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An Arab () is any member of the Semitic speaking group of people whose cultural, linguistic, and in some cases, ancestral origins trace back to the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. The Arabic language and culture began to spread in the Middle East in the 2nd century with ethnically Arab Christians such as the Ghassanids, and even earlier with ethnically Arab Jewish tribes. Wide proliferation in the Middle East and North Africa began after the advent of Islam in the 7th century and the ensuing Arab Muslim expansionism. This resulted in the cultural assimilation of the region's indigenous Semitic and non-Semitic peoples of non-Arab origin, usually together with their Islamization. Islamized but non-Arabized peoples outside the region are part of the Muslim World, not the traditionally secular Arab World. Many other views of who is Arab have been offered.[1]
Arabness was always defined independent of religious identity. It pre-dates the rise of Islam, with historically attested Arab Christian kingdoms and Arab Jewish tribes. The word "Arab" is documented as defining a group of people from the 9th century BCE to the oresent.[1] The major ways of defining who is an Arab are:
The relative importance of these factors is estimated differently by different groups and frequently disputed. Some combine aspects of each definition, as done by Habib Hassan Touma,[2] who defines an Arab "in the modern sense of the word", as "one who is a national of an Arab state, has command of the Arabic language, and possesses a fundamental knowledge of Arabian tradition, that is, of the manners, customs, and political and social systems of the culture." Most people who consider themselves Arab do so based on the overlap of the political and linguistic definitions.
However, some groups meet some of these criteria, and yet do not identify as Arab due to genealogy and ethno-nationality. In particular, the native people of North Africa, the Berbers and the Egyptians, are not Arabs. Instead, North Africans who still use the Berber language identify only as Berber, and many Egyptians (both Copts and Muslims) identify only as Egyptians, ie, descendants of the ancient Egyptians[3] (See also Egypt#Identity). Some Lebanese (predominantly Maronite Christians, but also some Muslims) also reject the label Arab in favor of a narrower Phoenician-Aramaean-based Lebanese identity.
Groups using a non-Arabic liturgical language are especially likely to consider themselves non-Arab. Few people consider themselves Arab based on the political definition without the linguistic one. Thus few Kurds and Berbers identify as Arab. But some do, for instance some Berbers also consider themselves Arab (v. e.g. Gellner, Ernest and Micaud, Charles, Eds. Arabs and Berbers: from tribe to nation in North Africa. Lexington: Lexington Books, 1972).
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"[4].
The relation of and is complicated further by the notion of "lost Arabs" mentioned in the Qur'an as punished for their disbelief. All contemporary Arabs were considered as descended from two ancestors, Qahtan and Adnan. Qahtan was related to the "lost Arabs", and the Southern Arabs were identified as of his lineage, regarded as the "real Arabs", . The Northern Arabs, including the tribes of Mecca, were considered the descendants of Adnan, in Islamic tradition traced back to Ismail son of Abraham, said to have been arabized later.
Versteegh (1997) is uncertain whether to ascribe this distinction to the memory of a real difference of origin of the two groups, but it is certain that the difference was strongly felt in early Islamic times. Even in Islamic Spain there was enmity between the Qays of the northern and the Kalb of the southern group. The so-called Himyarite language described by Al-Hamdani (died 946) appears to be a special case of language contact between the two groups, an originally north Arabic dialect spoken in the south, and influenced by Old South Arabic.
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. Some native people in Sudan, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria (Berbers) and in other regions became Arabized.
Arab nationalism declares that Arabs are united in a shared history, culture and language. Arab nationalists believe that Arab identity encompasses more than outward physical characteristics, race or religion. 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 and ethnic nationalisms in the Middle East, such as Lebanese and Egyptian.
A modern study by Kamal Salibi connects Israel and the biblical events to Yemen instead of Palestine and Egypt. The study relies on linguistic evidence from rural dialects in Yemen, and old village names that are similar to biblical names and outnumber those in the north. The study was considered biased because it was labeled Anti-Israeli. Although it gives weak evidence against the Mesopotamian origin of Israelites, it confirms a traditionally accepted Qahtani general origin of Semites. [4]
Early Semites built civilizations in Mesopotamia and Syria, but slowly lost their political domination of the Near East due to internal turmoil and constant attacks by new nomadic Semitic and non-Semitic groups. Attacks climaxed with the arrival of the Medians to east Mesopotamia and the incorporation of the Neo Babylonians. Although the Semites lost political control, the Aramiac language remained the lingua Franca of Mesopotamia and Syria. Eventually, Aramiac lost its day-to-day use with the defeat of the Persians and the arrival of the Hellenic armies around 330BC. Both nations maintained their pure Semitic tongues and continued to evolve into Northern and Southern Arabic.[5]
The Nabateans moved into territory vacated by the Edomites -- Semites who settled the region centuries before them. The Nabateans were nomadic newcomers who wrote in a vernacular Aramiac that evolved into modern Arabic and modern Arabic script around the 4th century.
