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The Arabs in History by Bernard Lewis

THE ARABS IN HISTORY

What is an Arab? Ethnic terms are notoriously difficult to define, and Arab is not among the easiest. One possible definition may be set aside at once. The Arabs may be a nation; they are not a nationality in the legal sense.

 One who calls himself an Arab may be described in his passport as a national of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, or any other of the group of states that identify themselves as Arab.

Some of them—such as Saudi Arabia, the Union of Arab Emirates, the Syrian and Egyptian Arab Republics—have even adopted the word Arab in their official nomenclature.

Their citizens are not, however, designated simply as Arabs. There are Arab states, and indeed a league of Arab states; but there is no single Arab state of which all Arabs are nationals.

But if Arabism has no legal content, it is nonetheless real. The pride of the Arab in his Arabdom, his consciousness of the bonds that bind him to other Arabs past and present, are no less intense.

Is the unifying factor then one of language—is an Arab simply one who speaks Arabic as his mother tongue?

It is a simple and at first sight a satisfying answer—yet there are difficulties. Is the Arabic-speaking Jew from Iraq or the Yemen or the Arabic-speaking Christian of Egypt or Lebanon an Arab?

The enquirer could receive different answers amongst these people themselves and among their Muslim neighbors.

Is even the Arabic-speaking Muslim of Egypt an Arab? Many consider themselves such, but not all, and the term Arab is still used colloquially in both Egypt and Iraq to distinguish the Bedouin of the surrounding deserts from the indigenous peasantry of the great river valleys.

 In some quarters the repellent word Arabophone is used to distinguish those who merely speak Arabic from those who are truly Arabs.

 A gathering of Arab leaders many years ago defined an Arab in these words: ‘Whoever lives in our country, speaks our language, is brought up in our culture and takes pride in our glory is one of us/ We may compare with this a definition from a well-qualified Western source, Sir Hamilton Gibb: ‘

All those are Arabs for whom the central fact of history is the mission of Muhammad and the memory of the Arab Empire and who in addition cherish the Arabic tongue and its cultural heritage as their common possession.

 Neither definition, it will be noted, is purely linguistic. Both add a cultural, one at least a religious, qualification.

 Both must be interpreted historically, for it is only through the history of the peoples called Arab that we can hope to understand the meaning of the term from its primitive restricted use in ancient times to its vast but vaguely delimited extent of meaning today.

As we shall see, through this long period the significance of the word Arab has been steadily changing, and as the change has been slow, complex, and extensive, we shall find that the term may be used in several different senses at one and the same time and that a standard general definition of its content has rarely been possible.

The origin of the word Arab is still obscure, though philologists have offered explanations of varying plausibility.

For some, the word is derived from a Semitic root meaning ‘west’, and was first applied by the inhabitants of Mesopotamia to the peoples to the west of the Euphrates valley.

This etymology is questionable on purely linguistic grounds and is also open to the objection that the term was used by the Arabs themselves and that a people is not likely to describe themselves by a word indicating its position relative to another.

More profitable are the attempts to link the word with the concept of nomadism. This has been done in various ways; by connecting it with the Hebrew “Ardbha—dark land, or steppe land; with the Hebrew ”Erebh’—mixed and hence unorganized, as opposed to the organized and ordered life  of the sedentary communities, rejected and despised by the nomads; with the root “Abhar’—to move or pass—from which the word Hebrew is probably derived.

The association with nomadism is borne out by the fact that the Arabs themselves seem to have used the word at an early date to distinguish the Bedouin from the Arabic-speaking town and village dwellers and indeed continue to do so to some extent at the present day.

 The traditional Arab etymology deriving the name from a verb meaning ‘to express’ or ‘enunciate’ is almost certainly a reversal of the historic process.

A parallel case may be found in the connection between German deuten—’to make clear to the people’, and deutsch—originally ‘of the people.

The earliest account that has come down to us of Arabia and the Arabs is that of the tenth chapter of Genesis, where many of the peoples and districts of the peninsula are mentioned by name.

