The Peace FAQ:

Arabic, Arabs, "The Arab World"

Frequently Asked Questions:

If Arabs are from Arabia, how did lands from west Africa to Iran become occupied almost exclusively by Arabs?
Aren't the Arabs just people of many ethnicities who simply use Arabic as their mother tongue?
But aren't there Christian Arabs? Christians in the Middle East who speak only Arabic, like in Lebanon and Palestine?
Isn't the Arab world a romantic place, like in 'Arabian Nights'; aren't Arabs a peaceful, hospitable people?
What are the factors retarding Arab progress?

If Arabs are from Arabia, how did lands from west Africa to Iran become occupied almost exclusively by Arabs?

For several centuries after its advent, Islam was an alibi for Arab imperialism. And it was an imperialism of a type which the world had not known so far. The Arabs not only imposed their ruthless rule and totalitarian creed on the countries they conquered; they also populated these countries with a prolific progeny whch they procreated on native women. Every Arab worth his race 'married' scores, sometimes hundreds of these helpless women after their menfolk had all been killed. Divorce of a wedded wife had been made very easy by the 'law' of Islam. A man could go on marrying and divorcing at the rate of several women during the span of a single day and night. What was more convenient, there was no restriction on the number of concubines a man could keep. The Arab Conquerors used these male privileges in full measure. And in a matter of a hundred years, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Egypt and North Africa which had been non-Arab countries for countless ages became Arabic-speaking countries. Arabic did not spread like English, French or other similar languages that spread through commercial and diplomatic excellence of the lending nation and filtered through the top strata of the receiving: countries. Arabic was injected through all strata of the conquered population which did not have much choice in the matter. Thus we have a series of countries that are 'Arabic' in race, culture and language extending from Iraq to Morocco. Conversion was not confined to creed alone, it covered one's ancestry as well.
- from Islam: The Arab National Movement, by Anwar Shaikh
"Arabs used Islam for conquering half the world & for creating an Arab Empire thus making Islam a trade mark of Arabs."
- Anonymous Pakistani Humanist, Left Shoe News

Aren't the Arabs just people of many ethnicities who simply use Arabic as their mother tongue?

the Jews

race

the Jews

- by Stephen Van Nattan, in Allah, Divine or Demonic? A Journey of the Pagan Deity from Babylon to Mecca

. "We've sort of passed over from the stage of heightened vigilance into the stage where people's ethnic identity becomes suspect in and of itself. People of Arab ethnicity who are being held on routine visa violations [by the FBI] --the most mundane type of arrest--are being treated as potential terrorists."
- Hussein Ibish, a spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, AP, Dec. 30, 1999
Founded in 1940 by the Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Baitar, the Harakat al-Baath al-Arabi, or Movement of the Arab Baath, had gained sizable popularity in Iraq by 1952. This doctrine, an unusual combination of Marxist, Hegelian, and nationalist ideologies united under the banner of Arab ethnicity, not only originated outside the traditional circles of Arab politics; it formed a comprehensive ideology for the Middle East, a rarity among the dominant sectarian dogmas of this region.
- J. Adam Brockwell, www.oppression.org
Most Saudis are ethnically Arab. Some are of mixed ethnic origin and are descended from Turks, Iranians, Indonesians, Indians, Africans, and others, most of whom immigrated as pilgrims and reside in the Hijaz region along the Red Sea coast. Many Arabs from nearby countries are employed in the kingdom.
- U.S. Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs
THE KEY to this history is that the Sudanese are not ethnically Arab, even though the country is within the realm of Arab civilization. As their dark skin attests, the Sudanese are Africans of diverse ethnic stock. Many Egyptians make a similar disclaimer of Arabism, insisting they are Africans of Pharaonic descent, a distinction that the eye confirms. But the Arab conquest of Egypt, which was then Christian, took place less than a decade after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, meaning that Egyptian society has been Arabized for more than thirteen hundred years.
- By Milton Viorst, in Sudan's Islamic Experiment, Foreign Affairs, Spring, 1995
[Arabs are] A people/ethnicity/nation, including a culture, language and religion, that originated in the 7th century western Arabian peninsula, and was spread to almost all the aboriginal semitic peoples of the near east by conquest, murder, rape, slavery and forced conversions to Islam. That legacy of expansionism, violence, mistreatment of women, and slavery continues to this day. It is important to mention that not all Arabs share these negative traits, especially if they no longer espouse Islam (the Muslim Bedoin of the Israeli Negev are one of the few exceptions). Arabs are Muslims or are descendants of Muslim Arab ancestors (since it has always been illegal for an arab to convert to any other religion, the rare non-Muslim Arab is usually an atheist); Egyptian Coptic Christians and Lebanese Christians (most of whom have fled to America), Jews, Bahais, Druze, Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Maronites and others who have been living among Muslims may speak Arabic but will tell you with unexpected vigour that they are in no way Arab. These groups are but tattered survivors of Arab expansionism and violence -- they are the true indigenous populations of their respective homelands, and should be allowed, in a just world, to return and re-build their plundered lands, free from Arab hostility. Israeli and Palestinian Christians will often call themselves Arabs, although it is thought that this is simply a strategy to try to win Muslim favor if and when an Islamic Palestinian State becomes a reality. Most likely, they will be forced to flee as have most other Christians formerly living in the Arab world. [Editor's Note: Since this article was written, Christians living under the Palestinian Authority have been leaving the region at unprecedented rates, due, in part, to the PLO strategy of using Christian villiages as bases for firing into Israel, hoping that an Israeli retaliation resulting in Christian dead would reduce Christian support for Israel.]
- The Society for Rational Peace

