Who are the Arabs are all Middleasterners Arabs ?

Why Middleasterners call them self Arabs or when did they become Arabs m
Is it because they are Muslim then by deduction they are Arabs ?

 

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That is a big no there sport . Arabs can be Muslim but Muslims can't be Arabs . Arabs have there own Identity beyond Islam. Before Islam . Quite unique really . Great contributors to the world books of knowledge we take for granted . Great discoveries you don't even know they discovered . It is one of the reasons they are so mad at you . There culture of greatness is buried by the mounds on peoples desks . They don't know what the Arabs have done for them . It is a what have you done for Me lately world my friend

 

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Arabs are less than 20% of all Muslims in the world. One of the biggest misconceptions people make is when they consider all "Arabs" to be the same. The Arab world is divided into the Sham or Levant and Yemen or the South with the Egyptians and Iraqis falling in between


The Levant has been at various times under Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Persian,Arab, Mongol, Turkic and British/French Rule. They have also obligingly followed the Greek, Roman, Persian and Arab religions and cultures. Since the Mongols and Turkics came from central Asia and a more primitive shamanist culture, they adopted at various times the religion and culture of the people they conquered. Hence the Levant is a collusion of several cultures and much more diverse and open in outlook.


The Egyptians Iranians and Iraqis fall somewhere in between. Still hungover with the glories of the past and subject to several massacres due to their culture of resistance - the Mongols used to build mountains of skulls in Baghdad - they seem to have arrived at Arabism as a form of compromise, which did not last too long in the Iranians who between the Arabs and Mongols captured power and established a Persian noble [married to a Jewish woman, if I am not mistaken] as one of the Caliphs. All of them did however Arabise their script.

The "real Arabs" the people of Najd and Hejaz, have a different history. They are one of the oldest trading centers in the region, trading thousands of years back with the Indians and Egyptians by sea. Pagan and isolated across the desert, they seem to have missed the influences of the Greeks and Romans [who called them Arabia felix] and retained an ethnocentric tribal society that is slow to adapt and change. They don't seem to have adopted any of the religions of their neighbors or at least, we have no record of it, although there is evidence that they came in touch with nomads from the north. They delivered their own monotheistic faith of Islam, derived from their contact with the others and retreated after a few hundred years back to their desert


Of all these, only Iranians and Turks do not self identify as "Arabs" whereas Egyptians and Levantines do, even though they are not "real Arabs" but are Arabised ie they have adopted the language, culture and religion of their occupiers. Strangely enough even Iraqis who are mostly Shia self identify as Arabs.

 

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Nothing strange about that - "Arab" is an ethnic group that includes Iraqis but not Persians. Religion doesn't figure into it: there are plenty of Christian and Jewish Arabs as well, let alone Shia. Arabism predates Islam by a long time.

Also you seem to have neglected North Africa from your analysis almost entirely. It's Arabs all the way to Morrocco.

 

The Iraqis are Mesopotamians and before the advent of Islam had a separate but distinct, non Arab identity although they did have minorities of Arab origin. The Iraqi "Arabs" and Kurds are closer to each other in ethnicity than to the Arabs

 

They are all called arabs, because they share an almost similar cultures and relegion (in majority) and language, however, it wasn't always like that, not everyone used to call himself an arab at some parts of history, propably that became very common that almost everyone identify themselves as arabs can be due to arabism, when arab invades a land (after islam), they don't destory it or massacre its people, they try to mixe with it, with the people nd the culture, that's why you find divercified arab cultures and even looks.
However, everyone who speaks arabic as hes native language, is called arab, even if he looks chinese.
So it was mainly a pool of many varities, both geneticly and culturally.

Talking geneticly, not all middle eastern share the same genetics, because they are a mixe of different races actually, in north africa for example, mainly it's a mixe of berbers and arabs, and others..

That's what I think.

 

Ethnic groups grow, move, shrink, etc. in various ways. Those Iraqis are as Arab as anybody by now, and there is no longer any such ethnic group as "Mesopotamians."

You mean in geneology. So what? We're talking about identity groups here - if Iraqis all identify as Arabs, and the other Arabs all agree, then it really does not matter at all what the DNA says. Even if the identity group mythology includes some idea of common ancestry. Nobody demands a DNA test before identifying, nor before accepting somebody else's identification.

