Who is an Arab ?

The earliest accounts

Language

The oral tradition

The Arab ethnic group, which has been known for around three thousand years, has experimented with pagan, Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian cultures and religious practices. For the last fifteen centuries, however, the majority of Arabs have been Muslim.

There are four main reasons explaining the confusion which is commonly made between "Arab" and "Muslim" : 

• The prophet of Islam was an Arab,
• The Koran, the holy scripture of Islam, was "revealed" in Arabic,
• The regretable tendency to consider the Arabs solely in religious terms.

However, there are Arab Jews and Arab Christians.

Of the billion Muslims in the world today, one fifth are Arabs.

According to Maxime Rodinson, the Arab ethnic group, people or nation is made up of individuals who :

• speak any variant of Arabic and consider it to be their "natural" language,
• consider the history and cultural traits of the Arabs to be their own, 
• stake a claim to Arab identity or Arab national consciousness.

Sati' Al-Husri, the founding figure of modern Arab nationalism, proclaimed that "he who speaks Arabic, considers himself Arab and who says he is Arab, is an Arab."

The importance of adhering to an Arab ideal comes up again in the following statement by Khatibi : "When I say "Arab", I am referring to someone who describes himself as such, in his own position in history, in his memory, in the space where he lives, dies or survives. In his own position, in other words in the experience of a tolerable or intolerable life."

Arab civilisation is a whole, but at the same time plural. It is the creation of both Arabs and Arabised peoples (whose everyday language can be either Arabic or Turkish, Persian, Berber, etc.), of both Muslims and non-Muslims.

This civilisation is the product of contacts, borrowings and admixtures. It passes on and reinvents a legacy in which Islam has a special place, not only because it claims to be a universal message but also because it has sanctified certain cultural traits, reformed others and, frequently, fitted into a continuum alongside earlier civilisations.

In this connection, Herodotus recounts, among other tales from his travels, that the priests of Egypt, some 1,000 years before Islam, shaved their bodies and made four ablutions per day and that all Egyptians reviled pork and practised circumcision. He added that "only ... the Colchideans, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians have always practised circumcision. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves recognise that they learnt the custom from the Egyptians."

Those whom the West not so long ago still referred to as Saracens (from the Latin Saraceni, from the Greek Sarakenoi) had previously been dubbed the Scenitae or Scenite Arabs, in other words tent-dwellers(from the Greek skene, tent).

For their part, they called themselves simply Arabs.

The earliest accounts of the Arabs go back to around three thousand years ago.

As of the ninth century BC, the Arabs are said to have exercised an influence on the historical development of the Middle East via the geographical situation of the land of Aribi, which lay between Syria and Mesopotamia, as well as through their role in the competition for control over the trade routes between what is now known as the Persian (or Arab) Gulf and Syria, between Syria and Egypt, and between Egypt and south Arabia.

Among other sources, Xenophon mentions that they took part in the conquest of Babylon alongside Cyrus I, around 539 BC.

The "King of the Arabs" mentioned by Herodotus is said to have occupied the northern Hijaz between 500 and 300 BC, and therefore seems to refer to the colony of Minaeans, from whom the Nabateans descended.

Over the centuries, the word "Arab" has served to define a fluctuating reality. In pre-Islamic times, it referred to the inhabitants of Arabia, who were divided into largely nomadic tribes. Some of these tribes had already begun to penetrate into the Syrian and Mesopotamian steppes, while other, sedentary tribes were made up of the descendents of the ancient civilisations fo Sa'ba (the biblical Sheba), Ma'in, Qataban or Hadramut (in other words, they hailed from southern Arabia, today's Yemen).

However, the extent of the Arab world was - then as now - mainly defined in terms of the use of a supposedly unified language.

Arab thought "repeats itself like gushing water ; just as Arab music is melodic, not harmonic ; just as time is like a spiral, not a straight line." - Badawi (Muslim mystic, d. 1276).

The question of language is at the very heart of Arab identity.

Like all semitic scripts, the earliest Arab alphabet consisted entirely of consonants (and so-called "long" vowels). It was a defective manner of writing which initially borrowed its letters from the South Arabian script, until these gave way to new letters derived from Aramaic writing. It is from these new letters that the present Arabic alphabet is derived.

