A warring collection of tribes with various dialects and...

A warring collection of tribes with various dialects and with none or very little of cultural life, especially on the intellectual plane.Islam introduced such an unimaginable qualitative change into the life of the Arabs that it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it ' created ' the Arab identity anew. The Qurayshi dialect was turned into the richest language in the world and one of the most wide-spread.

Islam won for that tongue adherents that came from non-Arab cultures and it was responsible for turning it into a tool of thought and expression in many fields of science and scholarship. It spread it far beyond its original home and speakers. Similarly, the Arab society was totally transformed in its structures, customs, aims, and outlooks by Islam.

This religion is a constitutive principle of Arab social and intellectual life for the past fourteen centuries, and the attempt to posit an 'Arab nationalism' without Islam or in confrontation with it is inconceivable if not utterly absurd.

At the same time, an Arab nationalism that tries to take account of Islam will find itself in an impossible position; for the universal claims of Islam and its insistence on full allegiance to its tenets, as well as its priority over other attachments, ensure that it rejects nationalism as a modern form of ancient tribalism or hamiyyat al-jahiliyyah (the fanatical clinging to pre-Islamic loyalties). The Arabic language and culture have been made by and contained within Islam and not the reverse.

Islam has not been a passing and limited stage occurring to an otherwise independent and developed history or tradition of Arab culture and society that had their own line of growth. The same view applies to Arab history, which is Islamic history along with the history of the many peoples that accepted Islam. In fact, Islam is the common denominator that ties the life and history of a great mass of humanity together.

As a total religion, Islam has shaped all the aspects of the societies that embraced it and linked them together in a vast entity which often found a political expression in the caliphate system. A non-clerical creed, Islam does not have a separate, isolated history within a church, for instance.