But aren't there Christian Arabs? Christians in the Middle East who speak only Arabic, like in Lebanon and Palestine?

Among Christians, Maronites represent roughly 65 percent of the total. They take their name from a 4th-century Syrian monk named St. Maron. The next two largest denominations are Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic. ...Most Maronites consider themselves Phoenicians, whose civilization dominated the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, not Arabs.
from Christians are a dwindling force in war-ravaged Lebanon, by Charles M. Sennot, The Boston Globe, 01/19/98
In Lebanon, Christianity is still strong, but the civil war, the divisions between the various Christian groups, the complications brought about by the proximity to Israel, the harsh militancy of the Maronites-especially their military arm, the Phalange-and the perception of the Muslims that the Christians are not Arabs make it hard for Lebanese Christians to look to the future with hope.
...In the great struggle between the Israelis and the Arabs, the Arab Christians seem a historical curiosity, finding a place on neither side of the divide. To the Israelis they are Arabs, to the Arab Muslims they are Christians-and to Westerners they are invisible.
- by Robert Louis Wilken, reviewing From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
For years, the term "Arab Christians" was used to categorize the Christians in the Middle East. However, the concept instead of being precisely defined was intellectually misused and politically abused. Both Arab regimes and "Arabists" in the West attempted to libel all Christians living under the sovereignty of Arab states, as "Arab Christians."
This denial of identity of millions of indigenous non-Arab nations can be equated to an organized ethnic cleansing on a politico-cultural level.
- from "ARAB" CHRISTIANS: AN INTRODUCTION by Dr Walid Phares, 1997
Thus developed the Christian instinct of rejecting even the subtlest hint of an Arab component to their identity; in time, this became the tool with which the Christians would counter the Muslim's disputation of Lebanon's existence, legitimacy and historicity as a non-Arab Mediterranean homeland for minorities in the midst of an Arab sea... So, the cynics would ask 'why do we speak Arabic if we are not Arabs?' But the answer is manifest; why do the Irish speak English if they are not Britons? Why do the French speak a corrupted Latin idiom if they are not Romans? (the early Frankish tribes, the ethnic progenitors of today's French were Gaelic speakers)... Fact is that language is not a national determinant; language is merely a vehicle of communication; it is a tool of survival in a hostile environment, and man has from times immemorial spoken the language of his conquerors and oppressors... It takes more than language to define a people. A nation is a soul, as Ernest Renan put it; a nation is a spiritual principle; it is the possession, in common, of a rich legacy of memories, and a desire to live together. The nation, like the individual, is the result of a long past ripe with struggles, sacrifices and devotion to duty. The worship of ancestors is, above all, most legitimate;; our ancestors have made us who we are. An heroic past (a myth perhaps), great men, glory... that is the stuff of the social capital upon which rests the national idea. Having common glories in the past, a common will in the present; having accomplished great feats together, wanting to accomplish some more... those are the conditions essential to becoming a people, NOT language!!! Languages come and go... Throughout their long history the Lebanese spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Greek, Roman, French, Arabic, Turkish and English (to name but a few), and yet they are neither Greeks, nor Romans or Turks, so why brand them as Arabs?? The Lebanese were guests to all of those languages, and yet they enriched all of them and left on all of them their noble markings, their warm inflections and their passionate timber. To stamp the Lebanese with the epithet Arab, simply because they happen to speak Arabic today, is to force them to conform to a certain era, a certain time, and a certain political direction, when in fact they are timeless, eternal and universalistic. Conforming the Lebanese to the will and whim of the hegemon of the day is to emasculate their rich and vibrant history; it is to cheat and pervert the history of mankind to which they remain the most faithful, consistent and selfless contributors.
Let us remember that the Arabs are relatively newcomers to the Levant. Their advent and subsequent settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean are but a novel and ephemeral incidence in the history of mankind, and their being the cultural hegemon of the day should not stultify or dwarf in any way the presence of other nationalities in their midst, nationalities which preceeded them in legitimacy, historicity and cultural pedigree. Furthermore, Middle Easterner and Arab are not tautological designations... It is rather pretentious, hypocritical, unsrupulous, arrogant and mendacious to assume that being a Middle Easterner is perforce being an Arab! As a result of the Arab conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean, and because of Islam's sumptuary laws with regard to the People of the Book and the Dhimmis it subjugated, Christians and Jews