Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam

ISBN-13: 9781474408264 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 384 str.

Peter Webb

Opis

Investigating 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.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Note on the Text; Introduction; Part 1: The Rise of Arab Communities; 1. The Rise of Arab Communities; I. Arabs and pre-Islamic Textual Traditions; II. Arabs in Arabia: ethnogenesis, interpretations and problems; III. An Arabness pretence: pre-Islamic ‘Arab’-cognates reconsidered; 2. Pre-Islamic ‘Arabless-ness’: Arabian Identities; I. The Arabic Language: a signpost to Arabness?; II. The search for Arabs in pre-Islamic poetry; III. Contextualising the ‘Arabless’ Poetry: ethnic boundaries in pre-Islamic Arabia; IV. The rise of ‘Arab’ poetry; V. Transition from ‘Ma?add’ to ‘Arab’: case study of Dh? Q?r; VI. Pre-Islamic Arabian identity: conclusions; 3. Arabness from the Qur’an to an ethnos; I. ‘Arab’: an ethnonym resurrected?; II. The Qur’an and Arabness; III. Early Islam and the genesis of Arab identity; Part Two: The Changing Faces of Arabness in Early Islam; 4. Interpreting Arabs: defining their name and constructing their family; I. ‘Arab’ defined; II. Arabness and contested lineage; III. Arab genealogy reconsidered: kinship, gender and identity; IV. The creation of ‘traditional’ Arab genealogy; V. Defining Arabs: conclusions; 5. Arabs as a people and Arabness as an idea: 750-900 CE; I. Arabs in the early Abbasid Caliphate (132-193/750-809); II. Forging an Iraqi ‘Arab Past’; III. al-J?hiliyya and imagining pre-Islamic Arabs; IV. Arabs and Arabia: changing relationships in the third/ninth century; 6. Philologists, ‘Bedouinisation’ and the ‘Archetypal Arab’ after the mid-third/ninth century; I. Philologists and Arabness: changing conceptions of Arabic between the late second/eighth and fourth/tenth centuries; II. The transformation of Arabness into Bedouin-ness; III. Bedouin Arabness and the emergence of a J?hiliyya archetype; IV. Conclusions; Imagining and Reimagining the Arabs: Conclusions; Bibliography.