Arabic, Arabs, "The Arab World", Arabia - 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

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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?

"I will make him a great nation." As the Jewsare a nation of twelve
tribes, the Arabs are also a nation of twelve tribes, in the Old
Testament, today, and in Messiah's Kingdom. Are Ishmael's people
still a "nation?" If not, God lied. Anyone who has studied the Arab
mind and politics knows that all of the Arab national leaders expound
on and on about "The Arab Nation." No other group of nations talks
this way. Shut off from the outside world by the sea and the peril of
the desert around them, the Arabs are the purest racein the world,
even purer than the Jews, many of whom have blond hair and blue
eyes.

- 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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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...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.

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