The Ghassanids were the last major migration of non-Islamic Semites out of Yemen to the north. They revived the Semitic presence in the then Hellenized Syria. They mainly settled the Hauran region and spread to modern Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan.
The Arameans, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Amorites, Sabaeans amd Minaeans spoke closely related Semitic dialects that correspond to the Arab dialects of the regions they settled. These groups often overlapped and mixed racial lines, as did IndoEuropean groups. [6]
Qahtani, also called (العاربة), "pure origin" or "pure Semites", are traditionally considered direct descendants of Noah through his son Shem. They took pride in their pure Semitic lineage and maintained the old Aramiac Script until the rise of Islam. But spoken Qahtani south Arabic was very close to the Adnani north Arabic. Many north Arabic tribes, such as the Ghassanids, claimed Qahtani lineage.
(المستعربة), "Arabized Arabs", are Arabs who settled in Mecca when Abraham took his Egyptian wife Hagar (or Hajar) and their son Ishmael there. Ishmael was raised by Hagar and the noble Arab tribe Jurhom who left Yemen after a drought and settled in Mecca. Ishmael spoke fluent Arabic. It is believed that the prophet of Islam, Mohammad, descended of the Adnani tribe of Qureish. Adnani Arabs spoke a similar dialect to Qahatani Arabic, but later started using the unique Nabatean script that evolved into modern Arabic script.
The arrival of Islam united the Arab tribes, who flooded into the strongly Semitic Greater Syria and Iraq. Within years, the major garrison towns developed into the major cities of Syria and Iraq. The local population, which shared a close linguistic and genetic ancestry with Qahtani and Adnani Muslims were quickly Arabized.
The Phoenicians and later the Carthaginians dominated North African shores for more than 8 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 Arab tribes mainly settled the old Phoenician and Carthagenian towns, while the Berbers remained dominant inland. Inland north Africa remained partly Arabized until the 11th century.
The Banu Hilal was a Yemeni tribal confederation, organized by the Fatimids in Egypt. They struck in Libya, reducing the Zenata Berbers (a clan that claimed Yemeni ancestry from pre-Islamic periods) and small coastal towns, and Arabizing the Sanhaja berber confederation. The Banu Hilal eventually Settled modern (Morraco and Algeria) and subdued Arabized the Sanhaja by the time of Ibn Khaldun.
The Banu Sulyam is another Bedouin tribal confederation from Nejd which followed through the trials of Banu Hilal and helped them defeat the Zirids in the battle of Gabis in 1052AD, and finally took Kairuan in 1057Ad. The Banu Sulaym mainly settled and completely Arabized Libya.
A branch of the Rabia' tribe settled southern Egypt and slowly Arabized the Makurian kingdom in modern Sudan until 1315 AD when the Banu Kanz inherited the kingdom of Makuria and paved the way for the Arabization of the Sudan, that was completed by the arrival of the Jaali and Juhayna Arab tribes.
After the defeat of the Crusades, the Ayubids repopulated the reconquered towns with Arabs mainly from their southern provinces of modern Yemen and Asir in modern Saudi Arabia.
The Banu Maqil is a Yemeni nomadic tribe that settled in Tunisia in the 13th century. The Banu Hassan a Maqil branch moved into the Sanhaja region in whats today the Western Sahara and Mauritania, they fought a thirty years war on the side of the Lamtuna Arabized Berbers who claimed Himyarite ancestory (from the early Islamic invasions) defeating the Sanhaja berbers and Arabizing Mauritania.
Based on the Torah, Bible, and Qur'an, Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula are descendants of Ismail, son of Abraham. Keeping the surname is an important part of Arabic culture as some lineages can be traced far back to ancient times. Some Arabs claim they can trace their lineage back to Noah and Adam. In addition to Adam, Noah, and Shem, some of the first known Arabs are those who came from Petra, the Nabataean capital.
Other Arabs are known as Arabized-Arabs, including those who came from parts of Mesopotamia, the Levant, lands of the Berbers and the Moors, Egypt, the Sudan, and other African Arabs.[7]
Arab origin is divided into two major groups:
Medieval Arab genealogists divided Arabs into three groups:
The Arabic language spoken today in classical Quranic form evolved as a mix between the original Arabic of Qahtan and northern Arabic which shares a great deal with northern Semitic languages from the Levant. Arabs take great pride in their language and its survival as a usable and comprehensible language over thousands of years.
