The racist virus has, in its wicked campaign to eradicate all non-Arab populations, placed these victims at the top of their list: Kurds, Jews, kabyles, Mozabs, Rifians,Berbers, Persians, Assyrians, Asians, Africans … .and more.
Progenitor of Wars and Tyrannies: the Falsehood of Pan–Arabism
The deep and hidden reason of the tyrannical oppression practiced throughout the Middle East is the imposition by France and England of pan-Arabic nationalist cliques that intend to dictatorially arabize the various peoples of the Middle East, who are – all – not Arabs.
To start with basic, we should stress the point that among the member-states of the so-called Arab League there is not a single one inhabited by Arab population. In this regard, the simple and single historical truth in this is that there are no Arabs at all. There are only ‘Arabic-speaking’ peoples having striking dissimilarities one from another, and they all have different past, different cultural backgrounds, different social and behavioural systems, different orientations and archetypes. Only failure is guaranteed in any attempt to shape up a ‘union’ among these so disparate elements and peoples.
We have all attested numerous similar examples of disunion, mutual disparagement and unprecedented co-vilification so paradigmatically performed by the uneducated and uncultured ‘leaders’ of the ‘Arab’ League. The mistake was to view all that as ‘fratricidal’ situation, whereas it is not, since they are very disparate and divergent from one another. It is only the paranoiac and contra-natural regrouping named ‘Arab’ League that, by creating the shock of bringing together elements that just cannot be together, generates the unpleasant atmosphere in which all these funny and clownish ‘leaders’ are engulfed, without knowing why ‘this’ happens to them! So pathetically ignorant they are.
If this concerned only these grotesque characters of the present day political Commedia dell’ Arte, the problem would be limited, and no one would need to discuss and tackle it. But the West and the rest of the World is found involved in this situation one way or another, because of the interconnections existing since the Colonial times. The Middle East affects the entire world. And if this absolute and fundamental historical reality is not widely assessed and understood first, nothing good can come out of the Middle East, and its extremist frenzy.
If the Middle Eastern peoples are not Arabs, what are they?
The real, true but hidden Face of the Middle East.
In reality, the Lebanese are Phoenicians, who got hellenized and aramaized in Late Antiquity.
Arabic speaking Syrians and Iraqis are Aramaeans.
So are the Palestinians and the Kuwaitis, as well as the Emirates and the Qataris, who have certainly been intermixed with Persians.
Egyptians are Copts, native Egyptians, descendants of the people of Ancient Egypt in their amalgamations with the numerous foreigners, who passed by the valley of the Nile: Aramaeans, Phoenicians, Yemenis, Greeks, Meroitic Sudanese, Romans, and others.
Sudanese are descendants of the ancient Meroites and the Nubians.
Libyans and the people of the Maghreb are descendants of the Khammitic peoples of the great Atlas, Berbers, in their genuine fusion with Carthaginians and Romans.
And finally Yemenis are Yemenis, descendants of the ancient states of Saba, Qataban, Himyar, Hadramout and other; they are closer to Abyssinians (mistakenly called Ethiopians) than to the Arabs of Hedjaz.
Islamization: the reason of the (linguistic but not racial) Arabization
All these peoples, by accepting Islam, sooner or later, started becoming arabized, but this happened at a linguistic, not at a racial, ethnic level. And we know only too well that the Arabs of the times of the Prophet were not numerous at all. One generation later, when let us say Islamic armies were reaching Carthage in today’s Tunisia, Central Asia and the Indus valley, the Muslim fighters were speaking Arabic but among them Arabs were already a minority. Aramaeans from Damascus and Ctesiphon, Egyptians from Alexandria, Yemenis from Muza and Persians from Praaspa were already a majority among them! They learnt the language of Quran, but they did not and could not change their racial and ethnic origin.
