Peoples, Tribes and the PROPHET

Who would have thought, then, that Muhammad, a Qurayshite, prophet of the Arabs, would not be considered a "true" Arab?!

Photo by Sajimon Sahadevan on Unsplash

In the most recent chapter of this endless book about the Middle East and its themes, published on 02/14/2025, I closed the text with the following excerpt that discussed a second part of a Surah from the Quran that I had dealt with in the previous post, from 02/08/2025. I had reproduced the verses, but I had not referenced the Surah. I do so now: it is Surah 49, called The Apartments, and the verse below is number 14. I was saying then, in conclusion, that:

“And, by chance, this continuation fits my argument:

The Bedouins (al a'rab) say: “We Believe"
Say: “You do not believe. Instead you may say: ‘We surrender,’ but faith has not entered yuor hearts.”

See that here we come in contact with a new word that could be translated as "Arabs," albeit for lack of option: the word a'rab is sometimes used negatively for those less sophisticated, more backward, more ignorant Arabs, and other times is used to refer to nomads or Bedouins. Of course, some can do both things at the same time, depending on their judgment of the Bedouins.

Beyond this vocabulary richness of the Arabic language, evidenced in the Surah in question, the verse brings us proof that the Prophet himself found difficulty in convincing all Arabs, all tribes, to join him in sincere, genuine faith. In this case, the reference is made to a group of Bedouins who would have embraced the religion only for convenience...”

I had, until then, spoken of Arabs as a noun meaning "nomads," had spoken of the Arabs as a people, or several, with clear identification markers, had remembered when I would say, and sometimes hear, we the Arabs, and, other times, they the Arabs. I had discussed clan and tribal identities and their importance among the Arabs. And I had discussed the distinctions, the binomials: "peoples and tribes" and "nomads and settled."

In finishing my text as I had done, I wanted to show that the same Surah that told us God had created humanity as a multiplicity of peoples and tribes, so that they might know one another, affirmed that some among the nomads, among the Bedouins, called a'rab, had converted out of mere convenience.

We discovered there that, from the point of view of the Prophet and his first audience, it was possible to refer in a certain way to "they the Arabs" using a different term that existed in their vocabulary, a'rab, which meant nomads or Bedouins. Unless I am mistaken, it is possible to hear the expression still today, throughout the Arab World, loaded with pejorative meanings. We also discovered that the Prophet belonged to a settled, sedentary society!

The time has not yet come to speak in depth about Islam; we will still stay for a while with the Arabs and their identity and, as promised, before we reach the religion revealed to Muhammad, we will pass through the language.

For this very reason, the reference to the Prophet today serves so that, taking his figure as a pivot, we perceive more about the Arabs, about their organization into tribes and clans, about their distribution in the territory, installed in cities and oases or in continuous movement.

Mecca

The city in which the Prophet was born was precisely that, a city. It was not a temporary encampment and it was not an oasis either. It was a city that lived off commerce and the fact that, being the repository of various idols and gods of diverse tribes, it received many pilgrims coming from all over the Arabian peninsula.

Photo by Mseesquare Shahiq on Unsplash

Not being an oasis, although it seems to have had a water source, it could not exploit agriculture and its population needed to seek supplies in relatively distant cities. What made its wealth, however, was its ideal location on the trade routes that connected fertile Yemen, in the south of the peninsula and, beyond it, India, with the Levant and with the Roman and Sassanid empires to the north.

Quraysh

As we have already learned, the fact that many Arabs had become sedentary did not cause them to abandon or lose identification with tribal and clan codes. It is true that some of these codes, some of the traditions, could be adapted, modified, or diluted in an urban context.