Jewish and Christian tradition described the Ishmaelites as an "Arabian people" at least by the time of Joseph, which became standard centuries before Islam. The term Hagarenes was commonly used; it is a pun on the Arabic muhajir and the name Hagar. Efforts to reconcile the Biblical and Arab genealogies later led to conflicting attempts to trace Adnan to Ishmael (Ismail), the eldest son of Abraham and Hagar. Joktan was identified with Qahtan, probably due to his biblical identification as the ancestor of Hazarmaveth (Hadramawt) and Sheba, although these links are based on biblical guesses.
The first written attestation of the ethnonym "Arab" occurs in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BC, where Shalmaneser III lists a King Gindibu of mâtu arbâi (Arab land) among the people he defeated at the Battle of Qarqar. Some of the names given in these texts are Aramaic, others are the first attestations of proto-Arabic dialects. Assyrian records from the 9th century BC talk about Arabs, such as tribes led by queens, and show how they became increasingly important for escorting trading caravans or military expeditions in northern Arabia and Sinai. [6]
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. Its earliest attested use referring to the southern "Qahtanite" Arabs is much later.
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 BC Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, the 6th century BC Lihyanite texts of southeastern Saudi Arabia and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and the Sinai (not in reality connected with Thamud). Later come the Safaitic inscriptions (beginning in the 1st century BC) and the many Arabic personal names in Nabataean inscriptions in Aramaic. From about the 2nd century BC, 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 Greeks called Yemen "Arabia Felix".[7], The Romans called the vassal nomadic states within the Roman Empire "Arabia Petrea" after the city of Petra, and called unconquered deserts bordering the empire to the south and east Arabia Magna[8]
Muslims of Median 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 , only the nisba adjective . The Qur'an calls itself , "Arabic", and , "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 , the language of the Arabs. The term [[I`rab|]] has the same root and refers to a particularly clear and correct mode of speech. The plural noun refers to the Bedouin tribes of the desert who resisted Muhammad, for example in ayat 9.97, "the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy".
Based on this, in early Islamic terminology, referred to the language, and 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 , "language of the Arabs", denoted the uncontaminated language of the Bedouins.
The Christians of Italy and the Crusaders preferred the term Saraceans for all the Arabs and Muslims of that time.[9]
The Christians of Iberia used the term Moor to describe all the Arabs and Muslims of that time.[10]
Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima distinguishes between sedentary Muslims who used 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.[11]
Most Arabs are Muslim, a few are Christian or Jewish. Arab Muslims are Sunni, Shi'a, Ibadhite, Alawite, or Ismaili. The Druze faith is usually considered separate. The self-identified Arab Christians follow generally Eastern Churches such as Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic. Other Arabic-speaking Christians, such as Copts and Maronites, do not generally consider themselves Arabs.
Before the coming of Islam, most Arabs followed a religion with a number of deities, including Hubal, Wadd, Allāt, Manat, and Uzza. Some tribes had converted to Christianity or Judaism. A few individuals, the hanifs, had apparently rejected polytheism in favor of a vague monotheism. The most prominent Arab Christian kingdoms were the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms. When Himyarite kings 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, most Arabs rapidly became Muslim, and polytheistic traditions disappeared.
Today, Sunni Islam dominates in most areas, overwhelmingly so in North Africa. Shia Islam is prevalent in Bahrain, southern Iraq and adjacent parts of Saudi Arabia, southern Lebanon, parts of Syria, al-Batinah region in Oman, northern Yemen, and in Iran. (Most Iranians are Persians, not Arabs.) The tiny Druze community follow a secretive faith similar to Islam, and are also Arab.
Estimates of the number of Arab Christians vary, and depend on the definition of "Arab", as with the number of all Arabs, especially Muslim Arabs. Christians make up 9.2% of the population of the Near East.[9] In Lebanon they number about 39% of the population,[10] in Syria 10% to 15%. In the Palestinian territories before the creation of Israel estimates range as high as 20%, but is now 3.8% due to mass emigration. In Israel Arab Christians constitute 2.1% (roughly 10% of the Palestinian Arab population). In Egypt, they constitute 10% to 20%, and do not identify as Arabs. Most North and South American Arabs are Christian, as are about half of Arabs in Australia who come particularly from Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt.
Jews from Arab countries – mainly Mizrahi Jews and Yemenite Jews – are today usually not categorised as Arab. Sociologist Philip Mendes asserts that 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".[11] Prior to the emergence of the term Mizrahi, the term "Arab Jews" (Yehudim ‘Áravim, יהודים ערבים) 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. See Jewish exodus from Arab lands.
