As is well known, the inhabitants of what was called “Arabia Felix” did not speak Arabic but extinct varieties of South Semitic, the epigraphic languages known by way of many thousands of extant texts. They also did not regard themselves as Arabs, the inhabitants of “Arabia Deserta,” who rather feature in their inscriptions as foreigners. Distinctions between north and south continue to be relevant in Islamic times, as is evident in the Qays and Yamān blocs of the Umayyad period, and the classification of all Arabs as either ʿAdnānī or Qaḥṭānī. Nevertheless, by the close of the first century, there are hardly any ethnolinguistic boundaries within the Arabian Peninsula, and only a faintly perceptible separation between Arabs and non-Arabs within the Yemen. By all indications, the Arabian Peninsula has truly become the land of the Arabs. While this process of ethnogenesis receives almost no direct attention in the Islamic sources, it is far from invisible: traces of an Arabizing Yemen are scattered throughout the genealogical tradition, poetry, and folklore. In this talk, Raashid Goyal considers what these sources reveal about the emergence of Arab identity and the distinct forms of ethnogenesis underwent before and after Islam.
Raashid S. Goyal, Ph.D., studies the history, languages, and literature of the early Islamic and pre-Islamic Near East, with a particular interest in the development of sociolegal and political ideas in the early centuries of Islam. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher and member of the QaSLA project (“The Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity) at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His doctoral dissertation (Cornell University, 2023) is titled “War and Law in the First Islamic Polity: Arabness, Emigration, and the Dhimma of God and His Messenger.”