in the East were reduced to the level of 'tolerated' religious communities in their own homeland. That is partly why those who want to impute onto the Lebanese of today an Arab identity are unable to accept his distinct character as member of a proud and tenacious nation. Today's Middle East defines all ethnicities and nationalities religiously; that is the sad legacy of Islam's Din wa Dawla (its inability to fathom a separation of Church and State, possibly due to the fact that there exists no expression in an Islamic discourse to designate Church as an ecclesiastical institution.) The mere fact that I happen to speak Arabic today (a trend that only began around the latter part of 17th century Lebanon) does not necessarily make me an Arab. Cynics often ask, why wasn't Syriac, Coptic, or Chaldean adopted by the Lebanese, instead of Arabic? Fact is that all of those aforementioned languages, in addition to Turkish, French, Italian, English, Armenian and Coptic etc... were at one time adopted, and today constitute an integral part of Lebanon's rich linguistic and cultural heritage; they are a component of our identity as much as Arabic, if not more. Furthermore, membership in a certain nation is a self-defined (and not an 'other-defined') perception; it is not what people think I am, it is what I think I am which makes me member of a given culture, nation, or community. Nevertheless, should the Maronites regret the adoption of the new tongue from the desert? "Nonsense" answers Henri Lammens, "those are regrets of archeologists, and pointless Jeremiads", and just as the French do not lament the loss of Celtic (the ancient tongue of their Gaelic ancestors) the Lebanese should draw solace from having chosen a noble instrument such as the Arabic language (among many other, and equally important, languages) for the perpetuation of their ancient civilization. "For man, the past never dies our completely" wrote the French historian Fustel de Coulanges in his 1864 introduction to La Cite Antique. And though man can very well forget the past, he keeps it forever confined deeply within him; because whatever he becomes through the ages, man is perforce the product and the summary of all preceding ages. Stemming from this reasoning, I want to argue that the Lebanese People, taken as a body, must accept a much older ascendancy than Arab nationalists (and today's Arabists) have arbitrarily chosen for them at the outset of the 20th century, in order to justify and bolster a certain political direction. To paraphrase Michel Chiha (the father of Modern Lebanon's Constitution), the men and women who have dwelt along the Lebanese littoral some 50, 40, 30, or 20 centuries ago, and from whom the Lebanese of today must have exhumed --often without due reverence-- their culture, language and civilization, would certainly recognize in today's Lebanese their authentic progeny. The blood of the ancients could not have disappeared completely; reason prevents us from accepting this conclusion, even if we were to rely entirely on an equation of probability... Therefore, it is axiomatic to me that the Lebanese of today are descendants of the Aramaeans of antiquity, the yro-Phoenicians of the Bible, and NOT the Arabs of a mere 13 centuries ago... Why do they speak Arabic, the cynics persist? Answer: So that they may not become deaf to the idiom of their oppressor and consequently become mute and unable to articulate their fears, their revulsion and their anger at their oppressor...
Those same cynics often hark back to Albert Hourani and numberless Arabist and self-effacing dhimmi Arabist sympathizers to stultify the audacious national awakening of Lebanon's Christians (and that is valid and legitimate, one might add) but Hourani does not have a monopoly on truth and objectivity, and nor is he the sole authority on the topic of minority nationalisms. He is a distinguished scholar of the Middle East to be sure, but he is the Briton par excellence; he was member of the British Foreign Office for most of his life, and although at time sympathetic to the plight of Middle Eastern minority groups, he remained at heart a proponent of the idea of secular Arab nationalism; an idea which for all intents and purposes died in its cradle... In fact, later in his writings, Hourani would expound the notion of an inherent tautology between Arabism and Islam; ultimately, he saw Islam as a 'national religion' which not only united the Arabs into a community [Umma] but also galvanized them and gave them culture, history, language, national pride and identity. So he was, in essence, saying that one cannot be an Arab without being a Muslim. Even Michel Aflaq, the quintessential architect of 'secular' Arab nationalism and the prime ideologue of the Baath Party, would acquiesce at the end of his life in the intimate correlation between Arabism and Islam, prompting him to convert to Islam so that he may truly become an Arab.
- by Franck Salameh, in "WHAT'S IN A NAME", published by The World Lebanese Organization
"But, again, changes in ethnic identity require more than linguistic change; the Nogmung cannot become Kachin simply by speaking Jinghpaw (or Shan, for that matter, by speaking Tai) any more than the Irish became English just because they finally adopted the language of their conquerors."
- From "How thick is blood? The plot thickens. . . " by Francisco J. Gil-White, Department of Anthropology, UCLA