 

Except in Iraqi history, which they learn from school, Iraqis have as much pride in their history as any people do and they self identify as Arabs who are descended from Mesopotamians. Even the word Iraq comes from the name Erech which was an ancient Mesopotamian city. The Iraqi Arab dialect is also different from classical Arabic and contains words from their original language

It is interesting but when Arabs speak to each other, the language they use is dependent on whether they are speaking to someone from the same region or country or whether they are speaking to someone from another part of the Middle East. A Tunisian and a Morroccan for example will speak differently to each other than either would to an Iraqi or a Yemeni

Of course, it is similar to the Autsralians/Americans/New Zealanders speaking English and feeling an affinity with the UK inspite not being all from England

Not exactly, it is like saying America is part of the Persian world due to the large number of Persian immigrants. Although groups like the Janjaweed in Sudan and the Bohra community in India are descended from Arab immigrants, their self definition as Arabs is not consistent across the board and there are differences to the extent in which they practice Arabism

I haven't heard of this. Consistently Kurds seem to be the closest genetic relatives of Jews in the region.

The Genetic Bonds Between Kurds and Jews

In the article in the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University of Israel wrote that their study revealed that Jews have a closer genetic relationship to populations in the northern Mediterranean (Kurds, Anatolian Turks, and Armenians) than to populations in the southern Mediterranean (Arabs and Bedouins).

Only because of the political implications. You may have noticed that in many cases, the conclusions described differ dramatically from what the data reveals. From Oppenheim's study

Oppenheim's study proposes that exclusive retention of these genes only in these two groups shows descent from neolithic times. Interestingly, the shared pool that these genes come from also show overlap with the pool shared by Jews even though Jews are shown to be closer to Kurds.

From the same study:

But going back to Arabs and Arabism, it is interesting to note that many groups adopted Islam but retained their ethnic identity [e.g. Kurds, Persians, Turks, Indians] while others adopted both Islam and the Arab identity and a third group adopted the Arab identity but not the religion [Christians in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan] and a fourth kept both their identity and religion [I suppose Mandaeans, Copts, Assyrians, Maronites and Samaritans would probably fall in these]. Then there are those who are still difficult to classify like the Marsh Arabs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Arabs

 

Was something in there supposed to conflict with something I said? Because it's phrased like it is - appended to a quote, and began with 'Except...' But when I read it, I don't find anything at odds with my quoted statement. This is all totally normal, expected stuff for any large ethnic group.

Also totally commonplace, expected behavior for any large ethnic group. I don't think you can identify a large ethnic group (say, more than a few million people) that does not do that.

You're missing the salient feature there - Australians and New Zealanders are ethnically "British" despite living on the other side of the world. This is because they identify as such, and the Brits agree. Americans are not ethnically British, because they do not identify as such, and others agree with this. Ethnicity is a form of identity group - it uses language, heritage, race, culture, etc. as signifiers, but does not depend on them in any concrete, deterministic fashion. If you choose to so identify, and the others in the group accept that identification, then that's all there is to it.

If the number of Persian immigrants to America had been as large and influential as Arabs who spread to North Africa were, that would be a perfectly reasonable, accurate statement.

Every country in North Africa is in the Arab League, has Arabic as an official language, etc. North Africans are as Arab as anyone.

So what? Sudan is an unequivocably Arab country, regardless of how they got that way, or what differences there might be between them and, say, Saudis. They all say they're Arabs, and the other Arabs all agree, so that's the end of the story.

 

No it wouldn't. "Arabness" isn't a genetic property. It's a matter of appearance and behavior. Ethnic groups are not genotypes.

DNA analysis is irrelevant to the question of ethnic identification.

Your point being...?

 

Do they? Not in my experience. I've worked with Yemenis, Syrians, Sudanese, Moroccons [my ex was one] Tunisians, Egyptians, Saudis, yada yada

Take Sudan for example. Sudanese identify themselves as Afro-Arabs preferring to be called neither Africans nor Arabs exclusively. The fact that 70% of them are Muslims makes them lean towards Arab culture the same way Indian Muslims have a lot of Persian culture in their day to day lives but Indian Muslims even if they speak Urdu with a lot of Farsi words and write right to left and dress in clothes which look vaguely middle eastern while using Arabic for their prayers, are not Arabs or Persians. They are Indians, even those who call themselves direct descendents of Yemeni immigrants like the Bohra community. If I'm not mistaken they - the Sudanese - recently split the country over such issues - in a few years possibly we will see a change in how these countries identify themselves, as North Africans rather than Arabs. Maybe not Tunisians though - what do think Shadow1? You think Tunisians prefer to identify as Arabs rather than Berbers? Will there be a revival of Tamazight you think?

