ABSTRACT
The settlement of conquerors and establishment of the Caliphate reorganised social groups in the Middle East. One of the most salient changes was the emergence of an ‘Arab’ identity as the means to unify the scion of the original conquerors. The process by which early Muslims ‘became Arabs’ required the over-writing of earlier, pre-Islamic identities. This chapter traces the story of perhaps the most important pre-Islamic group – the people Maʿadd. Comparative survey of pre-Islamic and Umayyad-era poetry and prose demonstrates both the importance of Maʿadd as an early Muslim-era community and its gradual eclipse as Maʿaddites re-imagined their identity as Arabs.