The first written attestation of the ethnonym "Arab" occurs in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BC, where Shalmaneser III lists King Gindibu of mâtu arbâi (Arab land) among the people he defeated at the Battle of Qarqar. Some of the names in these texts are Aramaic, others are the first attestations of proto-Arabic dialects.
Assyrian records in the ninth century BC talk about Arabs, such as tribes led by queens, and show how they became increasingly important for escorting trading caravans and military expeditions in northern Arabia and Sinai.[12] The Hebrew Bible occasionally refers to peoples called `Arvi (or variants thereof), translated as "Arab" or "Arabian". The scope of the Hebrew term at that early time is unclear, but it seems to have referred to various desert-dwelling Semitic tribes in the Syrian Desert and Arabia. Its earliest attested use referring to the southern "Qahtanite" Arabs is much later.
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 BC Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, the 6th century BC Lihyanite texts of southeastern Saudi Arabia and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and the Sinai (not in reality connected with Thamud). Later come the Safaitic inscriptions (beginning in the 1st century BC) and the many Arabic personal names in Nabataean inscriptions in Aramaic. From about the 2nd century BC, a few inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (near Sulayyil) reveal a dialect which is no longer considered "proto-Arabic", but pre-classical Arabic.
By the fourth century AD, the Arab kingdoms of the Lakhmids in southern Iraq and Ghassanids in southern Syria had emerged just south of the Fertile Crescent and ended up allying respectively with the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires. The Kindite Kingdom emerged in Central Arabia and allied with the Himyarite Empire of South Arabia. Thus they were constantly at war with each other on behalf of their imperial patrons. Their courts were responsible for some notable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and for some of the few surviving pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet. The Sassanids dissolved the Lakhmid kingdom in 602, while the Ghassanids held out until engulfed by the expansion of Islam (Pre-Islamic Arabia).
The Qur'an does not use the word , only the nisba adjective . The Qur'an calls itself , "Arabic", and , "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 , the language of the Arabs. The term [[I`rab|]] has the same root and refers to a particularly clear and correct mode of speech. The plural noun refers to the Bedouin tribes of the desert who resisted Muhammad, for example in ayat 9.97, "the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy".
Based on this, in early Islamic terminology, referred to the language, and 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 , "language of the Arabs", denoted the uncontaminated language of the Bedouins.
The relation of and is complicated further by the notion of "lost Arabs" mentioned in the Qur'an as punished for their disbelief. All contemporary Arabs were considered as descended from two ancestors, Qahtan and Adnan, of which Qahtan was related to the "lost Arabs", and the Southern Arabs were identified as of his lineage, regarded as the "real Arabs", , while the Northern Arabs, including the tribes of Mecca, were considered the descendants of Adnan, in Islamic tradition traced back to Ismail son of Abraham, said to have been arabized at a later period.
Versteegh (1997) is uncertain whether to ascribe this distinction to the memory of a real difference of origin of the two groups, but it is certain that the difference was strongly felt in early Islamic times. Even in Islamic Spain there was enmity between the Qays of the northern and the Kalb of the southern group. The so-called Himyarite language described by Al-Hamdani (died 946) appears to be a special case of language contact between the two groups, an originally north Arabic dialect spoken in the south, and influenced by Old South Arabic.
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. People in Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere became Arab through Arabization.
Arab nationalism declares that Arabs are united in a shared history, culture and language. Arab nationalists believe that Arab identity encompasses more than outward physical characteristics, race or religion. 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 and ethnic nationalisms in the Middle East, such as Lebanese and Egyptian.
During the time of the Ottoman Empire, Syrian writers started to write about "Arab pride" which was aimed to align the peoples of the Middle East away from the traditional tribal and family loyalties. Thanks to this process Arab nationalism gradually filtered into the arts, history and rhetoric. An Arab identity developed and led to a culture clash with the ruling Ottomans.
After the end of the Ottoman Empire and the colonial period, the new Arab states looked to protect their fragile nations by focusing on their own history and culture to build up an enduring national identity.
As these nations developed, pan Arab media led to the Arabization of the Middle East that resulted in much assistance between states, often forced by empathy of their populations for other Arabs. For example, many Arab countries allied in the wars against Israel.
This empathy was an issue to new and weaker states, which needed to reduce the impact of external influence on their citizens in order to run their own countries. For example Iraq functioned thanks to strong governance by the British (reducing third party Arab influence) and later the independent government from 1932 onwards, although the population has significant cultural and historical divides. This new nationalism had a practical application often in response to internal espionage by other Arab nations. This culminated in a number of pivotal events that emphasized the priority of "nation" over the "Arab nation": the 1978 Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, Syria's backing of Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, and Jordan's removal of the PLO.
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