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Pursuing the references to ‘Arabs’ in the Islamic-era poetry examined in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the processes by which Arab identity developed as a new form of community in early Islam. Analysis begins with the Qur’an, the first extant text to use the word ʿarabī to describe itself. It is revealed that the Qur’an’s Arabness is not a marker of ethnic identity, but it does mark key shifts which were amplified by new social processes following the Muslim Conquests. Employing models of ethnogenesis to interpret early Islam, this chapter demonstrates how the spread of Muslim communities and the centralisation of the Caliphate fostered an environment conducive to rethinking identities. The new social processes prompted early Muslims to experiment with various terms to define their community, and ‘Arab’ gradually gained traction during the later Umayyad period. The rise of Arabness as an ethnic identity thus closely intertwines with the maturation of Muslim community, but conflicting social pressures and imperfect communal cohesion meant that Umayyad-era Arab identity developed very unevenly in this formative period.

Chapter 4 investigates the changing faces of Arabness in early Islam. As an identity, Arabness was a fluid intellectual construct, and because Arab communal consciousness developed unevenly in early Islam, Muslims faced manifold challenges when they tried to define the word ‘Arab’ and delineate the boundaries of Arab community. The uneven parameters of Arabness and the debates over the identity’s meaning manifest in this chapter’s findings from the evolving dictionary definitions of ʿarabī, the disputes over membership to the Arab community, and the protracted process by which Muslims constructed Arab genealogy by fusing disparate pre-Islamic groups into one consolidated Arab family tree. By the early tenth century AD, Arabic literature articulates a largely cohesive sense of Arab identity and genealogy traced through a succession of ancient prophets, Judaic and Arabian: this chapter questions how that archetype of Arabness emerged by undertaking comprehensive analysis of the earlier disagreements which accompanied the processes of imagining Arabness in Islam’s first centuries.

How was Arab identity imagined in a world where most Middle Eastern populations stopped calling themselves Arabs? After the mid-ninth century AD, descriptions of Arabs proliferated in Arabic literature, whilst Arab identity as a social/political asset was in decline. In this period, the key spokesmen for the idea of Arabness were philologists who fundamentally reworked impressions of Arab identity as part of new theories about the Arabic language. Diachronic survey of the development of Arabic philology from the late eighth to eleventh centuries reveals shifting intentions and values which standardised the Arabic language via a unique process that focused on the idealisation of Bedouin as paragons of the ‘original Arabs’. Studying Arabic philology within its socio-historical contexts reveals how the grammarians transcended language study and forged paradigmatic changes to the ways Arab history and culture are interpreted. The novel association of Arab with Bedouin became a popular theme in Arabic literature from the early tenth century, and the weight of the resultant writings comprehensively transformed Arabness from the former expression of urban/Muslim elite identity in early Islam to a desert/Bedouin pre-Islamic identity which has cast a long shadow on the notion of Arab identity to the present.

This introductory chapter summarizes the journey of Shakespeare's Hamlet through the post-1952 Arab world and discusses this study's contributions to Arab politics and literary studies in general. Here, the chapter shows how the character Hamlet's central concern is the problem of historical agency. He asks what it means “to be” rather than “not to be” in a world where “the time is out of joint” and one's very existence as a historical actor is threatened. He thus encapsulates a debate coeval with and largely constitutive of modern Arab identity: the problem of self-determination and authenticity. Following Hamlet's Arab journey, the chapter attempts to clarify one of the most central and widely misunderstood preoccupations of modern Arab politics.

This chapter investigates the intersections between politics, public space and Muslim and Arab identities, and complicates the relationships between Muslim minorities and public spheres and spaces of society. School controversies are indicative of the highly problematic position of Muslim minorities in public and in the collective imagination of western nation-states. The chapter states that religious claims are important with respect to political life and public space. The clear dichotomies that frame many western perceptions of Islam are explained. For some of the interviewees, Islam is an important motivating force for activism, and some see their religious faith as closely tied to their reasons for becoming involved in community organisations and affairs. The interviewees expressed that they felt that they could not escape the fact that Arabness is culturally bound up with Islam. For them, the multiculturalism of the Arab world is a precursor to European multiculturalism.

