How did Arab poets experience the rise of the Islamic empire? How can Umayyad poetry help us understand this formative moment in human history? In this article, I explore the potential of Umayyad poetry for writing the history of the period, focusing on poetry of the soldiers in the Umayyad armies—men distant from political power yet serving as its instruments and deeply affected by the empire’s expansion and consolidation. Their verses complicate the traditional celebratory narratives of the Islamic conquests by giving voice to loss, grievance, and dislocation, revealing the human costs behind imperial triumph. Through its shared tone of nostalgia, this poetry not only preserves perspectives rarely heard in the historical record but also contributes to the emerging history of emotions in the early Islamic world.

Neither of the terms commonly used to describe the seventh-century expansion of the movement that comes to be called Islam – “the Islamic conquests” or “the Arab conquests” – is satisfactory; both terms are anachronistic and in some ways misleading; yet there is, at present, no clear candidate for an alternative terminology. This article discusses the weaknesses of existing nomenclatures, with reference to relevant primary sources, and the conceptual problems the traditional nomenclatures pose in the context of an extensive review of scholarly literature from roughly 1900 to the present. It offers a few suggestions for possible new terminologies, but essentially opens the question for further discussion.

This paper attempts to reconstruct aspects of the phonology and morphology of the Arabic of the Islamic conquests on the basis of Greek transcriptions in papyri of the first Islamic century. The discussion includes phonemic and allophonic variation in consonants and vowels, and nominal morphology. The essay concludes with a discussion on possible Aramaic and South Arabian influences in the material, followed by a short appendix with remarks on select Arabic terms from the pre-Islamic papyri.