Arabs
Arabs. The term "Arab" is applied to those people who are of Arab origin, regardless whether they are/were Muslims or non-Muslims. "Muslim" is used to refer to the people who adhere to the Muslim religion, which includes Arabs and non-Arabs, such as those people from Iran, Pakistan or Indonesia for example.
Forming the majority population of fifteen nations, Arabs represent the largest, most diverse and most politically influential Muslim ethnic group in the world. Their involvement with the non-Muslim world, whether through oil or politics, is profound. Their influence within the Muslim world is deep and broad. Arabic is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world as a mother tongue, but it is spoken by more than three-quarters of a billion people as a religious language. The Prophet Muhammad, who established Islam, was an Arab.
An Arab (Arabic: ʿarabi) is a person who identifies as such on ethnic, linguistic or cultural grounds. The plural form, Arabs (al-ʿarab), refers to the ethnocultural group at large. Though the Arabic language is older, Arabic culture was first spread in the Middle East beginning in the 2nd century as culturally Arab Christians such as the Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Banu Judham began migrating into the Syrian Desert and the Levant. The Arabic language gained greater prominence with the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE as the language of the Qur'an, and Arabic language and culture were more widely disseminated as a result of early Islamic expansion.
"Arabs" is the name given to the ancient and present-day inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and often applied to the peoples closely allied to them in ancestry, language, religion, and culture. At the beginning of the twenty-first century of the Christian calendar, there were about 250 million Arabs living mainly in 22 countries. They constitute the overwhelming majority of the population in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, and the nations of North Africa. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, about 4 million Arabs lived in Europe while 2 million lived in the Americas.
The Arabic heartland is Hijaz (now western Saudi Arabia) and also Yemen. The people living here around 620 were living in an area of major movements of people, with trade performed along the caravan routes, which had Mecca in Hijaz as one of the central towns. People were coming from Africa, from Mesopotamia, from Phoenicia, from Egypt, and there is notable that even before Muhammad the Arabs were a multi-racial people, primarily because of intermarriages and indiscriminate relationships.
Up through history, wherever Arab culture has taken hold, a mixture of people, and the domination of the Arabic language and culture, has made the number of people calling themselves Arabs increase dramatically. Often the indigenous population seems to have disappeared. When reading historical works, one is compelled to ask, where did the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians go? The answer is they started to speak Arabic, and began calling themselves Arabs. The whole process took centuries in most regions, but in areas close to Hijaz, more of the “original” Arabs seem to have immigrated, and this has speeded up the Arabization process.
The Arabic language is the main symbol of cultural unity among these people, but the religion of Islam provides another common bond for the majority of Arabs. Language and religion are united in the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam.
Arabia was the site of a flourishing civilization long before the Christian era and long before the advent of Muhammad. The Arabs themselves first appear in the light of history in 854 B.C.T., during the reign of the Assyrian king Salmanassar III as camel breeders and traders. Numerous Persian rulers relied on Arab vassals to provide buffer states on their western borders or encouraged the settlement of Arab tribesmen in frontier areas as a counterbalance to other troublesome tribal groups. The heyday of Arab political and cultural influence in Persia and Central Asia, however, was undoubtedly the early Islamic period (seventh to ninth century of the Christian calendar).
In the centuries following the death (632) of the prophet Muhammad, Arab influence spread throughout Southwest Asia, to parts of Europe (particularly Sicily and Spain), to Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa, to the sub-continent of India, and to Madagascar and the Malay Archipelago. The cultural and scientific contributions of the Arabs to Western civilization during the Middle Ages was highly significant, especially in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy.
Arab unity has been a central motive in Arab politics from the first days of Islam. This unity has only been fulfilled in the first century, before the world of Islam was divided into kingdoms and states.
During the past two centuries of rapid world change, hundreds of years of cultural unity have been disrupted, and the Arabs, led by the people of Egypt and Morocco, have moved more and more into separate national traditions. In some countries, such as Iran, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, minority communities of Arabs retain only language, religion and histories of their migrations to their present locations.
In modern times, Arab unity was a central political inducement in the time following independence of the different Arab states, that is in the 1950s and the 1960s. The only viable example of Arab unity was the United Arab Republic, consisting of Egypt, Syria and Yemen, from 1958 to 1961. In this union Egypt was too dominant, and the two other countries felt they had to leave. Today, the concept of Arab unity on the level of political leaders has lost its credibility, as the leaders will rarely agree upon who should give up his position as president or king. However, in the Arabs' hearts, Arab unity is strongly felt.
Islamism has many elements of Arab unity, through its emphasis on the Arab language (through the Qur’an) as a response to the dominance of Western cultures and Western political systems. Islamism has been deemed by non-Arabs as another way of imposing Arab language and culture on them, and Islamism has had to change its shape to catch on in these societies (Iran’s Islamism has major differences from the Arab Islamism, since almost all Iranians are not Arabs).
