Imagining the Arabs

Abstract

I often tell graduate students that there are three constituent parts to cuttingedgescholarship: (1) the requisite linguistic and historical training, (2) creativityand imagination, and (3) a bold vision that desires to take inheritedideas and subject them to new and rigorous analyses. Very few can do this,but those who can end up radically transforming our understanding of a topic.I am happy to say that Peter Webb has met all three of these criteria in hiswonderful and thought-provoking Imagining the Arabs. He has presented uswith a paradigm-shifting study, and all subsequent work on the topic will haveto wrestle with his monograph.Webb’s goal is sufficiently bold: to rethink the Arabs – who they were,what they believed, where they came from, and how they were imagined byvarious elites in the early Islamic period. Received opinion has, like so muchin early Islamic history, simply repeated what the earliest sources (paradoxicallyfrom later periods) tell us. The assumption is that such sources must betrue because there is no reason why they should not be. Why, for example,should they cultivate untruths or spread ideological rumors? Instead of adopting,as so many do, a posture of gullibility, Webb prefers to see such texts asengaged in the dual processes of ethnogenesis and mythopoesis.Tradition assumes that the Arabs were a homogenous group of of Bedouinsthat have inhabited the Arabian Peninsula since Antiquity. This would be akin,as Webb informs us, of assuming that all of the first nations in North Americawere essentially the same with respect to religion, culture, and ethnicity, andsomething that ignores that the aforementioned terms have distinct lineages inmodern political and nationalist thought. Then in the seventh century CE, sothe story continues, these Arabs adopted a new faith, to wit, Islam, and rapidlyconquered the Middle East and beyond. Study after study has simply assumedthat these “Arabs,” while sensitive to poetry, represented a form of militarized ...