who study late antique history, i.e., pre-Islamic history, from, let's say, a Latin perspective or from a Greek perspective or from a Persian perspective. And they seem to really like having Arabs as a character in pre-Islamic Arabia. And so they also like to see Arabs as a community that emerges thanks to interactions with Rome, because that's sort of the way in which European identities were supposed to have formed. And so, you know, the sort of the Franks and the Lombards and these other identities which became Europeans were supposed to have formed thanks to interaction with Rome. And so there's this a strong about much above weight of scholarship which argues that Arabs also formed that way. They lived on the frontier of the Roman Empire, and it was kind of thanks to Rome that they became a people. And so, in trying to counter these theories, I mean, one of the ones is that really we're thinking about Arabs in this very sort of monolithic term, which we have been doing for so long, really is ignoring all the theories about identity and ethnicity that have come along since the Second World War. And, you know, if we I think the most important analogy that I come up with is that the way we have thought about Arabs is very much the way people thought about Germans pre-World War II. You had this idea of these sort of deutsche Stämme, right? These are German tribes that kind of lived on the other side of the Rhine and they weren't politically unified, but they were culturally unified, and that this is where the roots of German identity came from. And those sort of narratives ended up having fairly unhelpful results, right, with sort of German nationalism through the 20th century. So nobody really talks about the German tribes and German essence coming from the forests on the way on the east of the Rhine. But you know, the Arabs didn't start World War II, or they didn't, they weren't involved in any disastrous political processes that really, you know, shook things. And so we're sort of still stuck with those kinds of narratives. And so I think that one thing is my invitation for people to do is, you know, think about what identity means and what ethnicity means, and then you're going to realize that I think we can't speak about Arabia in this very cohesive way. Whether Muslims just invented Arabness or not is it's not almost important to me. I mean, maybe there were communities of people who referred themselves as Arabs, but didn't leave really any mark in history in pre-Islamic period. That could be the case. But what is important is that if we think about what does Arabness mean today, you know, what are the cultural aspects of it today, they're coming from a community that started calling themselves Arabs in the early centuries of Islam.
SPEAKER_00It seems to me this falls a pretty natural pattern, and we've seen this throughout history of similar situations where there's tribal confederations or different tribes that are in the same region as a national identity or ethnicity or idea of a collective ethnicity starts forming. It's taken on the same pattern throughout history.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and we were very quick to kind of give these tribal confederations an ethnic label. You know, another great example is like Mongols. You know, I think Genghis Khan had the nation of the Mongols. We have a nation called Mongolia today, and that was that. They were the Mongols, they were, and they were the origins of the Mongol nation. But when you start drilling down into who actually were constituting the Mongol army, you got all sorts of different kinds of people, different kinds of Turks, and you got different kinds of other Central Asian tribesmen, even like Georgians and Caucasians, they were all part of the Mongol army as well. And so these were very sort of multi-ethnic affairs. And I think we are accustomed to think about things sort of in these sort of silos of nationalism. And then we go back in the pre-bureaucratic, pre-nation-state era, and we try to use those same labels that we have today to think about communities in the past. And I think those communities just don't work that way. That when the sort of Muslim conquests kind of started up in the 7th century, they didn't have a kind of a go-to ethnic identity to rally around. It was just like the Mongols, a bunch of different people who previously might not have really known each other very well, but they now had a good reason to get to know each other because they were participating in a very successful venture. And then from there, the process of creating an ethnicity begins. But I think I also would caution that the process of creating Arab identity was a bit fraught. Like it never really worked. You know, we don't have kings of the Arabs emerging in the 9th and 10th centuries. Um, when the caliphate started sort of breaking apart into different principalities, um, they didn't talk about themselves as Arab kingdoms either. And so, you know, Arabness kind of lulled as a sort of an effective ethnic identity, but then it was picked up really hard in the 18th and 19th century in the Ottoman Empire, when people were trying to break away from the Ottoman Empire, and that is sort of a new birth of Arab nationalism, and they draw very heavily on the form of Arabness that we have in the 8th and 9th centuries. And so, you know, it's all this dialogue and identity is constantly sort of flickering as it changes through these periods.
