Muriel Debié important paper (2016 in French) strikes femininely against the traditional account.
https://www.academia.edu/31247639/Les_controverses_miaphysites_en_Arabie_et_le_Coran_p._137-156_in_Les_controverses_religieuses_en_syriaque_F._Ruani_dir._Paris_Geuthner_2016_%C3%89tudes_syriaques_13_Extracts in English (thanks to
https://www.deepl.com/translator) :
Miaphysites controversies in Arabia and the Koran
The idea of Jāhiliyya, a state of ignorance supposed to characterize Arabia before the revelation of the Koran, as it was built by Islamic tradition, continues to influence the perception of the pre-Islamic history of the peninsula and its inhabitants. The Arab-Muslim memory was formed on the distance of a pre-historic antiquity, in fact little documented by the scriptures , pre-existing to the Islamic history that begins with the Prophet and the revelation of the Koran . It has helped to prevent Arabia from thinking about Arabia in the context of Late Antiquity since its history begins at nine with Muḥammad, with a forerunner - plunged into the darkness of ignorance, only embellished with the great one tradition of pre-Islamic poetry - and one after, illuminated by the truth descended into the Koran. So much so that it's only recently and in a way
still insufficient that Arabia has been reintegrated into the concert of nations or rather late ancient empires.
Because his antiquity is neither the one classical studies - which have forged the concept of late antiquity -, nor that of the Islamists, for whom history begins in Muḥammad, the study of pre-Islamic Arabia remains an imprecise zone at the intersection between current academic disciplines.
[...] The absence of writings other than epigraphic and the absence of Arabic script also contributed to forging the idea that Arabia was outside the prevailing movements of ideas and cultures in late antiquity, plunging it into obscurantism . The insistence on tribes and thus an unwritten Bedouin culture, as developed by the Islamic tradition, which emphasizes oral poetry as the only place where tribal Arab memory was built before Islam, has also contributed to considering pre-Islamic Arabs as illiterate . This position makes it difficult to explain Jewish and Christian influences in the Qur' an, if the Arab world were indeed cut off from the literate networks (the way of conceiving the Qur' an as revealed and thus free of contacts with other religious groups further accentuates this aspect).
[...] The acts of the "Western" Councils (west of the Tiger) have retained the names of the bishops of the Arab tribes and the Roman province of Arabia. The Acts of the Councils of the Church of the East enable us to trace the hierarchies present on the shores of the Persian Gulf and up to and including al-Ḥīra, and draw the contours of the temptations of independence from the Catholicos of Seleucia-Cesiphon. Like the others, the Arabs participated in the movements of religious definitions. Christianity was a major component of tribal culture, although of course only part of them and their members had adopted Christianity.
The term "Christian Arabic" is problematic in this respect because it seems to define a unified identity different from that of non-Christian Arabs (polytheists and Jews, in particular, later Muslims).
Here, as elsewhere, the question of Christian affiliations must invite us to be attentive to pluralism that controversial literature expresses. It is not only different churches that are competing with each other (Byzantine Churches, Syrian, Egyptian and Ethiopian Miaphysites, Syro-Eastern Churches of the Eastern Church), but also networks of individual and collective fidelity that are emerging through visits and exchanges of letters: networks of intellectual, dogmatic and spiritual proximity, if not geographical, across topographical and climatic barriers, as well as anthropological and linguistic barriers, and across political boundaries. With al-Ḥārith ibn Jabalah/Arethas ( 520-569/70) appearing as the patron saint of the miaphysites and appealing to Empress Theodora to obtain a bishop of his denomination (Theodore, ordained in 542/3 by Jacques Baradée for the ḥirta d-tayyoye the "Camp of the Arabs" ), the question of the controversies between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians lies at the heart of the relations between the Eastern Roman Empire and its Arab clients. al-Ḥārith or his son Mundhir sponsored a meeting between Miaphysites opponents whose chronicle of Michel the Syrian reports and which took place at Bet Mar Serge's monastery in GBYT' : Peter of Callinice, patriarch of Antioch (581-591), and Damien of Alexandria (578-605), who clashed over accusations of tritheism, i. e. on properties, roles and relations in Trinity . The meeting was stormy, the participants almost came to their hands and the outcome was inconclusive.
In Arabia proper, controversies arise through the correspondence of Syrian bishops. The letters written by three contemporaries, Jacques de Saroug (452-521), Philoxène de Mabboug (around 440-523) and Siméon de Bet Aršam (m. about 540) show that three major figures of the Miaphysite movement, who were also active controversies, had regular links with Arabia. They testify to the influence in the peninsula of the contemporary controversies between Christians and Jews and between the different Christian denominations: between Miaphysites and Nestorians on the one hand and between Miaphysites on the other, while divisions within the opponents of Chalcedony raged.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today