Arab people

 

Arab people, also known as Arabs (Arabic: عرب‎, ʿarab) and Arabians, are a panethnic group^[16] primarily inhabiting Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds,^[17] with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing an important part of Arab identity.^[18] Most however have direct or partial ancestral relation to the nomadic indigenous inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula and the Syrian desert, known as Qahtanite and Adnanite Arabs. After the genesis of Islam in the mid-7th century, most Arabs have been Muslim,^[19] spreading the Arab people, Arab language and culture with the Islamic conquests as far as North Africa and Central Asia.

 

The word "Arab" has had several different, but overlapping, meanings over the centuries (and sometimes even today). In addition to including all ethnically Arab and Arabized people of the world (with language tending to be the acid test), it has also at times been used exclusively for bedouin (Arab nomads [although a related word, "`a-RAB," with the Arabic letter "alif" in the second syllable, once was sometimes used when this specific meaning was intended] and their now almost entirely settled descendants). It is sometimes used that way colloquially even today in some places. Townspeople once were sometimes called "sons of the Arabs." As in the case of other ethnicities or nations, people identify themselves (or are identified by others) as "Arabs" to varying degrees. This may not be one's primary identity (it tends to compete with country, religion, sect, etc.), and whether it is emphasized may depend upon one's audience. If the diverse Arab pan-ethnicity is regarded as a single ethnic group, then it constitutes one of the world's largest after Han Chinese.

Etymology[ 

Further information: Arab (etymology)

The earliest documented use of the word "Arab" to refer to a people appears in the Monolith Inscription, an Akkadian language record of the 9th century BC Assyrian Conquest of Syria (Arabs had formed part of a coalition of forces opposed to Assyria).^[20] Listed among the booty captured by the army of king Shalmaneser III of Assyria in the Battle of Qarqar are 1000 camels of "Gi-in-di-bu'u the ar-ba-a-a" or "[the man] Gindibu belonging to the ʕarab" (ar-ba-a-a being an adjectival nisba of the noun ʕarab).^[20]
The most popular Arab account holds that the word 'Arab' came from an eponymous father called Yarab, who was supposedly the first to speak Arabic. Al-Hamdani had another view; he states that Arabs were called GhArab (West in Semitic) by Mesopotamians because Arabs resided to the west of Mesopotamia; the term was then corrupted into Arab. Yet another view is held by Al-Masudi that the word Arabs was initially applied to the Ishmaelites of the "Arabah" valley.
In Biblical etymology, "Arab" (in Hebrew Arvi {{he:ערבי}}) comes both from the desert origin of the people (Arava means wilderness) and/or from the concept of mixed people (Arev-rav - a large group of mixed people). The root a-r-b several additional meanings in Semitic languages including "west/sunset," "desert," "mingle," "merchant," "raven" and are "comprehensible" with all of these having varying degrees of relevance to the emergence of the name. It is also possible that some forms were metathetical from ‹See Tfd›ʿ-B-R "moving around" (Arabic ‹See Tfd›ʿ-B-R "traverse"), and hence, it is alleged, "nomadic."

Identity

Arab identity is defined independently of religious identity, and pre-dates the rise 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. Arabs are generally Sunni, Shia or Sufi Muslims, but currently, 7.1 percent to 10 percent of Arabs are Arab Christians.^[21] This figure does not include Christian ethnic groups such as Assyrians, and Syriacs.
The early Arabs were the tribes of Northern Arabia speaking proto Arabic dialects. Although since early days other people became Arabs through an Arabization process that could mean intermarriage with Arabs, adopting the Arabic language and culture, or both. For example, the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids which originated from Southern Semitic speaking Yemen made a major contribution in the creation of the Arabic language. The same process happened all over the Arab world after the spread of Islam by the mixing of Arabs with several other peoples. The Arab cultures went through a mixing process. Therefore every Arab country has cultural specificities which constitute a cultural mix which also originate in local novelties achieved after the arabization took place. However, all Arab countries do also share a common culture in most Aspects: Arts (music, literature, poetry, calligraphy...), Cultural products (Handicrafts, carpets, henne, bronze carving...), Social behaviour and relations (Hospitality, codes of conduct among friends and family...), Customs and superstitions, Some dishes (Shorba, Mloukhia), Traditional clothing, Architecture...
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 have historically been racially classified as white/Caucasian^[22][23] and, since 1997, by the U.S. Census as well.^[24][25]
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,^[26] 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.^[27] It was in this period that Arabic language and culture was widely disseminated with the early Islamic expansion, both through conquest and cultural contact.^[28]
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 Judham began migrating north from Arabia into the Syrian Desert, south western Iraq and the Levant.^[29][30]
In the modern era, defining who is an Arab is done on the grounds of one or more of the following two criteria: