pre-Islamic Arabia
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The Confluence of Two Seas: India and Arabia
The author opens with Dara Shikoh’s treatise on the similarities of Hinduism and Islam and his execution under Aurangzeb, then sets out to tell the story of Arabia before and…
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The Ambition of the Emirates
The Emissary frames the rise of the Emirates through the old Arab pattern of settled and nomadic peoples, tracing the Gulf Arabs’ roots to Nabatean, South Arabian and Bedouin streams…
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The myth of Arabian paganism, and the Jewish-Christian origins of the Umayyads
Citing a Twitter thread, the author notes that religious inscriptions from sixth-century Arabia appear invariably Christian rather than pagan, which sits uneasily with Islamic tradition and the Book of Idols’…
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Review: Arabs. A Three Thousand Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
A review of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Arabs, a three-thousand-year history. The reviewer praises its scope and its insistence that Arab identity, defined above all by the Arabic language, long predates Islam.…
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Browncast episode 37: Arabian Linguistics, pre-Islamic Arabia
On Browncast Episode 37, Ahmed Al Jallad of Ohio State University discusses the origins of Arabic, probably in the north-west of the peninsula, the script’s likely Nabataean roots, and inscriptions…
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Three Graces of Islam
A two-line post calling Persian, Arabic and Urdu God’s new favourites and pointing to the pre-Islamic goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat named in Qur’an 53:19-20.
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Review: The Hajj, by FE Peters
Reviews F. E. Peters’s history of the Hajj from its pre-Islamic origins to 1926, finding the discussion of how pre-Islamic pilgrimage rituals were modified and combined with the Umrah the…