The Copts (Christians) of Egypt, and the ‘Assyrians’ and ‘Chaldaeans’ of Iraq and Iran are very good examples that show very well what happened: those who remained Christians preserved initially their language (Coptic and Aramaic – Syriac), and lost it gradually in later dates.
Among the people who accepted Islam in the early period, only Persians preserved their language. This is not strange, since the great cultural phenomenon of Ferdowsi gives us an insightful understanding of the subject. If Copts and Aramaeans had not been christened, and if they had kept a national traditional historical record of their glorious past, they would have resulted into a different perception of Islam, preserving their original languages and developing epics similar to Shahnameh.
Colonial practice and diffusion of Pan-arabism
Because this did not happen, we attest nowadays the current situation, but this does not involve that these peoples are Arabs, or that a kind of union can be based on falsely perceived history, and tons of misinformation and disinformation due to colonial powers’ diplomacy. Mainly France and England became the centers of emanation of a falsely conceived and inaccurately studied ‘pan-Arabism’, since they focused their educational – academic – cultural – ideological policies on issues related to their strategic efforts to bring down the Ottoman Empire, Safevid Iran, and Mughal India. The term ‘inaccurately studied’ is employed because this falsehood created problems worse than those it was supposed to solve, even if we limit the discussion to the Western world, since Islamic Terrorism is a later result of the earlier ideological developments in the area of the Middle East.
It is from the Western European universities, political parties and demented ateliers of all sorts that nationalism emanated. And as such, it caused serious problems to peoples of the East and the West, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and others. The confusion spread throughout the territories of the Ottoman Empire finds its equivalent in the disaster of the Irish, the Scots, the Corsicans and the Celts of Brittany. Actually, it leads to nowhere.
Earlier one understands this, sooner one escapes from the traps that led millions to wars and disaster.
Of course, the Colonial Scheme was not meant only against the Ottoman Empire. It did aim at creating an entire situation in which it would be sure that no powerful successive state form would ever rise in its stead! In this way, the colonial powers shaped the problematic Middle East of the 20s, the 30s, the 50s and the 60s that we all know; an area of total confusion and impotence. An area, from which the Western powers would extract oil and other resources in a most profitable way that – at the same time – would help them impose themselves as undisputable powers over the rest of the world.
Following the results of the WW I America joined the two colonial powers that achieved a multi-targeted ‘miracle’:
- they destroyed the Ottoman empire
- they made sure that no power rises in its stead in the Middle East and
- they kept rival Germany and Russia far from it!
Impossibility of an ‘Arab’ nationalism
In the sense that never Indians will be able to express … Chinese nationalism (!), and never Spaniards will be able to express … Portuguese nationalism, never will…
- the Copts of Egypt (all the population is Coptic, Egyptian properly speaking, not only the Christians, those who are called ‘Copts’) – call them just Egyptians if you want
- the Aramaeans of Iraq, Syria, Jordan (I mean again the entire population of these countries, not just the Christains), of Iran (the so-called ‘Arabs’ of Khuzestan are just ‘Aramaeans’), of Turkey (Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic speaking populations of Antakya, Gaziantep, Kahraman Marash, Urfa/Edessa, Diyarbakir/Amida, Mardin/Margdis, Nusaybin, Hasankeyf, Siirt and Cizre) and of Lebanon (here I limit it to the inlanders)
- the Berbers of Lybia, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (again I do not mean the Kabylians in Algeria, who openly declare their Berberic/Khammitic identity, but the entire population of all these countries)
- the Nubians (belonging to the so-called Nilo-Saharic group of languages and races) of Egypt and the Sudan (another terribly oppressed minority), who live between Luqsor in Egypt and Karima in Sudan
- the Meroites of Sudan, who live either nubianized in the north of Karima or arabized between Karima and Malakal in Central Sudan, being the descendants of the ancient Khammitic population of the historical Sudanese states Kush (800 – 525), Meroe (450 BC – 350 AD) and (Christian) Makkuria (450 – 1150)
- the Yemenites and the Omanis, who are certainly Semites but closer to the Abyssinians than to Arabs (their extensively recorded on epigraphic monuments ancient language gave birth to Gueze, the official and religious language of Axumite Abyssinia, and has been preserved until now in some parts of Hadramawt and at the island of Sokotra)
and last but not the least- the Palestinians, the Kuwaitis, the Qataris, the Emiratis and the Bahrainis,who – all – are arabized Aramaeans,
…be able to express such a thing as Arabic nationalism.