The Islamic religion, which originated in the western Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, predominates in most Arab nations. Forms of both major divisions of Islam -- the Sunni and the various Shi‘ite sects -- can be found in the Arab countries. Almost everywhere nationalism, which emerged in the late 19th century, is an important force that sometimes uses the Islamic religious tradition as an ideological tool to justify the power of the ruling class.
Dozens of large cities and hundreds of towns reflect the pronounced urban character of the Arab world. In most of the countries, about forty percent of the people are urban dwellers. All Arab nations suffer from conspicuous economic inequalities, especially the concentration of wealth and power in a ruling elite. Most are also undergoing severe urbanization stresses as the failing rural economies drive poverty-stricken landless peasants to the cities. The growth of modern cities through rural migration has caused serious problems in these urban centers, including employment, housing shortages, and the proliferation of vast slums.
Most Arab countries have substantial agricultural, village-based populations. In the villages, the land, the family, and religion are still the main influences on attitudes and behavior. The traditional prosperous village cultures were altered and largely destroyed throughout the region during the late 18th and 19th centuries of the Christian calendar by European penetration and colonization. In most countries, peasant farming on a subsistence level is pervasive.
Until the mid-19th century, vast semi-desert areas in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula were exploited by nomadic tribes. The camel-breeding Bedouins were well known as warriors and controllers of the caravan routes. Other pastoral tribes specialized in sheep and goat husbandry. In present-day Sudan, the Somali Republic, and Djibouti, pastoral economies operating on subsistence levels remain the only means of survival for many poverty-stricken Arab groups. {See also Bedouin; Muhammad; Shi'a; Sunni.}
"Arab" is defined independently of religious identity, and pre-dates the rise of Islam, with historically attested Arab Christian kingdoms and Arab Jews. The earliest documented use of the word "Arab" as defining a group of people dates from the 9th century B.C.T. Islamized but non-Arabized peoples, and therefore the majority of the world's Muslims, do not form part of the Arab World but comprise what is the geographically larger and diverse Muslim World.
The Arab League at its formation in 1946 defined Arab as "a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples".
During the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Arabs forged an Arab Empire (under the Rashidun and Umayyads, and later the Abbasids) whose borders touched southern France in the west, China in the east, Asia Minor in the north, and the Sudan in the south. This was one of the largest land empires in history. In much of this area, the Arabs spread Islam and the Arabic language (the language of the Qur'an) through conversion and cultural assimilation. Many groups became known as "Arabs" through this process of Arabization rather than through descent. Thus, over time, the term Arab came to carry a broader meaning than the original ethnic term: cultural Arab vs. ethnic Arab. Arab nationalism declares that Arabs are united in a shared history, culture and language. A related ideology, Pan-Arabism, calls for all Arab lands to be united as one state. Arab nationalism has often competed for existence with regional nationalism in the Middle East.
Early Semitic peoples from the Ancient Near East, such as the Arameans, Akkadians and Canaanites, built civilizations in Mesopotamia and the Levant; genetically, they often interlapped and mixed. Slowly, however, they lost their political domination of the Near East due to internal turmoil and attacks by non-Semitic peoples. Although the Semites eventually lost political control of the Middle East to the Persian Empire, the Aramaic language remained the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and the Levant. Aramaic itself was replaced by Greek as the Middle East's prestige language following the conquest of Alexander the Great.
The first written attestation of the ethnonym "Arab" occurs in an Assyrian inscription of 853 B.C.T, where Shalmaneser III lists a King Gindibu of mâtu arbâi (Arab land) as among the people he defeated at the Battle of Karkar. Some of the names given in these texts are Aramaic, while others are the first attestations of Proto-Arabic dialects. In fact several different ethnonyms are found in Assyrian texts that are conventionally translated "Arab": Arabi, Arubu, Aribi and Urbi. The Hebrew Bible occasionally refers to Arvi peoples (or variants thereof), translated as "Arab" or "Arabian." The scope of the term at that early stage is unclear, but it seems to have referred to various desert-dwelling Semitic tribes in the Syrian Desert and Arabia.
Proto-Arabic, or Ancient North Arabian, texts give a clearer picture of the Arabs' emergence. The earliest are written in variants of epigraphic south Arabian musnad script, including the 8th century B.C.T. Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, the 6th century B.C.Et. Lihyanite texts of southeastern Saudi Arabia and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and the Sinai (not in reality connected with Thamud).
