THE QUESTION of whether Mu﹜:tammad was initially perceived as a prophet sent to the Arabs or, alternatively, to mankind in general, does not alter the historical fact that the spread of Islam throughout its first two centuries coincided historically with the rise of the Arab polity. Different key terms and aspects of the relationship between Arabism and Islam, which were crucial for the development of both, have been studied by modern scholars. Among these mention may be made of the terms ummaand ummī Islam as a genuine “national” Arabian form of monotheism;the process of the “arabization of Islam;“ the role of Arabic as the language of the Qur'an; the process and tribal nature of Arab settlement; the question of whether Islam on the whole can considered as a bedouin and desert, rather than a sedentary, religion and culture; the relationship between the Arab “conquistador” and the peoples converted to Islam as mawālī,and the position and role played by the latter in the different fields of Muslim life;and finally, the emergence of what Syriac-speaking Christians referred to as an Arab malkūtā(kingdom) and a perception of an Arab menace in Syriac and Persian apocalypses, respectively.

A few studies have specifically addressed certain aspects of the issue of the relations between Arabs and non-Arabs within the Muslim empire. Among these mention may be made of the works of Goldziher on the Shu'ūbīya and “Arab and ‘Ajam," ” as well as Wellhausen's views concerning the national and racial motives behind the ‘Abbasid revolution. But the point of departure of these works, as well as that of the critical follow-ups made by some scholars, has been that such relations developed within the historical framework of an Arab “conquistador” on the one hand and those “converted among the conquered,” to use Lewis’ words; hence, such studies have concentrated upon the examination of only the early ‘Abbāsid and later phases of these relations. Such an approach implies an a prioriacceptance of the notion that the rise of the Arab polity and Islam were one and the same thing from the beginning, and no serious attempt has been made to use the relevant traditional material to examine the validity of this notion.