Isn't the Arab world a romantic place, like in 'Arabian Nights'; aren't Arabs a peaceful, hospitable people?

"The Arab world is a sink of corruption and ... the most appalling and murderous tyrannies."
- Edward Said, an Egyptian Arab professor at Columbia University
The narrative of the last days of the Flatters mission, published in another column according to the text of the Paris Figaro, contains in its terribly dry detail suggestion of horror almost unprecedented. Most of the victims, as their names show, were spahis belonging to the race of the desert's children; but they had long been accustomed to the comparatively civilized life of Algeria or the Senegal colonies, and their last struggle took place in a region known only to the wildest and fiercest of all nomad Arabs, who sweep through it on their way to carry off a sable booty of slaves from the black cities of the Niger, leaving behind them on their return a track marked with skeletons. In these latitudes time has stood still for uncounted thousands of years,--naught has been changed since the primeval sea dried up. It is all a dead and ruined world like the Moon.
- by Lafcadio Hearn, in A STRANGE TALE OF CANNIBALISM, The Times-Democrat (1882-oct-15)
Arabs are "wild" in that they cannot be tamed. To many ancient and modern Arabs, war and fighting is good recreation. It may be fierce in the morning, and by evening all participants will sit down to coffee.
..."His hand will be against every man" The Arabs have a proverb, "I and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger; I and my brothers against my cousin; I, against my brothers." Living in the deserts of Arabia for all those years required the Arab to be strong in self-defense. There were no police, so justice was, and still is, by revenge. To forgo revenge would mean to be a coward and lose authority in one's acre, and the whole of Arabia is every Arab's acre to claim if he can take it. The royal family of Saudi Arabia is simply a 1990s version of some ordinary wandering Bedhoin, the Bani Saud, who rode out of the past and who conquered best. Anwar Sadat found out the hard way, as did King Faisal, that Arabs still don't like to be humbled. This is also why the Arab always extends the right hand to serve or greet his guests in order to show that he has no malice.
...The British tried to conquer Egypt, and the result was that Arabia conquered England. How? Emin Pasha was supposed to be German, but he became so Arabized that no Europeans could be certain of his loyalties. The Englishman, Lawrence of Arabia, turned Arab to the core, and today Islam is conquering Great Britain where they have made many converts to Islam and built the world's second grandest mosque. I say old man, who conquers whom?
- by Stephen Van Nattan, in Allah, Divine or Demonic? A Journey of the Pagan Deity from Babylon to Mecca

What are the factors retarding Arab progress?

No matter what its wealth or powers, the Arab world will never flourish as long as it claims it is being victimized by Israel, since every attribution of blame to the Jews postpones the possibility of Arab progress and self-improvement.
- Ruth R. Wisse

RELATED SECTIONS:
Islam, Middle East, Arabists, Muhammad, Palestinians, The Golden Age, Expansionism, Genocide, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, The Frog and the Scorpion, Democracy, Automorphism, Arab East Jerusalem, Slavery
WWW RESOURCES:
BOOKS & PRINTED MATERIAL:
- History of the Arabs, Revised: 10th Edition, by Philip Hitti, Walid Khalidi [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, by David Pryce-Jones [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, by Dore Gold [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, by Bernard Lewis [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- The Haj, by Leon Uris [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, by Barry Rubin [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Understanding the Arab World, by Louis Bahjat Hamada [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey, by Fouad Ajami [VIEW BOOK HERE]
- View from the Eye of the Storm: Terror and Reason in the Middle East, by Haim Harari [VIEW BOOK HERE]

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