THE PRESENT WORK was initially stimulated by the feeling that the way modern scholarship has dealt with the issues concerning the relations between Arabs and non-Arabs in early Islam has left both major and minor gaps to be filled. In particular, research thus far has focused primarily on the evidence of historical texts, and has paid only slight attention to the rich and varied materials in ∼adith and tafsīr. One must of course concede that this material is basically anachronistic, representing retrojections of later controversies, but the fact that almost all currents are represented in it adds to rather than detracts from its value for historical research.

As the present work has implicitly shown, the methodological problems facing modern scholarship on such matters are also of a conceptual nature. Failure to deal with the relations between Arabs and non-Arabs beyond the paradigm of conquerors and converted from among the conquered has been a major factor behind the inability of contemporary research to come to terms with the sharp discrepancies in the relevant material. To all intents, an a priori acceptance of the notion that the Arab polity and Islam coincided right from the outset, i.e. that Islam, in more or less the classical form that has reached us, was from the beginning the religious project of whatever political entity the Arabs had in the seventh century AD, is not sustained by Muslim tradition itself if the latter is subjected to critical scrutiny. Moreover, it must be recognized that in order to move such a scheme from the domain of chimera to that of historical reality, one must presume the operation of certain material and physical factors. But that is in itself problematic. The proposition that Arabia could have constituted the source of the vast material power required to effect such changes in world affairs within so short a span of time is, to say the least, a thesis calling for proof and substantiation rather than a secure foundation upon which one can build. One may observe, for example, that in spite of all its twentieth-century oil wealth, Arabia still does not possess such material and spiritual might.