Arab identity is defined independently of religious identity, and pre-dates the spread of Islam, with historically attested Arab Christian kingdoms and Arab Jewish tribes. Today, however, most Arabs are Muslim.[14][15]), with a minority adhering to other faiths, largelyChristianity, but also Druze and Baha’i.
Arabs are generally Sunni, Shia or Sufi Muslims, but currently, 7.1 percent to 10 percent of Arabs are Arab Christians.[16] This figure includes only Christians whose primary community language is today a variety of Arabic, and who identify as Arab.
Arab ethnic identity does not include Christian and other ethnic groups that retain non-Arabic languages and identities within the expanded Arab World. These include the Assyrians of Iraq and north east Syria, Armenians around the entire Near East, and Mandeansin Iraq—though many of these peoples speak Arabic as a first or second language. In addition, many Egyptian Copts and Lebanese Maronites espouse an Ancient Egyptian and Phoenician-Canaanite identity respectively, rather than an Arab one. A number of other peoples living in the Arab World are non-Arab, such as Berbers, Kurds, Turks, Iranians, Azeris, Circassians, Shabaks, Turcomans, Romani, Chechens, Mhallami, Sub-Saharan Africans, South Asians, Samaritans, and Jews.
Today, the main unifying characteristic among Arabs is the Arabic language, a South Semitic language from the Afroasiatic language family. Modern Standard Arabic serves as the standardized and literary variety of Arabic used in writing, as well as in the most formal speech, although it is not spoken natively by the overwhelming majority of Arabs. Most Arabs who are functional in Modern Standard Arabic acquire it as a second language through education, while various varieties of Arabic are spoken as vernaculars by each distinct Arab group. Due to sociolinguistic reasons stemming from pan-Arab political and social considerations, however, these varieties are often regarded dialects rather than independent languages, despite the fact that most varieties of Arabic are notmutually intelligible, whether with each other or to Modern Standard Arabic. By contrast, neither the Maltese language is referred to as a variety of Arabic, nor are the Maltese people Arabs, despite the fact that the Maltese language is philologically a variety of Arabic in no greater or lesser extent than any of the other thus-defined Arabic varieties (sharing intelligibility with Tunisian Arabic), in addition to Malta itself lying on the African tectonic plate along with the other Arab-defined countries of North Africa. This anomaly owes to modern-day Malta being politically aligned and within the cultural sphere of influence of Europe rather than the Arab world, as was the case in Malta’s earlier history.
During the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Classical Era there was no Arab presence in the areas encompassed by modern Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Iran, North Africa, Asia Minor or Kuwait.
The Arabs are first mentioned in the mid 9th century BC as a tribal people dwelling in the mid Arabian Peninsula subjugated by the north Mesopotamian based Assyrians. The Arabs appear to have remained largely under the vassalage of the Neo-Assyrian Empire(911-605 BC), and then the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire (605-539 BC), Persian Achaemenid Empire (539-332 BC), Greek Macedonian/Seleucid Empire and Iranian Parthian Empires.
Arab tribes, most notably the Ghassanids and Lakhmids begin to appear in the south Syrian deserts and southern Jordan from the mid 3rd century AD onwards, during the mid to later stages of the Roman Empire and Sassanid Empire. The Nabateans of Jordan appear to have been an Aramaic speaking ethnic mix of Canaanites, Arameans and Arabs. Thus, although a more limited diffusion of Arabic culture and language was felt in some areas by these migrant minority Arabs in pre-Islamic times through Arab Christian kingdoms and Arab Jewish tribes, it was only after the rise of Islam in the mid-7th century that Arab culture, people and language began their wholesale spread from the central Arabian Peninsula (including the Syrian desert) through conquest and trade.
