Arab World

Language and self-identified ethnicity are certainly a part of it. For example, neither the Palestinians nor the Lebanese are Arab peoples by strict analysis of their DNA and history. The Palestinians appear to be descended from the Canaanites who chose not to adopt Judaism when it arose, and the Lebanese are arguably of similar origin--both being more closely related by "blood" to the Jews than to the Arabs. Nonetheless in modern times both peoples regard themselves as Arabs.

While in strict anthropological terms there have been no true "races" of humans since transportation technology made it so easy for the populations to mingle and intermarry and turned us all into what we dog breeders call "mongrels" in our own work, the fact is, at least from an outside perspective, that there is a reasonably well-defined community of people who regard themselves as Arabs.

The term "the Arab world" is a construct of the West. It refers to a hegemony of nations whose people speak Arabic and practice Islam, and whose politics include all or most of the following: suspicion of Western values, hostility toward Israel, resistance to transcendence over old ways, minimization of diversity, second-class status for women, religion as a major factor in civil life, and solidarity against the United States, the nation they regard as "the Great Satan."

By definition, "the Arab world" excludes the majority of the world's Muslims, who live in Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh and are not Arabs by any measure. It also excludes the Iranians, who are an Indo-European people closely related to the Indians, as well as the Turks, Albanians, Kurds, and many other Muslim people inside and outside the Middle East.

Nonetheless it defines a large, nearly continuous swath of land from North Africa to Southwestern Asia, with discontinuities such as Israel and Ethiopia.

No, and one reason is that "English" refers to England and not just its language, whereas "Arab" refers to the entire ethnic group, not just the people who are customarily referred to as Saudis. Another reason is that there is no hegemony of anglophone countries. The U.K. is a member of the European Union and neither it nor Australia and New Zealand have as much in common with the United States as Egypt has in common with Libya or Syria. The only anglophone hegemony is the USA and tiny (in population) Canada.

Again, it's because those countries do not form a hegemony, i.e., there is no "French World" no matter how you try do define it.

Duh? We don't need another name, we just call it "China." Neither Taiwan nor Singapore, the other more-or-less major countries whose people speak Chinese, would agree to being considered part of a Chinese hegemony, and for good reason!

You must be an American because these days it's fashionable in my country to complain that everything has racial connotations.

To quote myself: "It refers to a hegemony of nations whose people speak Arabic and practice Islam, and whose politics include all or most of the following: suspicion of Western values, hostility toward Israel, resistance to transcendence over old ways, minimization of diversity, second-class status for women, religion as a major factor in civil life, and solidarity against the United States, the nation they regard as the Great Satan." I did not say that they all have every one of those characteristics, but they all have almost every one of them. These are the characteristics that are important in political discourse because they shape world politics. Which would you argue over? Iraq was the only secular pro-Western country in the entire "Arab World," and Backward Baby Bush destroyed it.

Good grief it certainly is not! The Iranians are Persians and Shiite Muslims, and they would very much like to end the hegemony of the Sunni Muslim Arabs. That's why they want influence over Iraq. The Iraqis may be Arabs but they are the only other Shiite nation of any size. It was ruled by a Sunni minority, but the Bush Dynasty overthrew it.

The Middle East includes Turkey, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, certainly the unstable Muslim Russian regions like Chechnya, and arguably even the surrounded Christian nations like Armenia and Georgia. None of those people are Arabs.

Don't forget that what we see in the 21st century as an Arab-dominated Middle East was once the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans are a Mongolic people, not Semitic like the Arabs.

Just as the "Western World" is not monolithic and there is considerable diversity among its nations and its peoples, nonetheless it cannot be argued that a Western World does not exist as a cultural, political and economic entity. The same is true of the "Arab World."

 

Indeed. And Japan is generally included in "the West," which is the way the region is more usually called. Japan was entirely rebuilt after WWII by American economists, technologists and industrial psychologists like Edward Deming, who could not get an audience at home. In a sense it is more American than we are.

Well nobody said the term was devoid of connotation.

Perhaps they don't, but our views are shaped by politicians like anyone else's, and they tell us that the Arabs hate us. Photos of people marching in the streets of Saudi Arabia, which is supposed to be one of our staunchest allies, carrying signs saying "Death to the Great Satan," certainly reinforce that belief. The fact that Saudi money underwrites virtually all anti-Western terrorist movements, except for the couple on the outskirts of Israel financed by Iran and Syria, further reinforces it.

That's a pretty big exception in today's world, when rival cults of Abrahamism are once again, regular as clockwork, threatening to destroy civilization.

Malaysia has its anti-Western terrorist cells, but they exist even in the United States. Malaysia taken as a whole, especially its government--just like Indonesia--is reliably pro-Western.

As I said, it's because the term simply doesn't fit any reality. In any case, "English World" would be analogous to "Arabic World," which has a much different meaning than the phrase under discussion in this thread.

Like the modern Britons, a Germanic (and now Franco-Germanic) people who took the name of the Celtic inhabitants they drove out of Britannia, the modern Egyptians are descended from Arabs who destroyed the Ancient Egyptian civilization (which admittedly was already in serious decline) and marginalized the native people. Like the Britons there is plenty of DNA from the original inhabitants due to intermarriage. The Ancient Egyptians were an Afro-Asiatic tribe related to the Semitic tribes, speaking a language that is recognizably related to the Semitic languages.

The modern Egyptians have adopted the history of the Ancient Egyptians and consider the Pyramids and other relics part of their history, but they are predominantly the descendants of the armies of Caliph Omar, who occupied the country and rebuilt is as an Arab, Muslim nation.

The world is full of people who have studied their own history and steep themselves in it. It's a common phenomenon in the USA for children and grandchildren of immigrant families to "reconnect to a heritage" they never really knew, studying the ancestral language and reviving traditions that they were never taught at home. Take for example the Aztlán/La Raza movement among the English-speaking university-educated American-born offspring of Mexican immigrants in America.