The Nabataeans were nomadic newcomers who moved into territory vacated by the Edomites -- Semites who settled the region centuries before them. Their early inscriptions were in Aramaic, but gradually switched to Arabic, and since they had writing, it was they who made the first inscriptions in Arabic. The Nabataean Alphabet was adopted by Arabs to the south, and evolved into modern Arabic script around the 4th century. This is attested by Safaitic inscriptions (beginning in the 1st century B.C,T.) and the many Arabic personal names in Nabataean inscriptions. From about the 2nd century B.C.T., a few inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (near Sulayyil) reveal a dialect which is no longer considered "proto-Arabic", but pre-classical Arabic.
Greeks and Romans referred to all the nomadic population of the desert in the Near East as Arabi. The Romans called Yemen "Arabia Felix". The Romans called the vassal nomadic states within the Roman Empire "Arabia Petraea" after the city of Petra, and called unconquered deserts bordering the empire to the south and east Arabia Magna.
The Lakhmids settled the mid Tigris region around their capital Al-hira they ended up allying with the Sassanid against the Ghassanids and the Byzantine Empire. The Lakhmids contested control of the Central Arabian tribes with the Kindites with the Lakhmids eventually destroying Kinda in 540 C.C. after the fall of their main ally Himyar. The Sassanids dissolved the Lakhmid kingdom in 602 C.C.
The Kindites migrated from Yemen along with the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, but were turned back in Bahrain by the Abdul Qais Rabi'a tribe. They returned to Yemen and allied themselves with the Himyarites who installed them as a vassal kingdom that ruled Central Arbia from Qaryah dhat Kahl (the present-day Qaryat al-Faw) in Central Arabia. They ruled much of the Northern/Central Arabian peninsula until the fall of the Himyarites in 525 C.C..
Muslims of Medina referred to the nomadic tribes of the deserts as the A'raab, and considered themselves sedentary, but were aware of their close racial bonds. The term "A'raab' mirrors the term Assyrians used to describe the closely related nomads they defeated in Syria.
The Qur'an does not use the word ʿarab, only the nisba adjective ʿarabiy. The Qur'an calls itself ʿarabiy, "Arabic", and Mubin, "clear". The two qualities are connected for example in ayat 43.2-3, "By the clear Book: We have made it an Arabic recitation in order that you may understand". The Qur'an became regarded as the prime example of the al-ʿarabiyya, the language of the Arabs. The term ʾiʿrāb has the same root and refers to a particularly clear and correct mode of speech. The plural noun ʾaʿrāb refers to the Bedouin tribes of the desert who resisted Muhammad, for example in ayat 9.97, alʾaʿrābu ʾašaddu kufrān wa nifāqān "the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy".
Based on this, in early Islamic terminology, ʿarabiy referred to the language, and ʾaʿrāb to the Arab Bedouins, carrying a negative connotation due to the Qur'anic verdict just cited. But after the Islamic conquest of the 8th century, the language of the nomadic Arabs became regarded as the most pure by the grammarians following Abi Ishaq, and the term kalam al-ʿArab, "language of the Arabs", denoted the uncontaminated language of the Bedouins.
The arrival of Islam united many tribes in Arabia, who then moved northwards to conquer the Levant and Iraq. In 661, and throughout the Caliphate's rule by the Ummayad dynasty, Damascus was established as the Muslim capital. In these newly acquired territories, Arabs comprised the ruling military elite and as such, enjoyed special privileges. They were proud of their Arab ancestry and sponsored the poetry and culture of pre-Islamic Arabia whilst diffusing with Levantine and Iraqi culture. They established garrison towns at Ramla, ar-Raqqah, Basra, Kufa, Mosul and Samarra, all of which developed into major cities.
Caliph Abd al-Malik established Arabic as the Caliphate's official language in 686. This reform greatly influenced the conquered non-Arab peoples and fueled the Arabization of the region. However, the Arabs' higher status among non-Arab Muslim converts and the latter's obligation to pay heavy taxes caused resentment. Caliph Umar II strove to resolve the conflict when he came to power in 717. He rectified the situation, demanding that all Muslims be treated as equals, but his intended reforms did not take effect as he died after only three years of rule. At that time, discontent with the Umayyads swept the region and an uprising occurred in which the Abbasids came to power and moved the capital to Baghdad. The Abbasids were also Arabs (descendants of Muhammad's uncle Abbas), but unlike the Ummayads, they had the support of non-Arab Islamic groups. Through the adoption of the Arabic language and Islam, the Levantine and Iraqi populations became Arabized.
The Phoenicians and later the Carthaginians dominated North African and Iberian shores for more than eight centuries until they were suppressed by the Romans and the later Vandal invasion. Inland, the nomadic Berbers allied with Arab Muslims in invading Spain. The Arabs mainly settled the old Phoenician and Carthagenian towns, while the Berbers remained dominant inland. Inland north Africa remained partly Arab until the 11th century, whereas the Iberian Peninsula, particularly its southern part, remained heavily Arab, until the expulsion of the Moriscos in the 17th century.
Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima distinguishes between sedentary Muslims who used to be nomadic Arabs and the Bedouin nomadic Arabs of the desert. He used the term "formerly-nomadic" Arabs and refers to sedentary Muslims by the region or city they lived in, as in Egyptians, Spaniards and Yemenis. The Christians of Italy and the Crusaders preferred the term Saracens for all the Arabs and Muslims of that time. The Christians of Iberia used the term Moor to describe all the Arabs and Muslims of that time.
In 1728, a Russian officer described a group of Sunni Arab nomads who populated the Caspian shores of Mughan (in present-day Azerbaijan) and spoke a mixed Turkic-Arabic language. It is believed that these groups migrated to the Caucasus in the 16th century. The 1888 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica also mentioned a certain number of Arabs populating the Baku Governorate of the Russian Empire. They retained an Arabic dialect at least into the mid-19th century, but since then have assimilated with the neighbouring Azeris and Tats. Today in Azerbaijan alone, there are nearly 30 settlements still holding the name Arab (e.g. Arabgadim, Arabojaghy, Arab-Yengija, etc.).
From the time of the Arab conquest of the Caucasus, continuous small-scale Arab migration from various parts of the Arabic-speaking world was observed in Dagestan influencing and shaping the culture of the local peoples. Up until the mid-20th century, there were still individuals in Dagestan who claimed Arabic to be their native language, with the majority of them living in the village of Darvag to the north-west of Derbent. The latest of these accounts dates to the 1930s. Most Arab communities in southern Dagestan underwent linguistic Turkicisation, thus nowadays Darvag is a majority-Azeri village.
Today many people in Central Asia identify as Arabs. Most Arabs of Central Asia are fully integrated into local populations, and sometimes call themselves the same as locals (e.g. Tajiks, Uzbeks) but they use special titles to show their Arabic origin such as Sayyid, Khoja or Siddiqui.
Arab Muslims are generally Sunni, Shia, Ismaili and Druze. The self-identified Arab Christians generally follow Eastern Churches such as the Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches and the Maronite church. The Greek Catholic churches and Maronite church are under the Pope of Rome, and a part of the larger worldwide Catholic Church.
Before the coming of Islam, most Arabs followed a religion with a number of deities, including Hubal, Wadd, Allāt, Manat, and Uzza. A few individuals, the hanifs, had apparently rejected polytheism in favor of monotheism unaffiliated with any particular religion. Some tribes had converted to Christianity or Judaism. The most prominent Arab Christian kingdoms were the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms. When the Himyarite king converted to Judaism in the late 4th century, the elites of the other prominent Arab kingdom, the Kindites, being Himyirite vassals, apparently also converted (at least partly). With the expansion of Islam, polytheistic Arabs were rapidly Islamized, and polytheistic traditions gradually disappeared.
Today, Sunni Islam dominates in most areas, overwhelmingly so in North Africa. Shia Islam is dominant in southern Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon. Substantial Shi'a populations exist in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, northern Syria, the al-Batinah region in Oman, and in northern Yemen. The Druze community, concentrated in the Levant, follow a faith that was originally an offshoot of Ismaili Shia Islam, and are also Arab.
Christians make up 5.5% of the population of the Near East. In Lebanon they number about 39% of the population although not all Lebanese Christians identify as Arabs. In Syria, Christians make up 16% of the population. In Palestine, before the creation of Israel estimates ranged as high as 25%, but is now 3.8% due largely to the 1948 Palestinian exodus. In the West Bank and in Gaza, Arab Christians make up 8% and 0.8% of the populations, respectively. In Israel, Arab Christians constitute 1.7% (roughly 9% of the Palestinian Arab population). Arab Christians make up 6% of the population of Jordan. Most North and South American Arabs are Christian, as are about half of Arabs in Australia who come particularly from Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories.
Jews from Arab countries – mainly Mizrahi Jews and Yemenite Jews – are today usually not categorised as Arab. However, before the anti-Jewish actions of the 1930s and 1940s, overall Iraqi Jews viewed themselves as Arabs of the Jewish faith, rather than as a separate race or nationality. Prior to the emergence of the term Mizrahi, the term "Arab Jews" was sometimes used to describe Jews of the Arab world. The term is rarely used today. The few remaining Jews in the Arab countries reside mostly in Morocco and Tunisia. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, following the creation of the state of Israel, most of these Jews left or were expelled from their countries of birth and are now mostly concentrated in Israel. Some immigrated to France, where they form the largest Jewish community, outnumbering European Jews, but relatively few to the United States.