The strength of survival in numbers was more considerable in the case of the Nubian and the Berberic than for Syriac, Yemenite or even Coptic. The latter went silent just 150 years ago. At the times of Champollion, Coptic was still mother tongue to a few thousands of Christian Egyptians. But yet, Coptic is the religious language in use for the Christians in Egypt, and many hundreds of thousands learn it in the religious schools.
To this – necessarily summarized presentation – there can be only a counter-argument:
Several scholars have indeed pretended that Arabs, going outside the Arabic peninsula at the very Dawn of the Islamic Era. finally settled and definitely intermingled with local populations from Iran and Oman to Morocco, in a way that we could admit a certain…arabization at the racial, not only the linguistic, level.
The Aramaization of the Middle East during the Late Antiquity: a real racial intermingling.
This would be an entire aberration. Of course, any ‘– ization’ can eventually take place at the level of race, not only language, culture or religion! The case of the Aramaization of Babylonia and Elam (a long procedure that took place from the 6th to the 1st century BC) is quite indicative! But there were numerous Aramaic populations transported by the Assyrian emperors of the 8th and the 7th centuries there, or had settled because of their own choice. Elamites were exterminated by Assurbanipal at 640 BC, and the decapitated Babylonians started being outnumbered by the continuously arriving in the Mesopotamian South Aramaeans!
But nothing similar happened during the early Islamic times! At the times of the Prophet, all the Arabs of Hedjaz did not outnumber the population of just one big Aramaic, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Abyssinian, Berberic, Meroitic or Yemeni city like Tadmor, Syene (Aswan), Istakhr, Corinth, Mediolanum (Milano), Axum, Carthage, Dongola Agouza or Aden! So, there cannot be discussion about numbers, the real Arabs went lost among the multitude of the early Muslims, already before the year 30 of Hegira!
What most of the modern Western (in their great numbers Colonial) historians failed to see, focus and understand is that already during the life time of the Prophet Yemenites accepted Ali’s preaching in Yemen at 630 AD. In great numbers! Along with them, Persian soldiers and colonizers, since Yemen belonged to the Sassanid Empire.
Islamic, not ‘Arab’ invasions
So, to rtepeat what we earlier stated, when the first Islamic armies were fighting at Yarmouk (636) and were reaching Jerusalem and Damascus (638), there was a sizeable non-Arabic part among them! And we know only too well that these armies were not so numerous! When, a few years later, Islamic armies were reaching Nihavent (641) and Alexandria (642), already more than half of them were not Arabs! When Islamic armies attacked Constantinople (677) and reached Gibraltar, Arabs were already insignificant portion among them.
Early Islam was not ‘culturally’ Arabic: on the contrary, Islam de-arabized the then Arabs of Hedjaz.
This reality shaped the world, and it was widely accepted among early Muslims in the first centuries of Islam. It was not limited at the racial level whatsoever! It was then accepted as encompassing all levels: cultural, literary, philosophical, religious, scientific, artistic. The great movement of Shu’ubiyeh precisely stressed the point that the contribution of the Arabs was just…. nothing!
And the Shu’ubiyeh were correct! Not only they knew more than the modern XIXth century scholars but they did not have back mind schemes and hidden plans! Nothing from all the aspects of the Islamic civilization is Arabic, except the language! Art, philosophy, sciences, literature, knowledge, wisdom, technology, administration, army, navy, religion, theology: nothing in early Islam is Arabic.
