Arabs

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Arabs
(العرب)
Total population
approx. 250 to 300 million
Regions with significant populations
Populations in Arabic-speaking regions
 Egypt (Arabizied)62,000,000
 Algeria (Arabizied)25,000,000
 Iraq19,000,000
 Saudi Arabia17,000,000
 Yemen16,000,000
 Syria (Arabizied)13,000,000
 Morocco (Arabizied)13,000,000
 Tunisia (Arabizied)9,500,000
 Sudan (Arabizied)7,500,000
 Lebanon (Arabizied)2,300,000
 Libya (Arabizied)1,600,000
 United Arab Emirates1,500,000
 Oman840,000
 Kuwait710,000
 Bahrain409,000
 Qatar166,000
Languages
Arabic
Religion
Predominantly Islam
Some adherents of Druze, Judaism, Samaritan, Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Mizrachi Jews, Sephardi Jews[citation needed], Ashkenazi Jews, Canaanites, other Semitic-speaking groups

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an Arab (Arabic: عرب ; Template:ArTranslit) is a member of a Noble people inhabiting Most of the Middle East whose language and Islamic religion spread widely throughout the World from the seventh century.[1] However, Arabs can be considered part of the white ethnic group [2] and many varying views of the definition have been offered.


Defining Arab

The relative importance of these factors is estimated differently by different groups and frequently disputed. Most people who consider themselves Arabs do so on the basis of the overlap of the political and linguistic definitions. However, some members of groups who meet both criteria reject the identity on the basis of the genealogical and ethno-national definitions; Lebanese Maronites, for example, may reject the Arab label in favor of a narrower Phoenician-Aramaean-Lebanese identity. This is particularly true for the peoples of North Africa; the Muslim Berbers and both Muslim and Coptic Egyptians. Groups using a non-Arabic liturgical language are especially likely to consider themselves non-Arab. Not many people consider themselves Arab on the basis of the political definition without the linguistic one, thus, Kurds or Berbers do not usually identify themselves as Arab - but some do. For instance, some Berbers also consider themselves Arabs or, in other words, Berber and Arab identities are not necessarily mutually exclusive (v. e.g. Gellner, Ernest and Micaud, Charles, Eds. Arabs and Berbers: from tribe to nation in North Africa. Lexington: Lexington Books, 1972).

Defining Arab in Medieval Times

In medieval times, the definition of Arab was restricted. Ibn Khaldun, for example, does not use the word Arab to refer to Arabic-speakings people as defined by most of the above definitions, but only to those who can trace their ancestry to one of the original Arabian tribes (e.g. the modern peoples of Saudi Arabia , Yemen and the Arab Gulf States).

Defining Arab in Modern Times

In the modern nationalist era, according to Habib Hassan Touma,[3] "An 'Arab', in the modern sense of the word, is 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."

On its formation in 1946, the Arab League defined an "Arab" as follows:[citation needed]

An Arab is 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"

- Arab League

Origin

Based on the Torah, Bible, and Qur'an, the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula are the descendants of Shem son of Noah. 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 directly 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 (today, Petra is an archaeological site in Jordan, lying in a basin among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Wadi Araba).

Other Arabs are known as Arabized-Arabs, including those who came from some parts of Mesopotamia, the Levant, lands of the Berbers and the Moors, Egypt, the Sudan, and other African Arabs.[4]

Arab origin is divided into two major groups:

al-ʻĀriba (العاربة) "Pure origin": They are the Arabs known as Qahtanite who are traditionally considered to be direct descendants of Noah through his son Shem through his sons Aram and Arfakhshaath. Famous noble Qahtanite Arab families from this group can be recognised in the modern days from their surnames such as : Alqahtani, Alharbi, Alzahrani, Alghamedey, aws and khazraj (Alansari or Ansar), Aldosari, Alkhoza'a, Morra, Alojman, etc. Arab genealogies usually ascribe the origins of the Qahtanites to the South Arabians who built up one of the oldest centres of civilisation in the Near East beginning around 800 BC. These groups did not speak one of the early forms of Arabic or its predecessors, however, but instead South Semitic languages such as Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic.[5]

al-Mustaʻribah (المستعربة) "Arabized Arabs": The term Arabized-Arabs can be used in three different cases:

