Who is an Arab?
The definition of who an Arab is has three main aspects:
Political: whether they live in a country which is a member of the Arab League (or, more vaguely, the Arab world); this definition covers more than 300 million people. Somalia and the Comoros are sometimes excepted from this definition. The aforementioned definition, however, is problematic and somewhat arbitrary, particularly as most national borders in the region were determined by post-colonial partitioning and do not necessarily reflect native cultural affiliations. For example, certain native populations in Eastern Chad are virtually indistinguishable from those in Western Sudan and many groups in Southern Turkey share the same culture and ethnicity, and indeed may have come from the same tribe or even family as people in Northern Syria. Sizable communities in Chad, Turkey, Israel, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, in addition to the Arab League, have spoken Arabic for generations, and many consider themselves Arab.
Linguistic: whether their first language is Arabic; this definition covers more than 200 million people.
Genealogical: whether they can trace their ancestry back to the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula.
The relative importance of these factors is estimated differently by different groups. Most people who consider themselves Arabs do so on the basis of the overlap of the political and linguistic definitions. However, some members of groups which fulfill both criteria reject the identity on the basis of the genealogical definition; Lebanese Maronites, for example, may reject the Arab label in favor of a narrower Lebanese nationalism. Groups which use a non-Arabic liturgical language - such as Copts in Egypt and Assyrians in Iraq - are especially likely to be considered non-Arab. Not many people consider themselves Arab on the basis of the political definition without the linguistic one—thus, Kurds or Berbers do not usually identify themselves as Arab—but some do (for instance, some Berbers do consider themselves Arabs and Arab nationalists saw the Kurds as Arabs).
A hadith of questionable authenticity[1], related by Ibn Asakir in Târîkh Dimashq and attributed by its narrator Salmân b. `Abd Allah to Islam's prophet Muhammad, expresses a common sentiment in declaring that:
"Being an Arab is not because of your father or mother, but being an Arab is on account of your tongue. Whoever learns Arabic is an Arab."
According to Habib Hassan Touma (1996, p.xviii), "An 'Arab', in the modern sense of the word, is one who is a national of an Arab state, has command of the Arabic language, and possesses a fundamental knowledge of Arabian tradition, that is, of the manners, customs, and political and social systems of the culture."
On its formation in 1946, the Arab League defined an "Arab" as follows:
"An Arab is a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples."
The genealogical definition was widely used in medieval times (Ibn Khaldun, for instance, does not use the word Arab to refer to "Arabized" peoples, but only to those of originally Arabian descent), but is usually no longer considered to be particularly significant.
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