Days of the Arabs

For a list of conflicts in pre-Islamic Arabia, see List of wars and battles in pre-Islamic Arabia.

In Arabic literature, the Days of the Arabs (Arabic: أيام العرب, romanized: ayyām al-ʿArab) is a genre of legendary narratives about warfare in pre-Islamic Arabia. The genre represents the oldest extant Arabic narratives.

A few of the battles of the Ayyām (Battle Days) were major, but most were minor skirmishes. Skirmishes could escalate into major battles, as conflicts or petty disputes between individuals could grow to include entire tribes on opposing sides.

The narratives typically recount raids and battles among tribes of Arabia, and present themselves as realistic accounts, though their transmission and shaping were influenced by social and scholarly concerns. The texts are largely prose, punctuated with citations of pre-Islamic poetry (prosimetric), with the poem attributed to the protagonist of the story, or to a transmitter or compiler who added it later. Quoting poems of the protagonists of these battles played the role of presenting the narrative as credible and believable.

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