Pre-Islamic Arabia : Societies, Politics, Cults and Identities during Late Antiquity

Full study of the interactions of cultures in pre-Islamic Arabia. Investigates the cultural milieu where the inhabitants of the peninsula lived and connects the neglected socio-political, religious and economic history of Arabia with its surroundings in order to construct a coherent historical narrative out of our fragmentary sources.

This book delves into the political and cultural developments of pre-Islamic Arabia, focusing on the religious attitudes of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension into the Syrian desert. Between the third and the seventh century, Arabia was on the edge of three great empires (Iran, Rome and Aksu¯m) and at the centre of a lucrative network of trade routes. Valentina Grasso offers an interpretative framework which contextualizes the choice of Arabian elites to become Jewish sympathisers and/or convert to Christianity and Islam by probing the mobilization of faith in the shaping of Arabian identities. For the first time the Arabians of the period are granted autonomy from marginalizing (mostly Western) narratives framing them as ''barbarians'' inhabiting the fringes of Rome and Iran and/or deterministic analyses in which they are depicted retrospectively as exemplified by the Muslims'' definition of the period as Ja¯hili¯yah, ''ignorance''.