The study of Arab identity begins with the foundational question: when did people begin to call themselves Arabs and form an Arab community? The process of Arab community formation is much debated, and this chapter re-evaluates theories of Arab origins via critical survey of the ancient epigraphic and literary evidence about Arabia before Islam. The wealth of texts, spanning ancient Assyrian records, Greek/Latin literature and South Arabian inscriptions, give intriguing indications about pre-Islamic Arabian societies alongside enigmatic references to ‘Arab’-sounding words, but these sources have not yet been interrogated via theories of ethnicity and identity. Chapter 1 revisits the sources through a critical theoretical lens to offer a fresh interpretation of Arabian identities before Islam and a resolution to difficulties scholars face when trying to identify ‘Arabs’ in ancient history. The findings prompt us to question long-held theories of Arab origins and invite a wholesale rethink of Arabs and Arabia before Islam.

This chapter consists of collected oral histories of Iraqi women refugees in Jordan. It examines the identity of Iraqi women refugees as revealed through their personal narratives. In the Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi identity was reinforced as an Arab identity. During the 35-year rule of this regime, Iraqis watched other Arab nationalities enjoying privileges while they lived in Iran. After the fall of the regime, the new government emphasized Iraqi identity as separate from the Arab identity. The new regime imposed an Iranian identity within the concepts of ethnic and sectarian power sharing. While this new identity posed a dilemma with the manner refugees formed representations of themselves in host countries and with the distribution of privileges they used to enjoy in the former regime, many of the Iraqi women refugees still saw themselves as Arabs and refused the sectarian criteria. All the women interviewed in this chapter expressed the notion that their identity was challenged as their life circumstances demanded them to accommodate the changes they experience.

This chapter explains that much of what matters for Arab Hamlet appropriation in the postcolonial period—the international sources, the way they were absorbed, and the concerns they help express—was shaped by the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser's geopolitical and cultural priorities made a range of Hamlets available and conditioned how intellectuals received them. Beyond this, from the moment in 1954 when he declared to his people, “All of you are Gamal Abdel Nasser,” the Egyptian leader personally embodied his country's identity and acted out its drama of historical agency. Beyond Egypt's borders, he became (like his radio station) “the voice of the Arabs.”

Arab identity is an intriguing conundrum. It is commonly presumed that Arabs originated as a distinct and essentially homogenous community of ancient Arabian Bedouin who were separate from other populations of the Middle East, yet modern Arab identity is multifarious and resists all scholarly attempts to generalise about Arabness. It thus seems that pre-modern Arabs are too simplistically conceptualised around monolithic stereotypes of Arabian nomadism, and the idea of ancient Arab identity is accordingly in need of new, theoretically grounded and critical scrutiny. The task inspires this book, and the Introduction sets the scene by discussing the problems of interpreting Arab history, and describes the theoretical models that can help resolve these problems. Ancient Arabs have not hitherto been studied as an ethnic group, and the Introduction discusses how anthropological theories of ethnogenesis enable fresh interpretation of textual and archaeological evidence to reorient our understanding of both Arab origins and the rise of Islam.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of Arab American literary self-representation by moving through a historiography of Arab migration to America and toward an analysis of Ameen Rihani's literary and political writings. Positioned at the headwaters of an indigenous Arab intellectual reawakening (the nahdah) and a migrant Arab political consciousness (the mahjar), Rihani articulates a vision of Arab identity that embraces arabesque self-representation as a form of empowerment. Eventually, the literary strategies of self-representation that Rihani employs translate into the political strategies informing pan-Arabism. Indeed, Rihani's goal is the formation of a pan-Arab identity that self-consciously blends Orient and Occident, modern and traditional, Islamic and Christian, America and Arabia to create mahjar or migrant identity.

Focusing on change is required academically but it could also help in the elaboration of relevant policies to cope with the evolving challenges on the ground. One of the early manifestations of this steady change is the debate from within on the definition of the region and the emphasis on a distinct Arab identity. If the relationship between global and regional levels of analysis appeared to find a happy solution with the elaboration of the international subsystem concept, the problem of analyzing change remained marginalized. To be operational and applicable, such a research program has to go beyond being satisfied with a pure juxtaposition of disciplines if it is to be interdisciplinary and focused.

This chapter discusses this normative model of the public sphere and whether it is plausible to apply it to the Arab case. It discusses a recent attempt to apply this model to the Arab context and aims to provide a new definition of the criteria needed for a sound Arab public debate, locally and regionally, i.e. a functioning civil society.

By unfastening Arab identity from conventional cultural stereotypes, Bedouinism and ancient pre-Islamic Arabian bloodlines, this book sought to reveal the complexities and changing nature of historic Arab identity. The book was intended as an invitation to begin rethinking Arabness afresh, and by highlighting the shortcomings inherent in the static, monolithic manner in which historical Arab communities have often been discussed, our analysis sought to reappraise historic Arabness as an ethnicity, tracking its evolution and contextualising its development with close attention to the sociopolitical and ‘cultural stuff’ factors that sustain ethnogenesis....

