When the Arabic speakers of the desert told one another stories of their origins, they traced their lineage back to Abraham. They were the Hagarites: the descendants of Abraham’s union with his wife Sarah’s enslaved person Hagar, which had produced a son called Ishmael. At the time Ishmael’s very existence had been a mixed blessing, for it aroused Sarah’s extreme and lasting enmity. But it had also—so the stories went—produced the Arab people, a race quite distinct from the sons of Abraham’s second son, Isaac, who was revered as patriarch of the twelve tribes of Israel. In one sense all this
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