The novel appearance of al-ʿarab in Umayyad-era poetry as a term of selfreference points decisively to the period when ideas of Arab communal consciousness gained wide acceptance to articulate a shared identity, but the verses alone do not explain why early Muslims during the later first/seventh century chose the name ‘Arab’ to identify themselves. The word al-ʿarab appeared as an understood byword for the large collective – but where did early Muslims find the word and why did it become their ethnonym? These questions are important because peoples’ choice to identify as ‘Arabs’ would not have been idle: Arabness replaced earlier identities and subsumed formerly disparate groups under a new umbrella – people changed who they thought they were and how they related to each other. Such transitions are contested processes that produce fissures and inconsistencies in the historical record, and the following chapters trace the flow of Arabness ideas over Islam's first centuries. As a prelude, this chapter tackles the genesis of Arabness as a symbol of community, a task that leads us to investigate the source of the word ‘Arab’ as an ethnonym and the ways which sociopolitical structures during Islam's first century prompted the formation of Arab identity.

‘Arab’: an Ethnonym Resurrected?

The reason why early Muslims identified themselves as Arabs remains obscure. Chapter 1 traced the extensive use of ‘Arab’-cognates to connote ‘outsider nomads’ since Antiquity, but we lack an explanation as to why a group of people would transform ‘Arab’ into a reference for their own community. In order to elucidate the emergence of the Arabs’ name, there is an ostensibly analogous case in Late Antiquity where a label for ‘other’ did transform into an ethnonym for ‘self’: this was the name ‘Berber’. The genesis of the Berber ethnonym appears analogous to ‘Arab’ inasmuch as ‘Berber’ was initially a Greek and Latin term connoting ‘outsiders’, and in Late Antiquity an array of communities on the fringes of Roman/Byzantine control in North Africa embraced the name as a term of their own self-reference.