Arab identity

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, with a minority adhering to other faiths, largely Christianity, 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. This figure includes only Christians whose primary community language is today a variety of Arabic, and who identify as Arab.

Overview

Arab ethnic identity does not include Christian, Jewish and other ethnic groups that retain non-Arabic languages and/or identities within the expanded Arab World. These include the Jews, Samaritans, Assyrian people of Iraq, north east Syria, north west Iran and south east Turkey, the Syriac Christians of western Syria, Armenians around the entire Near East, and Mandaeans in Iraq and Iran—though many of these peoples speak Arabic as a first or second language. In addition, Copts and Maronites espouse an ancient Egyptian and Phoenician identity respectively, rather than an Arab one.

Additionally, a number of other indigenous peoples living within what is considered the Arab World are equally non-Arab, even if they are ethnic groups which predominantly consist of adherents of Islam. These include ethnic groups such as Berbers, Kurds, Turks, Persians/Iranians, Azeris, Yezidis, Circassians, Shabaks, Turcomans, Romani, Chechens, Kawliya, Mhallami. Nor does Arab include migrant groups resident in the Arab World, even if they are largely of the Muslim faith, including migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

Today, the main unifying characteristic among Arabs is Arabic, 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 most formal speech, although it is not used in daily speech by the overwhelming majority of Arabs. Most Arabs who are functional in Modern Standard Arabic acquire it through education and use it solely for writing and formal settings. While various varieties of Arabic are spoken as vernaculars by each distinct Arab group, these varieties are often regarded as dialects rather than independent languages. Most of these dialects are mutually intelligible, although not all of them.

The Arabs are first mentioned in the mid-ninth century BCE as a tribal people dwelling in the central Arabian Peninsula subjugated by Upper Mesopotamia-based state of Assyria. The Arabs appear to have remained largely under the vassalage of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911-605 BCE), and then the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire (605-539 BCE), Persian Achaemenid Empire (539-332 BCE), Greek Macedonian/Seleucid Empire and Parthian Empire.

Arab tribes, most notably the Ghassanids and Lakhmids begin to appear in the south Syrian deserts and southern Jordan from the mid 3rd century CE onwards, during the mid to later stages of the Roman Empire and Sasanian Empire. The Nabataeans of Jordan appear to have been an Aramaic speaking ethnic mix of Canaanites, Arameans and Arabs. Thus, although a more limited diffusion of Arab 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 south Syrian desert) through conquest and trade.

At the time of the early Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, the population of Mesopotamia, the Levant and nearby regions was primarily Aramaic speakers with a minority such as Persians, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Romans, Samaritans. Egypt was largely populated by natives of ancient Egyptian heritage with a Greek minority, the Maghreb by Carthaginians and Berbers as well as a small minority of Germanic peoples such as the Vandals and Visigoths ruling kingdoms.

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 constitute 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.

Arabic, the main unifying feature among Arabs, is a Semitic language. During the early Muslim conquests, Arabic language, culture, and people spread across most of West Asia and North Africa, resulting in the acculturation of their inhabitants 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 seventh century, and as the language of the Qur'an, Arabic became the lingua franca of the Islamic world. It was in this period that Arabic language and culture was widely disseminated with the early Islamic expansion, both through conquest and cultural contact.

Arab culture and language, however, began a more limited diffusion before the Islamic Golden Age, first spreading in West Asia beginning in the second century as Arab Christians such as the Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Banu Judham began migrating north from Arabia into the Syrian Desert, south western Iraq and the Levant.

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 more 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.

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, 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.

The Arab League, a regional organization of countries intended to encompass the Arab world, defines an Arab as:

An Arab is a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic-speaking country, and who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic-speaking peoples.

Schoolgirls in Gaza lining up for class, 2009

According to Sadek Jawad Sulaimanis the former Ambassador of Oman to the United States:

The Arabs are defined by their culture, not by race; and their culture is defined by its essential twin constituents of Arabism and Islam. To most of the Arabs, Islam is their indigenous religion; to all of the Arabs, Islam is their indigenous civilization. The Arab identity, as such, is a culturally defined identity, which means being Arab is being someone whose mother culture, or dominant culture, is Arabism. Beyond that, he or she might be of any ancestry, of any religion or philosophical persuasion, and a citizen of any country in the world. Being Arab does not contradict with being non-Muslim or non-Semitic or not being a citizen of an Arab state.

The relation of ʿarab and ʾaʿrāb is complicated further by the notion of "lost Arabs" al-ʿArab al-ba'ida mentioned in the Qur'an as punished for their disbelief. All contemporary Arabs were considered as descended from two ancestors, Qahtan and Adnan.

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 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.

During the early Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries, the Arabs forged the Rashidun and then Umayyad Caliphate, and later the Abbasid Caliphate, whose borders touched southern France in the west, China in the east, Anatolia 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 Arab culture, science, and language through conversion and cultural assimilation.

See also

• Arabs
• Arab culture
• Arabic