Perhaps this is the most correct summary of the case: by accepting the prophet Muhammad, 7th century Arabs were des-arabized once and forever! In the sense that all that was genuinely Arabic before Muhammad with his preaching took a definite end!
Different type of Islamization: the Persians preserved Persian, but other peoples got linguistically arabized. An effort of analysis.
The different approaches to the phenomenon of the adhesion to Islam consist in a certainly large – truly speaking – a vast, subject. We currently know many details, but until now scholars did not focus on a comparative, eventually interdisciplinary, approach.
Turks accepted Islam late, in Central Asia, and through the Persians.
The main issue focalizes on the difference between
- the Persians – from one side – and
- the Aramaeans (the many Aramaic speaking peoples that consisted in the outright majority of the areas belonging to today’s SE Turkey, SW Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates, Bahrain, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and N – NE – E Arabia) and the Egyptians – from the other side.
The main distinction between the two groups at the very moment of the beginning of the Islamization procedure was the fact that – all the Egyptians and the great majority of the Aramaeans belonged to various Christian denominations, with the minority of the Aramaeans practicing Manichaeism and other Late Antiquity forms of Gnosticisms (of which originate both the Mandaean and the Yazidi Kurdish minorities of present day Iraq), but – the outright majority of the Iranians were following various religious systems that almost all were derivatives of Zoroaterianism (namely Mithraism, Mazdakism, Zervanism, Gayomardism) turning around the Court derivative of Zoroasterianism, i.e. Mazdaism that was deeply involved in shaping a national – nationalistic political ideology that could not find its counterpart among any christianized people and/or state.
Whereas Mazdaism’s approaches to the diachronic role of Iran were shared by Iranian Mithraists, Mazdakists, Zervanists, Gayomardists, and eventually Iranians following other religious systems (Manicheism, Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism), Christianized populations of the Roman Empire, Aramaeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Armenians, Romans and others were involved in terrible Christological divisions, debates, confrontations, and polarizations. They had all rejected political ideologies related to their pre-Christian religions, cults, ideologies, and philosophies, adopting the Christian Roman ideology of ‘Urbi et Orbi’, a kind of early ‘internationalism’ bringing nations together to the trinity – god of that religion.
The case of the Egyptians was particularly hard, since terrible hatred against the Pharaonic past of the country was diffused among the darkened minds of the fanatic, christianized masses, leading therefore to total disrespect for their own identity, culture and past.
Briefly, the ideological issues that were by then prevailing among the Aramaeans were the division between Nestorians (who rejected Jesus’ divine nature) and Monophysites (who rejected Jesus’ human nature), and the common rejection of Constantinople Christianity (that was refuting both, Nestorianism and Monophysitism, accepting Jesus’ double nature).
The issues among the Egyptians were the fights between the outright Coptic – Monophysitic majority and the sizable Greek majority that was following Constantinople Christianity, as well as the anti-Jewish stand of the Christians that created serious problems wherever Jews formed a sizable minority.
Similar to their attitude of forgetting their mother language because of their adhesion to Islam, one can find later among Greeks, who – by accepting Islam – went through linguistic turcization. There was no apparent reason for them to preserve Greek (as for the Arameans Aramaic, and for the Egyptians Coptic), in the way Persian was preserved among Iranians.
As far as the Yemenites are concerned, it seems that Monophysitic or pro-Constantinople Christianity (supported by and collaborating with Axumite Abyssinian King Kaleb, who invaded Yemen to help the Eastern Roman Empire in its fight against the Sassanid Empire of Iran) was so insignificant (whereas the majority was versed either in older forms of Yemenite religion, or in Nestorianism and Judaism), that the overwhelming acceptance of Islam came as a natural result to earlier developments.
Peace depends only on the extinction of the falsehood “Pan-Arabism”.
