This is a book about Arabic in the social world in the pre-modern and modern periods. It deals with identity and conflict in society, showing their continuity as features of social life, as well as the variety of ways in which they are manifested through debates about language in the political, cultural and theological spheres. The book therefore straddles many areas, hence the reference to the ‘social world’ in characterising the book, rather than framing it under ‘sociolinguistics’ or the ‘sociology of language’ as general headings, although it addresses researchers from these two constituencies from multiple perspectives. Owing to this broad framing, the book will be topic based and thematic, rather than chronological. It selects a few productive sites from which to pursue the twin themes of identity and conflict through, not in, language and deals with them in reference to the set of principles outlined below. The data utilised for this book are therefore second order perspectives on language, rather than data that are culled from language use, as is customary in formal linguistics. In other words, the data contained within this book are meta-linguistic, rather than linguistic in nature. Owing to this, these data tend to relate to the extra-linguistic world, rather than issues of linguistic structure or how data of this kind directly relate to social variables, such as those that abound in Arabic correlational sociolinguistics.