Arabic generates its vocabulary from a large number of roots (each one generally composed of three consonants) which do not in and of themselves have meanings but which give rise to words when vowels are added, letters are doubled or other such permutations are made.

Hence, from the root KTB, which covers the general idea of writing, are derived the words kitab (book) and its plural kutub, katib (writer), kuttab (Koranic school), maktab (office), and so on.

If one does not know the root of a word, one is reduced to guess-work in order to decipher it. The absence of written vowels in most written material makes it necessary to analyse the grammar of a text in order to arrive at the correct pronunciation. Although signs do exist for vowels, they are largely reserved for children's books and sacred texts (in order to prevent errors of pronunciation), and their inclusion in any other text would be almost humiliating for an educated speaker of Arabic.

Confusing as all this may seem, it should be noted that both the syntax and the spelling of Arabic are highly consistent, which makes it possible to conjugate a verb and indeed derive a whole semantic field from a single root, without having to worry about exceptions and irregular forms.

Finally, the richness of Arabic vocabulary makes it possible to express a range of nuances which in other languages often have to be paraphrased. Hence, for example, the word "man" can be translated into Arabic in several different ways: bashar (Man as a creation of God), mar' (mortal, ephemeral man), rajul (man as opposed to woman), insan (man as a social being, the human race), and so on.

The Arabic language, which is "read with the eyes" as if one were recognising signs or ideograms, is a language of repetition, of inwardness, and of evocative whispers, each word referring to a whole universe of meanings via its root. It is a language which is given to recitation : the power of an orator is to be found first and foremost in his capacity to harmonise sound, context and delivery, in short to convey clearly to his audience the inner meaning of what he is saying. It is also a very direct language : the verb system has no equivalent for the verb "to be" (which is simply implied), but can express intensity, cause and effect, repetition and so on by means of a variety of verb forms.

The Arabic language conjugates inner nuances with consciousness.

Over time, it has been increasingly reglemented in order to preserve the exactness and purity of the divine revelation of the Koran. This has established norms for cultivated expression in a world where both speech and rememberance are of prime importance.

The Arab world cherishes its oral tradition. A sense of poetic improvisation, as well as a taste for collective singing and the challenge of oratorical contests, have been preserved from pre-Islamic times.

The expansion of the Arabs, and with them Islam, provided new episodes for ancient themes : harmony (Andalusia), courage (the explorers and conquerors), knowledge and faith. Poetry remained attached to the theme of impossible love. During its classical period, Arab poetry also experimented with provocative evocations of earthly and illicit pleasures.

This poetry was not simply an artistic activity as it is commonly understood today, but also a socially useful one, in that it preserved the history of the group and of its heroes. In the Middle Ages, the royal courts of Europe likewise had their bards and troubadours. It has been suggested that the etymology of the word "troubadour" actually goes back to an Arabic expression which referred to those who earned their living by going from house to house to sing and tell tales of the past.

As the Arabs expanded geographically, this language of poetry, trade and conquest met other languages, integrating new regions and adapting itself to new populations, be they Berber, Turkish, Frankish, Iranian, African or whatever. Later, as the West expanded in its turn, the Arabic language began to be exposed to other, complex processes of interaction and exchange.

In fact, Arabic has from the outset had a dual form.

On the one hand, in order to insure the spread of the Koranic message, it has been presented as an untouchable, scholarly norm. .

On the other hand, in order to match the day-to-day needs of each country and each region, it has taken on numerous local variants - the so-called colloquial Arabic or dialects, which are rarely written.

At the end of the 19th century, after five hundred years of apparent lethargy, the Arabic language underwent a renewal under the impulse of the modernists and reformers who sought to turn it into the means of cultural and technical communication for a whole civilisation.

This renewal, which aimed to reconcile the oral and the written languages and at the same time integrate new concepts, gave rise to what is known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is used today by the press and the media.

Muhammad Hassan Bakalla has described the present situation as "spectroglossic." Among native speakers of Arabic, those who master the classical language are still a minority (of varying proportions from region to region, depending on the level of education). English and French remain of great importance for higher education. The Arabisation policies adopted since independence have wavered between between imposing Arabic, as the symbol of a cultural community, and respect for linguistic pluralism. Finally, there is interference from the various dialects, with some spreading outside their original homelands as a result of the development of radio, television and cinema.