This effort for analysis consists in just some introductory thoughts regarding the perplex phenomenon of Islamization, but again the subject is vast, and mostly unstudied. However, this event’s implications in the present day politics are so deep that never peace in the Middle East will be achieved, before an earlier understanding and a final outmaneuvering of the aforementioned situation be reached and undertaken!
Arabic nationalism must be extinguished, the must be dissolved, Syriac, Berberic, Nubian, Yemenite and Coptic must be taught in the schools, primary and secondary, in parallel with Arabic and Kurdish! Not only minorities, but the entire population of the Middle East must be taught the correct language in the primary and secondary education. This is the only way to Peace in the Middle East.
Read more: Falsehood of Pan-Arabism, Progenitor of Wars and Tyrannieshttp://phoenicia.org/panarab.html#ixzz21CikBDUo
Roger
Lebanese journalist Neheda Baraka wrote an article in the British newspaper The Guardian to express her annoyance that the media talks about “an Arab world”, an “Arab people”, encompassing more than 300 million people who are not Arab at all.
The article is full of errors due to the falsification of history on the pseudo conquest made by Arabs and by the meaning of the word Arab, but has the merit to denounce the Western media in what can be likened to a crime against the diversity of humanity. A true crime against humanity.
________
Let’s banish the term ‘Arab world’. What does it mean anyway?
Neheda Barakat
Labelling 381 million people from 22 countries as monolithic ‘Arabs’ is misleading and inaccurate
With conflicts raging on in Syria, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq and a diaphanous calm in the rest of the Middle East, the language we use in covering this region is not only hindering our understanding of the issues, but it is also misguiding strategic policies.
As a journalist covering international events, I have witnessed the narrative covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) recede to a thin crescent of one pan-ethnic group, primarily because they speak a dialect of Arabic. At the last count, 35 dialects of the Arabic language are spoken across the two regions.
In a recent discussion one person, referring to Iranians, used the term “Arab speakers”. I wanted to ask whether they were Dolby Digital or Stereo. Instead I pointed out that Iran’s language is Farsi.
The BBC has an “Arab affairs” editor and it is not alone. Fellow journalists who are “internationalists” themselves make that mistake; politicians, commentators and academics as well. This language does nothing to inform and only perpetuates a phantom identity of “Arabs” and the “Arab world”. Both terms are widely used as blanket coverage of the populace in the MENA that displaces the indigeneity of “Arab” into a single basket that mashes 22 countries with a population of 381 million.
Perhaps it is the globalisation of things that has made it acceptable to do away with the specifics of identity? A Google Books search suggests the usage of these terms has shot up to almost 400% since the 1800s.
The MENA consist of many countries and each speaks its own form of Arabic patois, a clear indication of their nationality. Arabic in North Africa is almost incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant such as Lebanon. In the case of Lebanon, their version is what I call frou-frou Arabic due to lasting French influences. Lebanon’s native language was Phoenician or Canaan, which was also spoken in coastal Syria, northern coastal Israel and Cyprus. Syria’s once native language that it shared with Iraq and Iran was Assyrian. The Egyptians spoke Coptic. The list goes on.
During an assignment in Israel and Palestine, my Arabic dialect clearly defined my roots from the local Palestinians. The dialects differed wildly when I was in Egypt and even greater when dealing with Iraqis and Libyans. Not to mention cultural differences. As a Lebanese-Australian who lived in Libya as a child and then later worked for the Nine Network Australia during a Gulf war assignment in Saudi Arabia, I found both countries terrifying. They and their lifestyle were alien to me. Yet in this instance, the global membership I had been assigned, told me I belong to others. An otherness dictated by passersby.
Lebanese biologist, Dr Pierre Zalloua, whose wide body of work includes the National Geographic’s Genographic project – an ambitious worldwide genetic mapping of human history – has a huge interest in this topic and has dedicated a lot of his work to deconstructing the misleading current definitions of identities in general. Zalloua says, “DNA is the most powerful tool that eradicated the word race and embraced the word ethnic background. It does not define or determine an identity, or culture or an ethnicity, it uncovers stories from our past but does not reveal who we really are.”
