Arabs

• 1. Introduction

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  The Arabs first appear in writing as an enemy line on an Assyrian war record. The Kurkh Monoliths, carved in Akkadian in the 9th century BCE, describe the Assyrian conquest of Aram. They name a king called Gindibu, who led Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula into a coalition against Assyria. That is the earliest known use of the word Arab for a people, and it was written by their opponents.

  Several centuries later, the word turned up again, this time in a voice that was not foreign. An inscription dated to 328 CE, cut in an early form of Arabic using the Nabataean alphabet, calls a man named Imru' al-Qays ibn 'Amr 'King of all the Arabs.' It is the oldest surviving sign that Arabs saw themselves as one people.

  Between those two stones lies a puzzle. Why did a word first aimed at desert nomads end up naming an ethnic group of the modern Arab world, spread over two continents and found on several more? Who counted as an Arab before there was a shared language, a shared faith or a shared state? And what did the people living under that name build, lose and carry with them on the road from Gindibu's coalition to today?

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• 2. Names and Ancestors

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  Ya'rub, remembered as the first person ever to speak Arabic, gives the most popular Arab explanation of where the word Arab came from. Other medieval writers disagreed. The scholar Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani argued that Mesopotamians called the Bedouins gharab, meaning westerners, because they lived west of Mesopotamia, and the term later wore down into Arab. Al-Masudi thought the name was first given to the Ishmaelites of the Arabah valley.

  The Hebrew word arava, meaning wilderness, points to a desert origin. The Semitic root behind the word, spelled ʿ-r-b, carries a whole bundle of meanings. These include west, sunset, desert, mingle, merchant and even raven. Scholars consider each of them plausible. Some also suggest a link to a root for moving around, which would make the name mean nomad.

  Nomads and townspeople were already told apart in antiquity. Sabaean inscriptions use both ʿarab, for Arabs in general, and ʾaʿrāb, for the Bedouins, about 40 times between them. Arabs of Medina later applied the second word to desert tribes, calling themselves settled yet acknowledging close bonds of kinship.

  Outsiders supplied their own labels. Herodotus placed Arabs in the Sinai, southern Palestine and the frankincense lands of the south. Later Greek writers such as Agatharchides, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo found them along the Euphrates, on the Red Sea coast and in the Syrian steppe. Greek and Latin authors came to say Saracens. Christians in Iberia used Moor for Arabs and Muslims alike. Syriac, Greek and Armenian writers called the early conquerors Hagarenes, after Hagar.

  Hagar is part of the family story that Arab tradition tells about itself. Arab, Islamic and Jewish traditions name Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar, as father of the Arabs. Tribes of central western Arabia called themselves the people of Abraham and the offspring of Ishmael. In the Quran, Ibrahim and Ishmael raise the Kaaba in Mecca, on a foundation first laid by Adam. The Samaritan book Asaṭīr says Ishmael reigned for twenty-seven years. The Targum Onkelos stretches Ishmaelite settlement from Hindekaia, meaning India, to the edge of Assyria.

  Linguists tell a different story. Arabic is a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic family, and most scholars place the Semitic homeland on the Arabian Peninsula. Proto-Semitic probably reached it by the 4th millennium BCE, and Old Arabic began to split off by the start of the 1st millennium BCE. A minority of researchers look to the Levant instead, a dispute that remains open.

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• 3. Incense and Caravans

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  An Assyrian scribe recording the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE left the first known reference to Arabs as a distinct group. Few Arabs of that age wrote their own history, so scholars rely on archaeology, foreign accounts and oral tradition. One surviving anecdote comes from the reign of Sargon. He banned the sale of iron to people called Arabs in Ḫuzaza in Babylon, fearing they would forge weapons against his army.

  The oldest powers sat on trade routes. Dilmun, which rose around the 4th millennium BCE and lasted until 538 BCE, controlled shipping in the Gulf, and the Sumerians treated it as holy land. Gerrha, on the western shore of the Gulf, anchored an Arab kingdom from about 650 BCE to roughly 300 CE. Magan was known for copper and other metals. The Qedarites, a largely nomadic confederation centred on the Wādī Sirḥān in the Syrian Desert, ran caravans linking Arabia to the Mediterranean. By the 6th century BCE they ruled a kingdom covering northern Arabia, southern Palestine and the Sinai.

  The south grew rich on scent. Sheba, or Saba, cultivated frankincense and myrrh and sold them to Egypt, Greece and Rome, along with spices, textiles and other luxuries. Its language was South Arabian rather than Arabic. The Maʾrib Dam supplied the city of Maʾrib and its fields with water and ranks among the great engineering feats of the ancient world.

  Neighbouring kingdoms rose and fell around Saba. Lihyan, centred on Dedan, the modern Al Ula, controlled land from Yathrib to parts of the Levant. Ma'in ran local affairs through councils called Mazood, and each of its cities kept a temple. Qataban was ruled by two co-kings from the 6th century BCE. It conquered Ma'in, beat Hadramawt in a war in the 3rd century BCE, and was finally absorbed by Hadramawt and Ḥimyar in the 1st century CE.