  • Is used for defining the Arabs who are traditionally considered to be descendants of Abraham through his son Ishmael through his son Adnan, and they are known as "Adnanites": it is defined of the Arabs who settled in Mecca when Abraham took his Egyptian wife Hagar or (Hajar) and his son Ishmael to Mecca. Ishmael was raised by his mother Hagar and the noble Arab tribe "Jurhom" who left from Yemen and settled in Mecca after the drought in Yemen at that time. Ishmael learned Arabic language and he spoke it fluently during his life. That is the main reason for calling this group as Arabised. It is believed that the Prophet of Islam Mohammad is descended of Adnanite Arab tribe which is "Quriesh". Some famous noble Adnanite Arab families from this group are: Alanazi, Altamimi, Almaleek, Bani Khaled, Bani Kolab, Bani Hashim, etc.
  • The term Arabised-Arabs is also used for defining the Arabs who spoke other Afro-Asiatic languages. They are Arabic speakers and regarded as Arabs in contemporary times.
  • The same term al-Musta'ribah "Arabized-Arabs" is also used for the "Mixed Arabs", between "Pure Arabs" and the Arabs from South Arabia.

Religions

The Arabs are mainly Muslim with a minority of Christian followers, and some Arab Jews. Arab Muslims are Sunni, Shiite, Ibadhite, Alawite, or Ismaili. The Druze faith is usually considered as a religion apart. The Arab Christians follow generally one of the following Eastern Churches: Coptic, Maronite, Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic.

Before the coming of Islam, most Arabs followed a religion featuring the worship of a number of deities, including Hubal, Wadd, Allāt, Manat, and Uzza, while some tribes had converted to Christianity or Judaism, and 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. With the conversion of the Himyarite kings to Judaism in the late 4th century the elites of the other prominent Arab kingdom, the Kindites, being Himyirite vassals, appear to have converted (at least partly) to Judaism too. With the expansion of Islam, the majority of Arabs rapidly became Muslims, and the pre-Islamic polytheistic traditions disappeared.

At present, most Arabs are Muslims. 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, northern Yemen, southern Iran and al-Batinah region in Oman. The tiny Druze community, belonging to a secretive offshoot of Islam, is also Arab.

Reliable estimates of the number of Arab Christians, which in any case, just as the number of all Arabs, especially Muslim Arabs, depends on the definition of "Arab" used, vary. Today Christians only make up 9.2% of the population of the Near East.[6] In Lebanon they now number about 39% of the population,[7] in Syria they make up about 10 to 15%, in the Palestinian territories before the creation of Israel estimates range as high as 40%, but due to mass emigration the contemporary figure is 3.8%, and in Israel Arab Christians constitute 2.1% (or roughly 10% of the Israeli Arab population). In Egypt, they constitute about 6% of the population. Most North and South American and Australian Arabs (about two-thirds) are Arab Christians, particularly from Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon.

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".[8] 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. Between the late 1940s and 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 also 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).

History

Al Khazneh, Petra (the Nabataean capital)
File:Antoninianus Philip the Arab - Seculum Novum.jpg
Coin showing the roman emperor Philip the Arab
Arabs wearing traditional dress in 1910
Arab family from 1905

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) as among the people he defeated at the Battle of Qarqar. Some of the names given in these texts are Aramaic, while others are the first attestations of Proto-Arabic dialects. The Hebrew Bible likewise refers occasionally to peoples called `Arvi (or variants thereof), translated as "Arab" or "Arabian". The scope of the Hebrew term at this 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 into history. The earliest such texts are written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor in its Nabataean ancestor, but in variants of the Epigraphic South Arabian musnad, beginning in the 8th century BC with the Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, and continuing from the 6th century BC on with the Lihyanite texts (in southeastern Saudi Arabia) and the Thamudic texts (found throughout Arabia and the Sinai, and not in reality connected with Thamud). Later come the Safaitic inscriptions (beginning in the 1st century BC) and the many Arabic personal names attested in Nabataean inscriptions (which are, however, written 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. In addition to this the Kindite Kingdom emerged in Central Arabia that allied with the Himyarite Empire of South Arabia. Thus they were constantly at war with each other on behalf of their imperial patrons. However, 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 would hold out until engulfed by the expansion of Islam (Pre-Islamic Arabia)

In the Qur'an, the word Template:ArabDIN does not appear, only the nisba adjective, Template:ArabDIN: The Qur'an is referring to itself as Template:ArabDIN "Arabic" and Template:ArabDIN "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", and the Qur'an came to be regarded as the prime example of the Template:ArabDIN, the language of the Arabs. The term [[I`rab|Template:ArabDIN]] is from the same root, referring to a particularly clear and correct mode of speech. The plural noun Template:ArabDIN refers to the Bedouin tribes of the desert who resisted Muhammad, for example in ayat 9.97, Template:ArabDIN "the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy".