Identity in Sudan: African or Arab?

 

@SAM: in Tunisia, people identify themselves as arabs, but most of them know that we are a mixe of both berbers and arabs mainly, besides other ethnics, but mainly we still identify ourselves as arabs, however, there are some towns in the tunisian south, that idenfity themselves as berbers, and have their berber language, besides arabic.
Maybe in morroco where there's a high number of people who indentify themselves as berbers, and speak tamazigh as their native language, and also arabic, morroco is more like than tunisia, to have the language of tamazigh added as an official language one day, but they are still all morrocans, nationality and relegion is what unites them.
Most of us here, in Tunisia, realise the fact that we are a mixe, we are not pure berbers, nor pure arabs, but we identify ourselves as arabs, I don't think there will be a "revival" of Tamazigh here, first, there's a small minority of them who speak that as a native tong besides arabic, it's like, calling the country Jewish because once we used to worship many gods (from stone), and then we became jews, and then christians, and then muslims, effcorse the previous relegions stayed as minorities, not totally vanished (the 3 relegions I mean).

The rise of the Tamazigh identity and such things in some Maghreb countries, isnt very "innocent" calling, since it's saying like "you are all berbers! you liked it or not! (means, you must identify your selves as berbers not arabs) ..." something like that, on the other side, there's the normal innocent calling wich calling to recocnize the tamazigh language in countries like Morroco, where there are alot of people that speak it as a native language besides arabic (they already have a Tamazigh speaking tv channel there)

This nationality thing, may be used for political reasons, to make problems and such things, to divide a country, (like in Iraq, they want to divide the country by relegion and ethnic identifications, like kurds, muslims (shia and sunna), stuff like that) ..

As democracy is rising in arab countries, and if it ever reaches Morroco or Algeria, (effcorse after overcoming problems as conflicts because of ethnics or something (effcorse arised by some hands for political reasons, like, to save the dictatorship) ), the Tamazigh nationality may be recocnized, also the Tamazigh language recocgnized as one of the recocnized languages in the country)

But many parts of this, are politicaly motivated (that's what I think).

 

Thanks Shadow1 thats what I thought, that Tunisians likely to continue to identify as Arabs while Morocco may not even though they both speak the same French Arabic patois that is incomprehensible to anyone from Egypt eastward. Are there many places in rural Tunisia which speak Tamazight? Do you have any regional political parties interested in revitalising the Berber culture? I know that a lot of Tunisian clothing and food is different from Arabic but to what extent is Tunisia arabised?

It seemed to me - and I may be wrong - that many Moroccans saw themselves as "different" from Arabs more westernised like the Turks. How do Tunisians see themselves?

 

You're welcome

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Btw, the word arabs itself, today, doesnt mean a specific race, but a group of ethnics, that is in the arab world, so if you are black or white or chinese-like, you are an arab (if your native language is arabic), so it's kinda irrelevant to make so much problems for identifying who's arab and who's not, in that case, everyone should make a DNA test, and see where he is from, I have a friend, who's hes father searched in their family history, and he reached turkey, as for my grand-mother's family origin, is from spain, so you see, it's a cultural and a genetical pool.

As for the Tunisian culture, it is arabic, (since arabic culture, or to be more precise and more correct, the islamic culture is already a production or many cultures, combined together, including the arabic one, and with adding to it, you get this, and as you see, it's diversified, from morroco to india.

The Tunisian culture IS arabic and islamic (wich is also, influenced by other cultures, including berbers, and carthage).
So you get some different things in each country, due to the different influence, and the different countries established during the history.

The minority I'm talking about, isnt that many towns, just few, like Tatouine, and few others, that have a tamazigh speaking people (my friend told me, he know some words, like "azul" means hi).

There isnt an political party that have political interrest in reviving the berber identity, but the cultural things, are already here, all of it is identified as Tunisian, but to be more precise, some of those cultural stuff are also identified to it's berber origin.

I don't think it's correct, morrocans are attached to their culture, westernised? I don't know how, the whole world is westernised.
I don't know exactly about morrocans, but Morroco looks like Tunisia in some places.

How Tunisians feel about themselves, generally, we feel that we are tunisians, arabs.

Today, the arab world is in it's dark ages, so my guess is, many people will try to identify themselves, to a different ethnic or culture, like phonecean and such things, while they forget, that the word arab itself today, is already a mixe of many ethnics and cultures.
While at some time in the arab world, many people from berbers and others, started to identify themselves as arabs, because the arab world was the most developed part of the world, and one of the centers (if not the center) of knowledge and other things at some part of it's history.