This chapter portrays second- and third generation Arab-Americans undertaking temporary return journeys to ancestral homelands. The revisionary perspectives resulting from such journeys, a concept referred to as rearrivals, are exemplified in the works of writers Mohja Kahf, Samia Serageldin, Pauline Kaldas, and Muaddi Darraj. The chapter also features nonliterary pieces that focus on the significance of return journeys in the Palestinian context, such as Annemarie Jacir's film Salt of this Sea (2008) and Emily Jacir's visual art. These works are often instigated by a desire to return to the geographical and national roots of diasporic Arab identities, or to what is simply defined as the familiar, even if this familiarity is an inherited construct. Such desires are informed by the urge to gain a deeper self-knowledge and some reprieve from the ambiguities of belonging that plague Arab-Americans in the diaspora.

This chapter delves deeper into the thematic diversity of transnational articulations to investigate how Arab-American rootedness in and production of transnational identities produce specific translocal spaces that alters peoples understanding of U.S. national, diasporic, and ethnic belonging. It analyzes the works of Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Haas Mroue, Rabih Alameddine, Etel Adnan, Edward Said, Laila Halaby, and Randa Jarrar. These writers' antinostalgic stances and critical perspectives, mostly but not solely reflecting a contemporary immigrant perspective, produce complicated constructs of homes and homelands that incorporate the stark effects of lingering war traumas and political tensions on current Arab-American identity formations. Specifically, the works examined highlight the need to ground a transnational framework in the specificity and uniqueness of particular place-based experiences that are primarily shaped within the Arab world and are then transported through immigration or exile into the multifarious U.S. landscape.

This chapter discusses the role of poetry in identity formation and nation building in the Arab-speaking world. Western theories of nationalism treat the novel as the locus of national narratives. The chapter argues that this view is Western-centric and that, in the Arab context, poetry plays that role more than the novel. It further discusses some Arabic poetry, and the Arab diaspora, mahjar, in which poetry, as a meta-linguistic discourse reflects on the role of language as a primary marker of Arab identity and emphasises its role in superseding ethnic tensions in the Arab body politic.

This chapter explores the jurisdictional problems that Arab populations experienced under Dutch colonial rule. The one thing that the Dutch feared above all else was not the slippage of Arab identity into the category of “Natives” but rather the possible equation of Arabs with themselves, Europeans. The possibility of fluid jurisdictions horrified Dutch authorities. The chapter examines the attempt by the Arab elite in the Netherlands Indies to appeal to Ottoman protection as subjects potentially led to a paradigm of diplomacy in the colony that inadvertently allowed some colonial subjects more latitude than the Dutch colonialists intended for them since they certainly did not possess equal status. The chapter also discusses how the Arab affairs — and one might even argue Muslim affairs in general — remained to some extent in Arab hands in the Netherlands Indies through the symbiotic relationships between colonial officials and the Arab elite.

This chapter introduces the topic of religion and literature, theorises the novel as a secular genre, and develops a concept of religion as the other in the Arabic novel. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between religion and literature, identifying imagination, metaphorical language and mythos as areas of overlap, before turning to the question of religion and the Arabic novel as a modern form which eschews faith and dogma but is nevertheless packed with religious themes, images, characters, language and intertextuality. This is accounted for by the form’s secularism, which is theorised in terms of Charles Taylor’s conditions of belief. Literary secularism is not static and stable however, thus religion emerges as the other in the Egyptian novel, with all the ambivalence which alterity characteristically entails. This religious other calls into question postcolonial studies’ over-valorisation of the East/West binary insofar as it has obscured the critical role of religion in Arab postcolonial literature and identity.

This chapter concludes the study and draws the different aspects — political, cultural, linguistic, and religious — together. It assess the place of the Jafnids and Nasrids in the history of Late Antiquity and, also, in wider historical schema, such as state‐tribe relationships in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in terms of the strands of continuity which linked together the late antique Near East and the early medieval world of the Islamic caliphate. It argues that the Arab groups discussed throughout shed new light on the very important role played by the two major empires — Rome and Sasanian Iran — in affecting concepts of identity for the Arabs, providing another way by which we can see the Muslim invasions of the 7th century as a continuation of pre‐existing processes. Finally, it suggests avenues for future study and ways, going forward, to think about the role and place of Arabs in world history.