Islamic History

Pre-Islamic Arab Self Identity

Last updated: April 17th, 2025 at 9:04 am · Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes

Arabs used to identify themselves as a separate ethnic group before advent of Islam.  However, they did not have a self identity as a nation.

King Shalmaneser III calls them ‘Arabs’ in Kurkh Stele.1.  Since then they have been being identified as a distinct ethnic group by foreign historical sources right up to sixth century CE.2  Late antique foreign sources called them, rather spitefully, Saracens (born to Saʾrah ساءره), Ishmaelites (descendants of Ismā’il اسماعيل) or Tayi (belonging to the nomadic tribe of Ṭāʾī  طاءِى).3  “Many different nations are native to Arabia,” writes Theophylact Simocatte (d. 630 CE), “Whom the masses are accustomed to call Saracen.”4  Here Theophylact Simotta is clear that Arabs he knows of were not one homogenous group and that it were the others who called them Saracene.   It means the foreign sources are segregating a people who were not part of their own group, and for them the terms Arab, Saracene, Ishmaelite or Tayi meant all the human groups living within the geographic boundaries of Arabia.  They keep us in suspense about how Arabs identified themselves.

As many external sources have mentioned Arabs as a distinct group, it is unlikely that the Arabs, especially those living in their neighbourhood, were devoid of any ethnic self-identity. However, evidence is lacking until 328 CE when an Arabic inscription describes one person as king of Arabs (mlk al-‘Arb).5  This inscription, written by Arabic-speaking people, clearly indicates that the Arabs were self-aware of their ethnic identity by the beginning of the fourth century CE.  Further, they did not call themselves Saracene, Ishmaelite or Tayi, which were derogatory terms coined by hostile cultural groups.

The group identity of being Arab must have continued and further strengthened, as the 522 CE inscription of Ma’dikarib Ya’far from central Najd not only mentions Arabs living in highlands and Tihamah of Hadramaut and Yemen, but also boasts of subduing Arabs living in central Arabia.6

Inscriptional records do not tell us what did the Arabs mean by this term.  We have to look into pre-Islamic poetry and the Arab lore preserved by the early Islamic sources for our answer.   Use of term ‘Arab’ is relatively underrepresented in pre-Islamic poetry. It was rather used as a reference to the culture of a group rather than a political entity an individual would associate with.  It means a group of people could be the best of Arabs but an individual would still be a Quraysh (قريش) or a Bakri and not Arab.  For example, Imru’ al-Qays (d. c. 540 CE), the chief of Kindah, (not to be confused with Imru’ al-Qays  of Namara inscription) while praising his father, does not claim that he was the best of Arabs but says he was the best of Ma’add.7  It appears that for pre-Islamic Arabs the term ‘Arab’ meant all those tribes which were loosely knit to each other by a shared cultural norms.

Pre-Islamic Arabs were not single ethnicity.  Northern Arabs were fairer in complexion than the southern Arabs. That is the reason when deputation of Najran came to Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, he asked “Who these Indians are?”8  The term Arab did not cover the ethnicity, it covered the culture formed around common language and customs.

Scholars are yet debating if late antique Arabs were on the way to attaining nationhood.9  Askar, a Saudi scholar, claims that the settled Arabs had started associating themselves with the region they resided in.  This is usually a first step towards formation of a nation in modern sense.10  Similarly, Serjeant thinks that the pre-Islamic Arabs had a tendency towards organizing themselves into a faith based group, which could have lead to faith based nationhood.  He cites presence of some inscriptions in south Arabia mentioning the ‘community of Athar’ knitted around faith on a similar pattern as Prophet Muhammad later built.11

The term Arab begins to be used more commonly in the works of Hassan bin Thabit (Ḥassān bin Thābit حَسّان بِن ثابِت), Prophet Muhammad’s ‘poet laureates’ and occurs more frequently in poetical texts of the Umayyad period to designate ‘the Arab nation’.12

Arabs attained nationhood in political sense only after advent of Islam, and that was based mainly upon faith.  Language or geography were secondary.

Further Reading

History of Islam, Pre-Islam Arab Social Structure. https://historyofislam.org/social-structure-of-pre-islamic-arabs/ 

Footnotes

  1. Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient records of Assyria and Babylonia, vol. I  (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1926), 223.
  2. For a brief survey of accounts of Arabs in foreign sources see: Valentina A. Grasso, Pre-Islamic Arabia: Societies, Politics, Cults, and Identities during Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 23 – 28.
  3. For the way Arabs were called by Greek writing neighbours see: Procopius, History of the wars, Books I and II, ed. and trans. H. B. Dewing (London: William Heinemann, 1914), 159, Vol. I.  For use of Tayi in Syriac for the Arabs see: Joshua the Stylite, The Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, ed. and trans. W. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), 15, paragraph XXII.
  4. Theophylact Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. and trans. Michael and Mary Whitby, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 244.
  5. James A. Bellamy, A New Reading of the Namārah Inscription, Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 no.1 (1985): 31 – 51. (Namara inscription; inscription RES 483).
  6. For the original notes of the discoverer see: Gonzague Ryckmans, “Inscriptions sud-Arabes,” Dixième Série. Le Muséon 66 (1953): 307 – 310, Pl. VI.  See also: Iwona Gajda, Ḥimyar gagné par le monothéisme (IVe-Vie siècle de l’ère chrétienne).  Ambitions et ruine d’un royaume de l’Arabie méridionale antique. (Université d’Aix-en-Provence, 1997): 88 – 89.  (Inscription Ry 510; Ma’sal 2).
  7. Gustave E. Grunebaum, “The nature of Arab Unity before Islam”, Arabica 10, no. 1 (1963): 20.
  8. Muhammad Ibn Ishaq. The life of Muhammad, ed. and trans. Alfred Guillaume (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 646.
  9. For possible ways of state formation in a tribal society see:  Steven C. Caton, “Anthropological Theories of Tribe and State formation in the Middle East: Ideology and the Semiotics of Power,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, eds. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 74 – 108.
  10. Abdullah al-Askar. Al-Yamama: in the Early Islamic Era, (Riyadh: King Abdul Aziz Foundation, 2002), 3.
  11. Robert B. Serjeant, “Haram and Hawtah, the Sacred Enclave in Arabia,” In Melanges Taha Husain, ed. Abdurrahman al-Badwai, (Cairo: Dar al Ma’arif, 1962), 49.  For the inscription see: Nikolaus Rhodokanakis. Studien zur Lexicographie und Grammatik des Altsüdarabischen,  (Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1915), 590 (CLXXVIII, IV).
  12. Gustave E. Grunebaum, “The nature of Arab Unity before Islam”, Arabica 10, no. 1 (1963): 20.
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