INTRODUCTION

The Arab League, Arab nationalism; Arabic numerals, Arabic literature; the Arabian Peninsula, the Arabian Nights. The English language makes use of several epithets to describe the people, language, and region whose literary creativity is the topic of this book. The Arabic language itself, by contrast, has a single word, 'arabī, an adjective derived from what must be one of the earliest words in the history of the language, 'arab, originally used to describe the nomadic peoples in the central regions of what is now termed the Arabian Peninsula. Quite how far back the existence of the 'arab can be traced is difficult to say, but a group called the ar-ba-a-a are cited as components of an army in cuneiform inscriptions dating from as early as 853 bc. At the end of the 1950s the same word, 'arab, was used by Jamāl ʾAbd al-Nāṣir (Nasser), the President of Egypt, when he proclaimed in a speech that ‘from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf we are Arabs’.

In this chapter I will provide a series of contexts that are intended to serve as background for the investigations of the genres of Arabic literature that follow. Firstly I will discuss two particular contexts within which the literary tradition has been created, developed, and recorded: the physical and the linguistic.