When third/ninth-century Iraqi writers began their efforts to gather the many pieces into which memories of Islam's rise had scattered, they imagined that Islam's first believers all constituted a unified community of Arabs, and they set about assembling narratives of Islam's rise into an Arab story. The sum of their writings had the seminal result of creating the impression that pre-Islamic Arabia was inhabited by ‘Arabs’. Akin to the construction of communal identities across the world, the Muslim-era writings obscured the Arab community's origins in early Islam and cast Arabness back into a deep, ancient pre-history, cobbling memories of tribes, nomads and poets into a robust icon which has long been misread as the ‘ history’ and ‘culture’ of the ‘original Arabs’, and which has long fuelled assumptions that Arab communities ‘must have’ existed in pre-Islamic Arabia.

The history of pre-Islamic ‘Arabs’ ought therefore be approached afresh as the history of the Muslim invention of pre-Islamic ‘Arabs’, and when we interrogate the sources from this perspective, we can begin to grasp the challenges that third/ninth- and fourth/tenth-century writers faced in order to create the cohesive ‘Arab story’, and the creativity they employed to overcome them. We saw that pre-Islamic Arabians had not called themselves ‘Arabs’, and hence Muslim-era writers faced the primary challenge of creating a sense of pre-Islamic ‘Arab identity’ to replace the heterogeneity of pre-Islamic Arabian memories with the homogeneity of one overarching Arabness. There were yet further complications too, because Arabness did not ossify in the third/ninth century into one static archetype. Arabness is an idea, it was the property of Muslim society and it consequently developed in correspondence to changing needs of Muslim discourses. The corpus of Arabic literature written between the late second/eighth and fifth/eleventh centuries is thus a truly unwieldy organism, and it would be naive to assume that all narratives about Arabs and Arab history can be treated identically.

The interpretation of literary references to the word ʿarab will benefit from circumspection that pays due accord to their history – their chronology on the continuum of Arab ethnogenesis that changed the faces of Arabness over time.