  Hadhramaut was famous for towers that served as watchposts, defences and homes for wealthy families. Its sailors traded with India, East Africa and Southeast Asia. Awsān, an earlier small kingdom, lost its capital Ḥajar Yaḥirr in the 7th century BCE, when the Sabaean ruler Karab El Watar destroyed it.

  Himyar, centred on Zafar in present-day Yemen, outlasted most of them, surviving into the 6th century CE. Its farmers terraced the hills and irrigated dry ground. In the 4th century CE its rulers converted to Judaism and took the title Kings of the Jews.

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• 4. Frontier Kingdoms

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  At Petra, in what is now Jordan, the Nabataeans carved a capital out of rock. They were nomadic Arabs who first wrote in Aramaic, then gradually moved toward Arabic. Their alphabet was borrowed by Arabs to the south and evolved into modern Arabic script around the 4th century CE. Inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw, from about the 2nd century BCE, show a dialect that scholars call pre-classical Arabic.

  Palmyra drew Arab soldiers early. A sheikh named Zabdibel brought his men to help the Seleucids at the Battle of Raphia in 217 BCE, and his name suggests Palmyrene roots. Centuries later, after the Sassanian king Shapur I captured the Roman emperor Valerian, Queen Zenobia seized most of the Near East, including Egypt. The emperor Aurelian defeated her, and her empire lasted only a few years.

  Elsewhere, other Arab dynasties held cities. The Itureans, based around Mount Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley, spread across Syria and into Galilee after the Seleucid decline in the 2nd century BCE. The Abgarids ruled Edessa, and their most famous king, Abgar V, is said to have corresponded with Jesus. In the 2nd century CE, the Banu Tanukh took Hatra and styled their rulers king of the Arabs. At Emesa, modern Homs, priest-kings served the god El-Gabal. Sampsiceramus I took power there in 64 CE, followed by his son Iamblichus and then Sampsiceramus II, and the city became a Roman client kingdom.

  The Sasanians recognised the Arab presence on their side of the frontier. An inscription from about 262 under Shapur I names a province called Arbayistan, meaning land of the Arabs.

  Late antiquity brought the last large movement of Arabs out of Yemen. Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Kindites headed north. The Ghassanids settled in the Hauran and sided with the Byzantines. The Lakhmids, ruling from Al-Hira on the middle Tigris, sided with the Sassanids. Together with the Himyarites they broke the Kingdom of Kinda in 540. In 602 the Sassanids dissolved the Lakhmid dynasty and took direct control.

  The Romans named Yemen Arabia Felix. After the Muslim conquest of the Levant, only a few Ghassanids became Muslims. Most stayed Christian and joined the Melkite and Syriac communities of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

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• 5. Caliphs and Scholars

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  In 622 Muhammad and his followers left Mecca for Medina in the Hijra, and by his death in 632 the Arabian Peninsula had been united. Four leaders followed, known as the Rashidun, or rightly guided: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali. Abu Bakr put down tribes that refused to pay Zakat. Under Umar the armies took Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Under Uthman they captured Fars in 650 and parts of Khorasan in 651, and Uthman was assassinated amid internal revolt. Ali's reign was consumed by the First Fitna, a civil war.

  In 661 the Umayyads took the caliphate and made Damascus its capital. They prized their Arab identity and sponsored the poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia. In 686 Abd al-Malik made Arabic the official language of the empire. Umar II demanded in 717 that all Muslims be treated as equals, but he died after three years. The Umayyads then lost most of their lands, keeping only Iberia, where Córdoba grew into a caliphate. The library of Al-Hakam II there held over 400,000 volumes.

  The Abbasids descended from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, an uncle of Muhammad, and won the Battle of the Zab. In 762 al-Mansur founded Baghdad as their capital. The Abbasids cited a saying that the ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of martyrs, and they founded the House of Wisdom. Cairo and Córdoba rivalled Baghdad as centres of learning.

  Cairo had its own dynasty. Al-Mahdi Billah, a descendant of Fatimah, founded the Fatimid caliphate in 909, and the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 969 and made Cairo their capital. In 970 they founded Al-Azhar Mosque and its university, one of the oldest in the world. Saladin's Ayyubids ended the dynasty in 1171.

  Arab scholarship reached Europe by way of translation. From the 11th to the 13th century, schools in Iberia, most famously the Toledo School of Translators, rendered Arabic works of science and philosophy into Latin. The commentaries of Averroes travelled with them. Europe took the words algebra, algorithm, alchemy, Aldebaran, sugar, camphor, cotton and coffee from Arabic. At the height of Arab power, the territories reached from southern France to western China.

  The Mongols took Baghdad in 1258 and killed the caliph Al-Musta'sim. The Abbasid family fled to Cairo, where the line lasted until the Ottomans ended it in 1517.

