A political map of the Arabian Peninsula (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Part of one of the other chapters that I\u2019m working on:<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first question that comes up when we begin to discuss \u201cthe Arabs\u201d is what, exactly, we mean by the term Arab<\/em>. As the word is used today, it refers to people whose primary language is Arabic. This Semitic language, a relative of Hebrew, is the native language of at least three hundred million people and is the official tongue of countries from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west. The largest Arabic-speaking country is Egypt. Even in Israel, Arabic, along with Hebrew, is one of the official national languages. This linguistic definition means that many Arabs are Christians. There\u2019s no religious requirement, no necessity of being a Muslim, in order to be an Arab. It also means that most of the world\u2019s Muslims are not<\/em> Arabs. The Persians, for instance, who are better known to us today as Ira\u00adnians, are overwhelmingly more or less devout Muslims but are not Arabs in any sense. In fact, their language is distantly related to English. (The Persian synonym for the English word bad<\/em>, for instance, is bad, <\/em>which seems rather closely related. The Persian equivalent of English\u00a0father<\/em> is padar; <\/em>the equivalent\u00a0of English\u00a0mother<\/em> is madar; <\/em>and brother<\/em>, in Persian,\u00a0is biradhar.<\/em>) The Turks are Muslims but aren\u2019t Arabs. Neither are the large Muslim populations of Pakistan, China, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Malaysia, the former Soviet Union, and many other nations. The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, which isn\u2019t Arab at all.<\/p>\nThe important thing to note here is that calling someone an \u201cArab\u201d today doesn\u2019t necessarily say a great deal about his or her lineage. The Arabs of northwest Africa, presumably, have a far dif\u00adferent genealogy than do the Arabs of Yemen or of Syria, fully a conti\u00adnent away. The notion that there might be no genealogical significance at all to the term Arab<\/em> may come as something of a shock to many Latter-day Saints, who\u2019ve been raised on the notion that the Arabs are the descen\u00addants of Abraham\u2019s son Ishmael. But to say that there\u2019s no genealogical aspect to \u201cArabness\u201d wouldn\u2019t be quite accurate, either.\u00a0 There is a connection between the Arabs and Ishmael. But we must be precise in the way we talk about it.<\/p>\nThe Egyptians, as I\u2019ve already noted, represent the largest national population of Arabs in the world. Yet the Egyptians of today are virtually all direct descendants of the ancient people who built the pyramids and the great temples at Luxor and Karnak, and those people weren\u2019t Arabs. How we account for this fact will help to explain what I mean when I say that the Arabs\u2019 descent from Ish\u00admael must be carefully qualified. The original home of the Arabs is the area known as the Arabian Peninsula, occupied today by such states as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. While the Arabs were confined within their original homeland, the Egyptians remained clearly non-Arab, as did the populations of Iraq and Morocco. It was only when the Arabs, inspired by the call of Islam, poured out of the peninsula, across North Africa, and up into Meso\u00adpotamia, when they occupied those lands and began to intermarry with the local populations, and when their Arabic began to be the language of everyday speech in the conquered territories that those areas beyond the peninsula came to be \u201cArab\u201d in the modern sense.<\/p>\n
A useful way of distinguishing between the original more-or-less pure Arabs of the peninsula and the Arabs of today is to call the former peoples \u201cArabian.\u201d These are the people who actually lived in the Arabian Peninsula. The subsequent conquests and intermingling, which we\u2019ll discuss more fully hereafter, mean that \u201cArabian blood\u201d is to be found throughout the Arab world. But it also means that, for many areas, and especially for the outlying ones, the lineage of Ishmael is probably not the dominant bloodline in the general population.<\/p>\n
Arabia is the largest peninsula in the world, covering almost a million square miles, which makes it roughly one third the size of the continental United States. It\u2019s a rectangle, bound on the west by the Red Sea, on the south by the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, and on the east by the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf (to which the Arabs generally refer as the Arabian <\/em>Gulf). On the north, the geo\u00adgraphical boundary is less decisive, merely the Euphrates River, and there Arabia meets the modern states of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Since it\u2019s bound on three sides by seas and on the north by a river, the pen\u00adinsula is known to the Arabs themselves as jazirat al-\u2018Arab<\/em>, \u201cthe Island of the Arabs.\u201d<\/p>\nTalk of an island should not, of course, mislead anybody into thinking that Arabia is moist or green. The area in the southern por\u00adtion of the peninsula known as \u201cthe empty quarter\u201d is the largest con\u00adtinuous area of sand in the world. Parts of it receive rain only once every ten years. To the north is another great sandy desert, the Nufud, which some readers will remember from the movie Lawrence of Arabia. <\/em>When we say that most of Arabia is desert, we mean that it\u2019s truly and absolutely desert. The dry areas of the United States sometimes look almost like tropical rain forests by comparison. This astonishing desolation, coupled with the area\u2019s remoteness\u2014which is still pretty much the case today, as America and its allies learned in the difficult process of trying to get men and material into Saudi Arabia in connection with two wars in the Persian Gulf\u2014meant that the Arabs had the peninsula pretty much to themselves. Occasionally, outsiders would try to take control of a part of the area, but they were virtually never successful. A Roman expedition, for example, met with disaster in Arabia under the command of Aelius Gallus in 25 B.C.<\/p>\nBut why would anybody want <\/em>to take over so inhospitable a place? An understanding of the area is necessary before the answer is clear.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Part of one of the other chapters that I\u2019m working on: \u00a0 The first question that comes up when we begin to discuss \u201cthe Arabs\u201d is what, exactly, we mean by the term Arab. As the word is used today, it refers to people whose primary language is Arabic. This Semitic language, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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