After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy by Noah Feldman

Author:Noah Feldman [Feldman, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374529338
Publisher: Macmillan

THE DIVERSITY OF THE ARABS

A

rab and Muslim history, culture, and politics are deeply intertwined. The Prophet Muhammad was an Arab, whose message, the Qur’an, was revealed to him in Arabic, the only language that he and his hearers knew. In Muhammad’s day, the Arabic language was restricted to the Arabian Peninsula, and the term Arab referred to a person who lived there. But as the united tribes of the Arabian Peninsula conquered Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq to create the Muslim East, and North Africa and Spain to form the Muslim West, they brought the Arabic language and Islam with them. Most of the peoples in these countries who adopted Islam also adopted Arabic. While there were a few exceptions, like the Berbers in Morocco and Algeria, the other peoples of the region took Arabic names, married Arabs, and, in short, became what the modern world calls Arab. By contrast, when Islam spread beyond the boundaries of North Africa and Iraq, people became Muslims without adopting Arab language and identity. Persia became Muslim but preserved its language and its philosophy, literature, and culture. Turkic peoples kept their languages; Afghans theirs. Sub-Saharan Africans who became Muslim also typically maintained their own languages and traditions. Farther afield in Indonesia and Malaysia, and as far away as the Philippines, Islam reached many people without transforming them into Arabs, either.

The idea that 280 million Arabs constitute one ethnic group is therefore slightly misleading. The Arabs stretch from Morocco to Iraq and possess very different cultures. Although educated Arabs all know some classical Arabic, and almost all Arabs can understand the modified classical Arabic, known as modern standard, that is spoken on the radio and television, ordinary Arabic speakers communicate in local variants of the language that differ strongly from place to place. A Moroccan and an Iraqi cannot speak easily to each other in their respective dialects; they would need to speak modern standard Arabic to have more than a rudimentary conversation. As a result of geographical distance, distinctive histories, and local cultures that never completely abandoned their pre-Islamic folkways, Arabs are a strikingly diverse group of people who are nonetheless designated by a single word.

Westerners who think it is possible to identify some distinctive Arab “mentality” are therefore oversimplifying, as were Arab nationalists who sought to unify the Arabs around a central identity as an Arab nation, bound by a common language and aspiring to common goals. Perhaps unifying Arabs through nationalism was no more quixotic than Garibaldi’s idea of unifying the city-states and regions of Italy into one Italian nation. But Arab nationalists faced a problem that the Italians did not, at least not in the same form: the problem of Western imperialism. After World War I, France and England split the Arab world into distinct states. Those states have proved surprisingly durable, even when their borders were drawn more or less arbitrarily, and even (maybe especially) after Europeans were driven out or departed. Today Egyptians think proudly of themselves as Egyptians, Iraqis as Iraqis, Moroccans as Moroccans, Algerians as Algerians, and so forth.

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