Robert G. Hoyland on the Pre-Conquest Arab Peoples

They are very difficult to write about because the term the term "Arab" has, as one would expect, meant different things to different people at different times since it was first introduced into the historical record almost three millennia ago. A recent academic study into the nature of pre-Islamic Arabs concluded that they were nomadic, camel-rearing, religiously fanatical desert warriors, essentially lumping together all the stereotypes about them held by settled peoples, on whose writings the author had relied for his data. These stereotypes have endured into our age, reinforced by films such as Lawrence of Arabia, and so it is immensely difficult to persuade even educated people that Arabs were not all nomadic desert-dwellers, and indeed that some were sedentary and even members of the imperial elite. The idea of Arabia as a harsh unchanging desert world populated by only heroic, martial Bedouin has a romantic fascination for Western culture - and for many Middle Eastern societies too, which have regarded the Arabian deserts and their denizens as the source from whence they all hailed. In reality, Arabia has harbored a number of different peoples, some of which did not define themselves as Arabs, and some of which possessed advanced and complex cultures. It was also not as remote as is generally assumed, but was heavily exposed to the influences and machinations of empires and enjoyed mercantile contacts with other polities such as Ethiopia and India.

Hoyland, Robert G. In God's Hands: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford University Press, 2015, 21-22.