Professor Shahid on the Arabs of Late Antiquity

Left to right: Professor Irfan Shahid and Professor Ramzi Baalbaki

The distinct achievements of the Arabs from the fourth to the seventh century were reviewed in condensed, scholarly detail in the lecture entitled "The Arabs in Late Antiquity: Their Role, Achievement, and Legacy," which was given on November 8 by renowned Georgetown University scholar Irfan Shahid. Sponsored by the Department of Arabic in College Hall, the lecture was part of the department's Distinguished Lecturer Series of the Margaret Jewett Chair of Arabic.

Professor Shahid described the last phase of the Jahilliya period, the years before the rise of Islam, emphasizing through linguistic and ethnic interpretations the distinctly Arab nature of the Arabian peninsula, as different from the Semitic, non-Arab South Arabia populated in this period of late antiquity by the Himyarites. Focusing on the emergence of a uniquely Arab identity, Shahid analyzed the Arab society from the fourth to seventh centuries as both rural and urban, showing the pastoralists of Inner Arabia surrounded by an arc of Arab cities extending clockwise from Najran to Hira.

At the end of the antique period, through the emergence of Islam, the Arabs channeled their resources, achieving their identity through language and poetry, through the concept of literary excellence, as well as through urbanization. "Mohammed succeeded because he was a Meccan," and also because he had intimate knowledge of trade. The Arabs moved from a people to a nation. According to Professor Shahid, with the Christian world in chaos, the contributions of the Arab urban centers, the power of the Quran, and the Arab cavalry-an invincible instrument of conquest and international trade propelled by the caravan-enabled the Arabs to challenge and subdue two world powers, Byzantium and Persia, thus changing the course of world history.

Professor Shahid is the Oman Professor of Arabic and Islamic Literature at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1963. A graduate of Oxford and Princeton (PhD, 1953), he has produced numerous publications on Arab-Byzantine relations, including a six-volume work on the pre-Islamic period of late antiquity, published by Dumbarton Oaks, the Byzantine Institute of Harvard University. These volumes are also the prolegomena climaxing his work in the area, The Rise of Islam and the Arab Conquests.