 

Thanks for the helpful post

I only asked because even with Egyptian Christians, there was no hesistation in identifying as Arab, the way that the Druze in Syria and Jews in Yemen all consider their Middle Easternness as indivisible from their faith and see Europeans as aliens with a different set of values even if they share their religion [doesn't help of course that so much westernised Christiniaty and Judaism has elements like the rapture or atheism which is incomprehensible to Christians and Jews of the Arab world] Even Syrians readily identify as Arabs the way you just did. But some of the Moroccans and Sudanese I met felt that by identifying as Arab, they were denying their own Nubian or Berber identity. Which is why I did not include the North African nations in the Arab world. Guess I have to put Tunisia back in

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Yes, it's not about relegion, Tunisian jews identify themselves as Tunisians and arabs, same to christians, (except if their family if from somewhere else), even in the case of atheists, anyway, again, it also depends on the person, like everyone else, arab, doesnt mean muslims since not all arabs are muslims, and since arab muslims are a minority in the world muslims population.

As for the real arabs (geneticly), or the first arabs, they are the people of Yemen, then it comes the arabia area.

 

Arabic is a language. People who speak Arabic as their native language typically call themselves 'Arabs'.

It's also cultural, since there's an Arabic culture that's associated with the language, which originated among the tribes in the Arabian peninsula and subequently evolved over the centuries in the countries that those tribes conquered in the 7'th century.

I guess that some Arabs see it in terms of blood too. But unless they are descended from those 7'th century Arabs, their ancestors were more likely Syriac, Mesopotamian, Egyptian or North African peoples who gradually took up use of Arabic as their language and were assimilated into the general Islamic culture.

Middle Easterners aren't all Arabs. There's the Turks, several varieties of them in fact. There are the Armenians, the Kurds, and a number of different kinds of Persians. There are many Berbers in North Africa. And the Israelis, obviously. What distinguishes all of these non-Arabic groups is their use of a different language. And important cultural differences are often associated with the linguistic differences.

But since the majority of the Islamic peoples to the west of Iran speak Arabic, and since Islam itself originated in Arabia, Arabic culture has broader importance and is kind of paradigmatic in the Islamic world. Arabic is the language of the Quran. Even as far east as Indonesia, Islamic scholars still learn Arabic. And Muslims in places like Malaysia and Pakistan give their children Arabic names.

 

I can see here in the USA the American converts to Islam the encourage or force them to learn and pray in Arabic, In other word if you want to be a Muslim you have to pray and learn Arabic, and that is probable what Islam did Arabisising were ever they conquered.

 

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Quran can't be correctly translated, because there are many words that have a precise meaning that may be changed when translated, many words have no synonym in the other language, or that may change the meaning and make it look weird.
The verses in the quran are attached to each other, and well orgenised to be cooherant, even in the numurotation.
So make an english version of the Quran isnt possible, while translating the explenations of the Quran is possible, by explenation I mean, the interpretation, even arabic speaking people need interpretations and explenation for many verses by scholars, that can be translated, but Quran as word by word, that isnt possible.

Also, not all muslims on the globe can speak arabic, they learn the basics of the relegion, and the explenations or the interpreations as I said, and true, they pray 5 times a day in arabic, since they have to read suras from Quran (wich it's not translated).

Indonisia and other countries, that are not arab countries, and don't speak arabic as their native language, yet they are muslims, and many of them do learn arabic so they can read Quran by themselves, do you see that they became arabs? Muslims didnt even reach Indonisia and those areas by war, they didnt invade Indonisia and Malisya, and others, yet those countries have a big muslim majority, they are muslim, did you say arabising by conquering and spreading islam?

However, the arabising did exist at some part of the history indeed, but instead, when they conquer a place, they don't delet it's original culture, they swollow it, mixe it with their own, and also mix the ethnics together, that way, they can keep that land together and a part of the arab world or whatever, that's why you see a good variety of arab (not the genetic meaning) cultures in the middle east and north africa, there for example architectural differences from morroco to iraq or something (also from iran (persian) to india ).

Apparently this method didnt die, when France occupied some countries, it started to teach french in those countries, to install that language inside the society, and start a westernising plan, or "frenchising" plan.

Back to the subject, what is "arab" and who are arabs, and why almost all north africans and middle eastern call themselves arabs despite the few cultural differences, and also the few ethnic differences (in my previous posts

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).

I wonder if an American muslim would call himself an arab, or a european or a chinese (according to what you say).