This extended essay is a study of historical possibilities offered by Arabic literary sources pertaining to the history of the Arabs in late antique times, during the centuries immediately preceding Muḥammad and up to and including the Umayyad period. Its purpose is to redress the balance of judgement regarding the utility of these sources for the reconstruction of the social, political, cultural and religious history of the Arabs as they were still pagans, and to reconstruct the emergence of Muḥammadan and immediately post-Muḥammadan religion and polity. For this religion (including the composition and canonisation of its Qur’ānic scripture), the label Paleo-Islam has been coined, in order to lend historical specificity to this particular period, distinguishing it from what came before and what was to come later, all the while indicating continuities that do not, in themselves, belie the specificity attributed to this period of very rapid change, on an assumption that ends are often unforeseen and not necessarily inherent in beginnings. This view is defended extensively in my book The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People, to which this book is both a companion and a technical preface. It is also a book where the issues raised in the pages that follow are addressed at a different order of detail throughout.

Studies of literary sources for the Paleo-Muslim period have in recent decades been the occasion for sharp divergences of opinion and interpretation, some, as will be seen, carrying with them an older repertoire of views of nineteenth century vintage, and of motifs that are much older still, best expressed in what I shall designate henceforth as the hyper-critical school. While it goes without saying that the historian should proceed according to criteria of veracity and in line with procedures of research that are cogent and credible according to the general canons of modern historical research, and while there is little dispute among scholars that Arabic narrative sources are often used uncritically and are beset by a variety of problems, this book will propose that they are neither unmanageable nor especially bizarre in themselves.