SPEAKER_00And as this discussion continues, I mean, how do you see it influencing some established areas like Quranic studies or Arabic literature or Islamic history?
SPEAKER_01Well, certainly the Quranic studies is interesting because if we can start fragmenting the notion of Arabian society, then you can start thinking that, okay, the Quran might be speaking to a very small audience that is, and some of the peculiarities in the Quran might be then better understood. We don't need to sort of think about the Quran as being part of Arabic literature. Think about the Quran and other literatures coming together and then becoming Arabic literature. And so the idea of Arabia in pre-Islamic times being divided along many zones of fragmentation, I think, is important in liberating our sort of tendencies to assume there must be cultural unity. You know, the idea that the Hajj, everyone in Arabia must have gone on Hajj in pre Islamic times, is a result of us thinking, well, they're all Arabs, so they must be all going on Hajj. But we start thinking, well, actually, you know, the Hajj doesn't appear in pre Islamic archaeological records very much. And so we've got these texts based on the idea all Arabs. Moscow and Hajj saying everyone was going, but very little archaeology. And so people get really worried about that sort of disjoint. But if we start breaking things down and say, look, there was not one Pan-Arabian Arab community. They weren't all going to the same shrine. They weren't all doing the same stuff. Then we can kind of look at sort of micro histories of bits and pieces of this land of Arabia and see that there's this whole panoply of different cultures. And that will help resolve some of the apparent contradictions or silences that we don't expect in the later literature. I think also from the perspective of Arab nationalism, I think it's quite important to really engage with this technical question of what is an Arab community? What does Arab identity mean? And how really does sort of 19th century Arab nationalism link backwards into the past? And I think that that's a huge field that needs to be investigated as well. What did being Arab mean in the 10th century in Egypt, for instance? Or what did it mean in the 15th century in Syria? And I don't think that we can assume. I think that that's not kind of how identity works as a matter of theory. And also I think our texts have all the information in there. And if we just step away from axiomatically assuming this is homogenized Arabic speaker equals an Arab equals an ethnic community, I think we can start seeing a lot more variation in Middle Eastern culture. That's what we all recognize.
SPEAKER_00And what's next for you and your research on this topic?
SPEAKER_01Well, actually, I'm going back to where I started. My PhD project was trying to figure out how Muslims write about pre-Islamic history, how they conceptualize Islam's prehistory. And so that is one of the things that I my current research projects are working on, looking at sort of what are the Muslim narratives of pre-Islam, what's the role of this idea of Jahiliya, the age of passion, the age of ignorance in Muslim thinking. And so having now kind of, let's say, exploded the idea of the expectation to find one cohesive Arab community in pre-Islam, I'm now interested to see how Muslims put the pieces together and took these different memories of different kinds of people in pre-Islamic Arabia and kind of constructed a pre-Islamic Arab story out of them. And so this obviously was important for a number of ways of identifying Muslim identity. The other is the pre-Islamic past, and the self is the Muslim identity today. So this is sort of a big project of sort of thinking about how do you create a pre-Islamic history for a people that you're kind of inventing, and then how do you use that created past to define your own culture? And I think that's really important to have understand medieval Muslim culture and up to today. People still use this idea of sort of Jahiliya as sort of Islam's other in polemical discourses in Islam today. Figuring out how those were constructed seems to be the logical next step of uh having sort of worked on the ethnicity. Now look at the mythology.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, I know you have a uh trip to Uzbekistan to to get ready for. So uh I'll let you start getting ready for that. And if people want to find your book or buy your book, you can get it on Amazon, I believe. And that's right. Um Imagining the Arabs, Arab Identity, and the Rise of Islam by Dr. Peter Webb. Thanks for joining me. I really enjoyed the conversation, and uh we'll be in touch and talk soon. Thanks very much.