Review: Arabs and Empires before Islam, ed. Greg Fisher (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2015; pp. xxvii + 580. £120; pb. [2017] £30).

Abstract

One of the responses to the revisionist scholarship of the 1970s and ’80s on early Islam has been a reinvigorated engagement with the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. The revisionists focused their attention on the Islamic tradition and on Islamic-era events. This was in part because of a lack, or perceived lack, of contemporaneous evidence for pre-Islamic Arabia—especially for West Arabia, where Muhammad was said to have been active. Indeed, the possibility that Islam had not originated in West Arabia at all was countenanced.