An identity as seen by the members of a group rather than outsiders.
Identity can come from outside. Moreover, for the human being it comes from outside. His mother, father, etc.
The same for a group : he can coming from outside : especially when this group has not developed already a specific culture
Webb is not trained as a psychologist or as historian, but as a professor of Arabic :
Peter Webb studied Arabic at SOAS, University of London and at the University of Damascus.My French teachers has never spoke of the French "identity"...
Talking of "identity" he is talking of things he knows nothing about. I've already posted here a paper of Philipp Wood about that kind of problem of who is talking of Islam in England...
For me, Webb is not competent :
There is almost no trace of ‘Arabs’ in the pre-Islamic historical record,
He plays on words.
and the Arab ethnos seemingly emerges out of nowhere to take centre-stage in Muslim-era Arabic literature
It emerges from what? The Quran.
This thesis examines Arabness and Muslim narratives of pre-Islamic history with the dual aims of (a) better understanding Arab origins; and (b) probing the reasons why classical- era Muslims conceptualised Arab ethnic identity in the ways portrayed in their writings.
Why? the Quran.
It demonstrates the likelihood that the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula was in fact ‘Arab-less’, and that Islam catalysed the formation of Arab identity as it is familiar today.
No : all the Arabs imported by Constantinople to Palestine from the beginning of the 5th c. were from the Peninsula.
Yes Islam : but only the Quran.
These Muslim notions of Arabness were then projected backwards in reconstructions of pre-Islamic history (al-Jāhiliyya) to retrospectively unify the pre- Islamic Arabians as all ‘Arabs’.
Yes, but it does not mean that before there was no Arabness. Not expressed because there was no tools to do it.
Then your question was :
What evidence would you see for the existence of a pre-Islamic Arab identity?
Would you see all speakers of some form of Arabic as being included within that identity?
1/Therefore, there is no evidence.
2/ Possible.
The identity given to the Arabs by the Quran corresponds to the one we can observe to be given to them
by Christians and Jews before it.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today