While much attention has been paid to several dialectal Arabic narrative and poetic genres, Negev Arabic (NA) daḥīyah songs (NA diḥḥiyyih, also known as daḥḥa) have received little scholarly attention. I report here eight traditional Negev Bedouin daḥīyah songs, one neo- daḥīyah, and one haǧīn (NA hiǧnih) - recorded during personal meetings with informants from 2017 to 2019 - in transcription and translation with some stylistic and linguistic comments. Background information is provided on the characteristics of this vernacular genre - its performance, contents, and scope - and its evolution. Daḥīyah has profoundly changed in content, language, and form in the transition from traditional Negev Bedouin society - before the establishment of the State of Israel - to the present. Originally a form of martial collective chant and dance mainly performed at wedding celebrations, the daḥīyah has gained popularity in neighboring sedentary Palestinian communities, where it has become an expression of identity, resistance, and revolt on various festive occasions. Today, several closely interconnected daḥīyah types coexist in the Negev, from songs that adhere to traditional models in terms of composition and performance to neo- daḥīyah.

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the field of Arabic and Islamic studies became enriched by a number of multi-facetted scholarly theories challenging the traditional account on the early centuries of Islam. An author of one of them was the Israeli scholar Yehuda D. Nevo (1932–1992), working in archaeology, epigraphy and historiography. He devoted much of his career to the studying of Arabic rock inscriptions in the Negev desert, as well as to investigating literary and numismatic evidence of nascent Islam. In his theory, the gradual development of the Islamic faith, inspired by Abrahamism with an admixture of Judeo-Christianity, went through a stage of “indeterminate monotheism”. Not earlier than since the end of the second century A.H. one can speak of the formation of the dogmatic pillars of Islam, similar to those we know today. This paper is an attempt to sum up Nevo’s insightful input into the field of modern Islamic & Quranic studies today. Although controversial and unorthodox, many later researchers repeatedly refered to Nevo’s plenty of inspiring theses in their quest for facts on Islamic genesis lost in the maze of time and shifting memory of generations.