Imagining the Arabs
I often tell graduate students that there are three constituent parts to cuttingedge scholarship: (1) the requisite linguistic and historical training, (2) creativity and imagination, and (3) a bold vision that desires to take inherited ideas and subject them to new and rigorous analyses. Very few...
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| Formato: | article |
| Lenguaje: | EN |
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International Institute of Islamic Thought
2017
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://doaj.org/article/634d3e7a0012412baf3c766e99e98a18 |
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| Sumario: | I often tell graduate students that there are three constituent parts to cuttingedge
scholarship: (1) the requisite linguistic and historical training, (2) creativity
and imagination, and (3) a bold vision that desires to take inherited
ideas 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 his
wonderful and thought-provoking Imagining the Arabs. He has presented us
with a paradigm-shifting study, and all subsequent work on the topic will have
to 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 by
various elites in the early Islamic period. Received opinion has, like so much
in early Islamic history, simply repeated what the earliest sources (paradoxically
from later periods) tell us. The assumption is that such sources must be
true 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 as
engaged in the dual processes of ethnogenesis and mythopoesis.
Tradition assumes that the Arabs were a homogenous group of of Bedouins
that 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 America
were essentially the same with respect to religion, culture, and ethnicity, and
something that ignores that the aforementioned terms have distinct lineages in
modern political and nationalist thought. Then in the seventh century CE, so
the story continues, these Arabs adopted a new faith, to wit, Islam, and rapidly
conquered the Middle East and beyond. Study after study has simply assumed
that these “Arabs,” while sensitive to poetry, represented a form of militarized ...
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