Arabs Today

The next set of ideas that I suggest we consider concern who the Arabs, the people we may think brought Islam into the world and may have negative views of, are. We may think of Arabs as being one race and see the Middle East as the Arab East but we would be wrong on both counts.

Arab is more of a cultural/linguistic term as it describes a person of any ethnicity who makes cultural and general use of the Arab language (Iranians mostly speak Farsi, Jews usually speak Hebrew and Turks generally prefer Turkish). Further to that, as I mentioned in the last post, the Middle East also includes Iran, Turkey and Israel and most Iranians, Turks and Jews don't consider themselves Arabs as they don't tend to speak Arabic.

Please also note that Arab also doesn’t necessarily mean Muslim. The language may come from the Arabian Peninsula and so does Islam but not all Arabs today are Muslim. Arabs at the time of Muhammad, the prophet who expounded the religion now called Islam, were Christians or Jews or humanists or worshipped one or more of various deities. This group’s language came to be used far outside Central Western Arabia (where it was mainly restricted at the time of Muhammad, who lived there) for reasons we will soon discuss, by many others who were not Muslim. Many Arabs today are not Muslim. Arabs today are of various Asian, African and European/Mediterranean 'races'.

So there are Arabs of other races and Arabs who are not Muslim but there are also many non-Arabs in the Middle East (just to reiterate and add yet more groups). There are, besides Persians, Turks and Jews, Circassians and many other groups that speak various other languages. So the ‘Arab’ Middle East is made of much more than one race of Arabs, and non-Arabs besides.

I mention here that today the Jews in Israel are a special case for the Arabs, however, as many Arabs see the Jewish state of Israel as a European colony and so hope it will be disbanded as all the others have been, essentially. I will explore this special relationship with those Jews, and whether Arabs (and Muslims) are anti-Semitic, in due course.

So, the 'Arab' Middle East is not uniquely homogeneous or Arab; in fact it tends to not be. But there is an “Arab World” within the Middle East (excluding Turkey, most of Israel and Iran, essentially) and that term refers to the region where a form of Arabic is the usual official language.

Even this area is far from unified and sub-regions are diverse in many ways (not least in (especially oil) wealth).

The Arab League now has 22 member 'states' (including Palestine). A few of the countries (i.e. Comoros, Djibouti and Somalia) are very border-line as to whether they would truly be considered part of the so-called 'Arab World' but it apparently suits all the Arab League members that they are included in the League.

So the Arab world is not a unified region any more than the Middle East is and probably much less than Europe is today in many ways. Nevertheless it shares an identity and history and heritage (along with a variety of religions, sects and cults). We need to bear this in mind when we consider the view that, for example, there is one powerful enemy in it, or in the Middle East, seeking to destroy the West.