In recent years, research on Islamic graffiti from the first and second centuries (seventheighth centuries CE) has shed new light on the early history of Islam and generated a number of methodological problems dealing with the first Arab and Muslim society in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. Arabic graffitology is a branch of epigraphy studying graffiti specifically. Generally speaking, graffiti can be described as private and original documents, each engraved on stone by a single person. The practice of graffiti is the result of a spontaneous production of personal self-expression that could be done during a group performance. They are generally short texts engraved by people who were contemporary with the historical events in the Arabian Peninsula in the first quarter of the seventh century. In fact, the corpus of inscriptions consists of thousands of ‘informal inscriptions’, found during surveys in Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Saudi Arabia. When we speak of informal inscriptions or graffiti, it does not mean that they are badly engraved or in poor condition or barely legible. Some indeed are, but we have also found real masterpieces that could be described as beautiful calligraphic graffiti. Graffiti often enter into an interaction with other texts around them, and may be written over other texts. The most important thing is that they are therefore not subject to the effects of a copying process: these texts are unaffected by linguistic, religious or political censorship and are consequently a source of basic information about Muslim society in the first two centuries AH and after.

As we have often pointed out, graffiti in Islam appear to have a repetitive and mostly religious content, and most of their authors are anonymous. Indeed, they are not seen as important or as refined as official texts, and we have to confess that they suffer from a certain denigration that relegates them to the category of texts of lesser interest. In fact, these texts have not been the subject of a specific major study; often mentioned and published individually or gathered in small local corpora, they have not been properly highlighted.

The first works that gave any importance to the Islamic graffiti date from the 1960s, after the publication of graffiti from Arabia by Adolph Grohmann in 1962, and from Syria and Jordan by Abū ‘l-Faraj al-ʿUshsh and Dmitri Barāmkī in 1964.