Based on this, in early Islamic terminology, Template:ArabDIN referred to sedentary Arabs, living in cities such as Mecca and Medina, and Template:ArabDIN referred to the Arab Bedouins, carrying a negative connotation due to the Qur'anic verdict just cited. Following the Islamic conquest of the 8th century, however, the language of the nomadic Arabs came to be regarded as preserving the highest purity by the grammarians following Abi Ishaq, and the term Template:ArabDIN "language of the Arabs" came to denote the uncontaminated language of the Bedouins.

The relation of Template:ArabDIN and Template:ArabDIN is complicated further by the notion of "lost Arabs" Template:ArabDIN 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", Template:ArabDIN, 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 eighth and ninth centuries, the Arabs (specifically the Umayyads, and later Abbasids) forged an empire 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. Throughout much of this area, the Arabs spread the religion of Islam and the Arabic language (the language of the Qur'an) through conversion and assimilation. Many groups came to be known as "Arabs" not through descent but through this process of Arabization. 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[citation needed] 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 respectively.

Traditional genealogy

Medieval Arab genealogists divided the Arabs into three groups:

  • the "ancient Arabs", tribes that had vanished or been destroyed, such as 'Ad and Thamud; they are often alluded to in the Qur'an as examples of God's power to destroy wicked peoples.
  • the "Pure Arabs" of South Arabia, descending from Qahtan. The Qahtanites (Qahtanis) are said to have migrated the land of Yemen following the destruction of the Ma'rib Dam (sadd Ma'rib).
  • The "Arabized Arabs" (musta`ribah) of center and North Arabia, descending from Ishmael son of Abraham.

The Arabic language spoken today in classical Quranic form was the result of a mix between the original Arabic of Qahtan and northern Arabic which shares a great deal with northern Semitic languages from the Levant. The Arabs take a great pride in their language and its survival as a usable and comprehensible language over thousands of years[neutrality is disputed].

In Jewish and Christian traditions the Ishmaelites were described as an "Arabian people" at least by the time of Josephus, which became standard centuries prior to Islam (in which the term Hagarenes, a pun on the Arabic muhajir and the name of Hagar, was commonly used). 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.

Arab tribes

Main article: Tribes of Arabia

Arab Nationalism

Main article: Arab nationalism
File:Nasser.gif
Egyptian President Nasser, whose ideology of "Nasserism" defined the pan-Arabism of the 1960s

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. Also, an Arab identity developed to the extent that it lead to a culture clash with the ruling Ottomans.

Following the demise 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 has lead to the Arabization of the region of the Middle East that resulted in a large amount of assistance between states, often forced due to empathy within their populations for other Arabs in certain situations, such as the war(s) with Israel where many Arab countries gave assistance.

This empathy is an issue to newly independent nations or weaker nations, as they sought to consolidate. New and small states needed to reduce the impact of external influence on their citizens so that they could run their own countries.

Iraq is a good case as initially strong governance by both the British (reducing third party Arab influence) and the Iraqi independent government (1932 onwards) allowed the country to function up until the present day even though the country has significant cultural and historical divides within the population.

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":

Over time the threat of other Arab States has given way to fear of Islamic fundamentalist takeover, so it is no surprise that global terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda seek to leverage Arab Nationalism to help their cause. Indeed Fred Halliday in his book Two hours that shook the world argues that international terrorist attacks such as the World Trade Centre in 2001 are actually targeted at nationalist Arab States to enable the local Arab Nationalist sentiment to facilitate fundamentalist takeover in the face of perceived state weakness.

See also

External links

Sources

References and notes

  1. ^ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Arab
  2. ^ ""Arab: The relative importance of these factors is estimated differently by different groups. Most people who consider themselves Arabs do so on the basis of the overlap of the political and linguistic definitions, but some members of groups which fulfill both criteria reject the identity on the basis of the genealogical definition. Not many people consider themselves Arab on the basis of the political definition without the linguistic one—thus, Kurds or Berbers usually identify themselves as non-Arab—but some do (for instance, some Berbers do consider themselves Arabs and Arab nationalists saw the Kurds as Arabs)."". "Economic Expert". {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  3. ^ 1996, p.xviii
  4. ^ Firestone, Reuven, (1990) "Journeys in Holy Lands: Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis", SUNY Press, pps.72., ISBN 0-7914-0331-9
  5. ^ Nebes, Norbert, "Epigraphic South Arabian," in von Uhlig, Siegbert, Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), pps.335.
  6. ^ Christian Communities in the Middle East. Oxford University Press. 1998. ISBN 0-19-829388-7.
  7. ^ https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/le.html#People
  8. ^ http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~ajds/mendes_refugees.htm
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