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• 6. Revolt and Unions

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  A small club called al-Fatat, the Young Arab Society, formed in Paris in 1911. Its stated aim was raising the Arab nation to the level of modern nations. At first it asked only for autonomy inside the Ottoman state, and it hosted the Arab Congress of 1913. When Ottoman authorities cracked down, it went underground and demanded full independence. It drew on the Nahda, a late 19th-century awakening of interest in the Arabic language and literature.

  In 1916, during World War I, Sherif Hussein bin Ali led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. It tied up Ottoman forces and raised support for Arab independence. Hussein hoped to rule an Arab state across the peninsula and the Fertile Crescent as King of the Arabs. The Sykes-Picot Agreement divided those lands into zones of French and British control instead. Hussein won only the independence of the Hejaz and recognition as its king.

  On the 22nd of March 1945 the Arab League was formed, and its Charter endorsed the principle of a unified Arab homeland. Pan-Arabism had by then become a movement, and its best-known champion was Gamal Abdel Nasser. He led the 1952 revolution in Egypt, became president in 1954, and paired Arab unity with Arab socialism.

  Union proved hard. Egypt and Syria merged in 1958 as the United Arab Republic. Syria withdrew in 1961, though Egypt kept the name until 1971. That same year of 1958, Jordan and Iraq formed the Arab Federation, which collapsed after six months during the 14th of July Revolution. The United Arab States, joining the UAR with the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, also dissolved in 1961. In the 1970s, a Federation of Arab Republics of Egypt, Libya and Syria lasted five years. Muammar Gaddafi proposed an Arab Islamic Republic with Tunisia, but the Arab Maghreb Union was formed in 1989 instead.

  The Arab Spring, a series of pro-democracy uprisings in 2010 and 2011, toppled some long-ruling leaders and left other countries in conflict.

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• 7. Far From the Homeland

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  The CIA Factbook estimated in 2014 that 366 million Arabs lived in Arab countries, with another 17.5 million elsewhere, for close to 384 million in all. The Arab world itself covers about 13 million square kilometres, from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea.

  The International Organization for Migration counts 13 million first-generation Arab migrants, of whom 5.8 million live in Arab countries. Their money flows home. In 2009 Arab countries received US$35.1 billion in remittances.

  Latin America holds the largest Arab population outside the Arab world, somewhere between 17 million and 30 million people. Brazil's government says 7 million Brazilians have Lebanese roots and 4 million have Syrian roots. Argentina has about 3.5 million, Colombia over 3.2 million, and Venezuela over 1.6 million.

  In Europe, about 6,000,000 Arabs lived in France in 2005, making them the second-largest ethnic group after French people. Arabs first reached Sicily in the 9th century. Spain's Arab population is about 1,800,000, and Arabs have lived there since the early 8th century, when al-Andalus began.

  Arab immigration to the United States grew in the 1880s. An estimated 2 million Americans now trace roots to the Arab world, and one-third live in Los Angeles, Detroit and New York City. In Canada, Montreal has about 267,000 Arab residents.

  In 1728 a Russian officer described Arab nomads on the Caspian shores of Mughan in present-day Azerbaijan. Nearly 30 villages in the region still carry the name Arab. In India, the Chaush of the Deccan and the Chavuse of Gujarat trace their roots to Hadhrami migrants of the 18th century. The 2010 Indonesian census counted 118,866 Arab-Indonesians of Hadrami descent. Zanzibar was once ruled by Omani Arabs.

  In West Africa, the Lebanese community of 250,000 is the largest non-African group in the region. Côte d'Ivoire is home to over 100,000. Sierra Leone had about 30,000 before its civil war began in 1991 and roughly 10,000 today, and traders have returned there since the war ended in 2002.

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• 8. Faith, Tribe and Belonging

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  Around 93% of Arabs today are Muslim, mostly Sunni with a Shia minority, and the Ibadis dominate in Oman. Shia Islam is dominant in Bahrain and southern Iraq. Arab Christians generally belong to Eastern churches such as the Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches, and there are Druze and Baháʼí communities. Large Arab Jewish populations once lived across the Arab world.

  Before Islam, most Arabs worshipped several deities, among them Hubal, Wadd, Allāt, Manat and Uzza. A few individuals called hanifs rejected polytheism for a monotheism tied to no religion. With the spread of Islam, the old cults faded fast.

  Because Arab identity predates Islam and includes Christian kingdoms and Jewish tribes, it is defined independently of religion. Traditionally, descent through the father decides membership of an ethnic group or clan.

  The tribes themselves are older than most states. In the Levant, Arabs are traditionally split between Qays and Yaman, a divide that goes back to the pre-Islamic era. Iran's largest Arab group is the Khuzestani Arabs, which includes Banu Ka'b. Tradition names great tribal divisions such as Bakr, Tamim, Azd and Quda'a, whose descendants now live in countries from Iraq to Morocco.

  The Banu Hilal show how tribes moved. They spent almost a century in Egypt before heading west to Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, then reached Morocco about a century after that.

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