The word Arab, however, does not occur in this text, and makes its first appearance in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BC in which King Shalmaneser III records the defeat by the Assyrian forces of a conspiracy of rebellious princelings; one of them was ‘Gindibu the Aribi’, who contributed 1,000 camels to the forces of the confederacy. From that time until the sixth century BC there are frequent references in Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions to Aribi, Arab, and Urbi.

These inscriptions record the receipt of tribute from Aribi rulers, usually including camels and other items indicative of a desert origin, and occasionally tell of military expeditions into Arabs land. Some of the later inscriptions are accompanied by illustrations of the Arabs and their camels.

These campaigns against the Arabs were clearly not wars of conquest but punitive expeditions intended to recall the erring nomads to their duties as Assyrian vassals. They served the general purpose of securing the Assyrian borderlands and lines of communication. The Aribi of the inscriptions is a nomadic people living in the far north of Arabia, probably in the Syro-Arabian desert.

The term does not include the flourishing sedentary civilization of southwestern Arabia, which is separately mentioned in Assyrian records. The Aribi may be identified with the Arabs of the later books of the Old Testament. Towards 530 BC the term Arabaya begins to appear in Persian cuneiform documents.

The earliest classical reference is in Aeschylus, who in Prometheus mentions Arabia as a remote land whence come warriors with sharp-pointed spears. The ‘Magos Arabos mentioned in the Persians as one of the commanders of Xerxes’ army may possibly also be an Arab.

 It is in Greek writings that we find for the first time the place-name Arabia, formed on the analogy of Italia, etc. Herodotus and after him most other Greek and Latin writers extend the terms Arabia and Arab to the entire peninsula and all its inhabitants including the southern Arabians, and even the eastern desert of Egypt between the Nile and the Red Sea.

The term at this time thus seems to cover all the desert areas of the Near and Middle East inhabited by Semitic-speaking peoples. It is in Greek literature, too, that the term ‘Saracen’ first becomes common.

This word first appears in the ancient inscriptions and seems to be the name of a single desert tribe in the Sinai area.

 In Greek, Latin, and Talmudic literature it is used of the nomads generally, and in Byzantium and the medieval West was later applied to all Muslim peoples.

The first Arabian use of the word Arab occurs in the ancient southern Arabian inscriptions, those relics of the flourishing civilization set up in Yemen by the southern branch of the Arab peoples and dating from the late pre- Christian and early Christian centuries.

 In these, Arab means Bedouin, often raider, and is applied to the nomadic as distinct from the sedentary population.

The first occurrence in the north is in the early fourth-century AD Namara Epitaph, one of the oldest surviving records in the north-Arabian language which later became classical Arabic.

This inscription, written in Arabic but in the Nabatean Aramaic script, records the death and achievements of Imru’1-Qays, ‘King of all the Arabs’, in terms that suggest that the sovereignty claimed did not extend far beyond the nomads of northern and central Arabia.

It is not until the rise of Islam early in the seventh century that we have any real information as to the use of the word in central and northern Arabia.

For Muhammad and his contemporaries, the Arabs were the Bedouin of the desert, and in the Qur’an, the term is used exclusively in this sense and never of the townsfolk of Mecca, Medina, and other cities. On the other hand, the language of these towns and of the Qur’an itself is described as Arabic.

Here we already find the germ of the idea prevalent in later times that the purest form of Arabic is that of the Bedouin, who have preserved more faithfully than any others the original Arab way of life and speech.

The great waves of conquest that followed the death of Muhammad and the establishment of the Caliphate by his successors in the headship of the new Islamic community wrote the name Arab large across the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and placed it in the heading of a vital chapter in the history of human thought and endeavor.

The Arabic-speaking peoples of Arabia, nomads, and settled folk alike founded a vast empire stretching from central Asia across the Middle East and North Africa to the Atlantic.

With Islam as their national religion and war-cry, and the new empire as their booty, the Arabs found themselves living among a vast variety of peoples differing in race, language, and religion, among whom they formed a ruling minority of conquerors and masters.

The ethnic distinctions between tribe and tribe and the social distinctions between townsfolk and desert folk became for a while less significant than the difference between the masters of the new empire and the diverse peoples they had conquered. During this first period in Islamic history, when Islam was an Arab religion and the