Is Arab History a Fraud?

Meet the scholars who think it is

Before it was united by Islam under a single religious polity, or umma, the Arabian Peninsula was inhabited by a large number of tribes, which vied against each other for power and prestige. Some of them formed kingdoms, like the Himyarites in Yemen or the Lakhmids on the coast of the Persian gulf, many of whose monuments are still present today.

But stones aren’t the only remnants of this ancient era. In the ongoing struggle for political influence, the spoken word emerged as a crucial weapon. Accordingly, every tribe had its resident poets, who composed eulogies for its fallen men, boasted about past accomplishments, and hurled vicious rhetoric against their enemies. These poems are still known to us now, and give us a remarkable glimpse of this time in Arab history.

This story is a central part of Arabic culture: it is engrained in the consciousness of every Arab, and enshrined in their educational curricula. This only makes it more remarkable that some scholars consider it to be a complete fabrication — nothing more than myth and fable.

The orthodox view

This much, at least, is clear: pre-Islamic Arabia was a tribal society with a strong polytheistic bent. With the advent of Islam, tribal loyalties were superseded by allegiance…