A book about the history of the Arab people strikes its path into seemingly well-worn ground. There is nearly a millennium-worth of Arabic literature and a several century-strong tradition of European writing that portrays the Arabs as Arabia's original population, an array of ancient Bedouin tribes roaming vast expanses of solemn sand-sea until the dawn of the seventh century when Islam's rise stirred them from their long Arabian subsistence into a wave of rapid conquest and settlement across the Middle East that laid the ground for today's Arab World. This familiar story has persuaded many, and the sum of much historical writing about the Arabs has erected a venerable icon of the ‘original’ Arab as a camelback desert nomad. Accordingly, a writer of Arab history may seem to have little left to achieve, save adding some names and dates to the great tableau of the Arabian–Arab Desert, but when research recently began probing some of the time-honoured stereotypes of Arab origins, the entire model began to wobble, and it now appears that we need to rethink the Arab story with entirely new orientations.

The root of the problem of Arab history is a crisis of plausibility. The traditional Arab origin story is too facile and the conventional image of the original Arab as a bescarved nomad astride his camel is more a romantic fancy than historical reality. Recent studies have encountered difficulties finding even any expressions of Arab identity in Antiquity, and it now seems wrong to assume that all inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula can legitimately be counted as Arabs, or that Arabs originated as Bedouin. The date when Arabs emerged as a distinct group of people is also currently disputed: some even venture that no Arab communities existed before Islam. The beginnings of Arab history have become uncertain, and there are yet deeper misunderstandings still awaiting due evaluation.

The traditional stereotype that Arabs originated as Bedouin tribes provided a tidy concept of ‘the Arab’ which enabled us to think of Arabs as one demographic category neatly segregated from other populations of the Late Antique Middle East, but in so doing it lumped generations of people into a static snapshot of Bedouin primitivism.