At the time of the Arab Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries AD, the population of Aramea and Phoenicia (modern Syria and Lebanon) was largely Aramean and Phoenician, with minorities of Greeks, Assyrians, Armenians and Romans also extant, as well as pre-Islamic Arabs in the south Syrian deserts. Israel-Palestine (ancient Israel, Judah and Samarra) and Jordan (ancient Moab, Edom and Ammon) were largely inhabited by native Jews, Samaritans, and other Canaanites, together with Arameans, Greeks and Nabateans. Egypt was largely populated by natives of Ancient Egyptian heritage together with a Greek minority, what had been Phoenician Carthage (modern Tunisia) by its mixed Phoenician-Berber population. A number of Germanic peoples such as the Vandalsand Visigoths were also extant as rulers throughout North Africa (modern Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco) at this time.
Arab cultures went through a mixing process. Therefore, every Arab country has cultural specificities that form a cultural mix that incorporates local novelties acquired after arabization. However, all Arab countries do also share a common culture in arts (music, literature, poetry, calligraphy…), cultural products (handicrafts, carpets, henne, bronze carving…), social behavior, and relations (hospitality, codes of conduct among friends and family…), customs and superstitions, some dishes (shorba, mloukhia), traditional clothing, and architecture.
An overview of the different Arabic dialects
Non-Arab Muslims, who are about 80 percent of the world’s Muslim population, do not form part of the Arab world, but instead comprise what is the geographically larger, and more diverse, Muslim World.
In the USA, Arabs are classified as white by the U.S. Census, and have been since before 1977.[17][18][19]
Arabic, the main unifying feature among Arabs, is a Semitic language originating in Arabia. From there it spread to a variety of distinct peoples across most of West Asia and North Africa,[20] resulting in their acculturation and eventual denomination as Arabs. Arabization, a culturo-linguistic shift, was often, though not always, in conjunction with Islamization, a religious shift.
With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, and as the language of the Qur’an, Arabic became the lingua franca of the Islamic world.[21] It was in this period that Arabic language and culture was widely disseminated with the earlyIslamic expansion, both through conquest and cultural contact.[22]
Arabic culture and language, however, began a more limited diffusion before the Islamic age, first spreading in West Asia beginning in the 2nd century, as Arab Christians such as the Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Banu Judhambegan migrating north from Arabia into the Syrian Desert, south western Iraq and the Levant.[23][24]
In the modern era, defining who is an Arab is done on the grounds of one or more of the following two criteria:
Distribution of Arabic as sole official language (green) and one of several official or national languages (blue).
- Genealogical: someone who can trace his or her ancestry to the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Desert (tribes of Arabia). This was the definition used until medieval times, for example by Ibn Khaldun, but has decreased in importance over time, as a portion of those of Arab ancestry lost their links with their ancestors’ motherland. In the modern era, however, DNA tests have at times proved reliable in identifying those of Arab genealogical descent. For example, it has been found that the frequency of the “Arab marker” Haplogroup J1 collapses suddenly at the borders of Arabic speaking countries.
- Linguistic: someone whose first language, and by extension cultural expression, is Arabic, including any of its varieties. This definition covers some than 420 million people (2014 estimate). Certain groups that fulfill this criterion reject this definition on the basis of non-Arab ancestry; such an example may be seen in the way that Egyptians identified themselves in the early 20th century.[26][27]
The relative importance of these factors is estimated differently by different groups and frequently disputed. Some combine aspects of each definition, as done by Palestinian Habib Hassan Touma,[28] 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 Arab 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.
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 Spainthere was enmity between the Qays of the northern and the Kalb of the southern group. The so-called Sabaean or Himyarite language described by Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī (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 Arabian.[citation needed][dubious – discuss]
During the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th 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 Sudanin the south. This was one of the largest land empires in history. In much of this area, the Arabs spread Islam and the Arabic culture, science, and language (the language of the Qur’an) through conversion and cultural assimilation.
Two references valuable for understanding the political significance of Arab identity: Michael C. Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (Yale University Press, 1977), especially Chs. 2 and 3; and Michael N. Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (Columbia University Press, 1998).
Arab identity