In my initial contact with Zalloua for this story he cautioned that: “This is a very complex and convoluted topic, very politically charged. One has to have the courage to tackle and be truthful to the facts without prejudice.”
And he was right. In researching for meanings, definitions and categorisations of the term or the regions, there are no definitive answers to populations, countries, sects and languages that accurately agree on what constitutes the MENA. There is no getting away from that ethnocentric mindset that mash-up countries, ethnicities, religions, cultures and languages by referring to the regions, not as the Arabic speaking world, not as the Middle East or North Africa, but as “Arabs” and the “Arab world.” We wouldn’t refer to Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the USA as “English” or the “English world” but most likely, the English-speaking world.
Robert Hoyland, a professor of archeology and history at NYU, spent considerable time in Syria and Yemen until the wars started and now teaches at NYU in Dubai. He says that the first reference to the term “Arab” was in 834BC in the Bible and “the race existed in Syria below Palmyra and top of Saudi Arabia, ie, in the desert between them.”
Before the regions were invaded by the “Arabs” from down south in the Arabian Peninsula, there were existing civilisations. The march north and conquest began in the mid-6th century, across the Persian and Byzantine territories and it was to spread the faith – Islam which was rooted in the Arabic language – not their ethnicity.
The word “Arab” means “nomad” in one camp, in another it is derived from “pure or mixed”. Arabic originated from nomadic tribes in the desert regions of the Arabian Peninsula. The language comes from Nabataean Aramaic script and has been used since the 4th century classical era belonging to the “Semitic” group of languages of Hebrew and Aramaic.
By the 8th century CE, the Arabic language began spreading throughout the MENA, as many people converted to Islam, and were obliged to pray in Arabic. This brings us to the most important constituent in the term “Arab”, ie the Arabic language – not people. To describe everyone who is Muslim or speaks Arabic as Arab is incorrect. Religiosity is not ethnicity and nor are they interchangeable.
A lot of what has happened in the MENA is sadly a case of unintended consequences. The struggles in these regions to a great extent has shifted from a nationalist to a religious front, which has led to the interchangeable terms of “Arabs” and “Muslims”. This has been a predominantly western perception, however, and the labelling of “Arabs” as monolithic can only be described as a fear-mongering term to reflect the “war on terror”.
Nonetheless, local contribution via geopolitics and strategic convenience cannot be ignored. Hoyland explains that the term “Arab” is a modern 19th century reference used to break away from the Ottoman Empire as well as Turkish nationalism. After that, the term was embedded with the initiation of the Arab League, specifically Saudi Arabia. It served Saudi very well to cast the one noun to describe two regions because ultimately, as the birthplace of Islam and “Arab”, it was convenient and strategic for this perception to continue. The greater the number of people, the bigger the area, the greater the leverage – and a desperate attempt to hold on to the pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism of yesteryear. The term stuck and was later advanced by Gama Abed Al Nasser in 1950s and 60s.
But no greater significance did it play until the 1967 war with Israel to give the perception of a big military force – a phantom bigness. Nowadays, the same term is a convenience for hawkish Israelis to refer to the Palestinians, casting them into that otherness, further into a phantasmagorical horror, and to erase their identity from lexicon listings.
According to Hoyland, the “Arab” term is becoming less popular in the Middle East, because the movement is seen as “backward”. “Nationalism and Islam has had its day,” he says.
Last year, the US Census Bureau held a forum to improve classifications of nationalities, race and ethnicities of the MENA, inviting 40 experts to discuss current data. The outcome of the forum will most likely lead to an increase in the number of classifications of ethnicities, race and nationalities in the MENA. This may get us closer to a more concise representation of the realities, rather than assumptions, and may help us understand the complexities of the regions. In lands of millions of Arabic speakers, not everyone is Ali or Abdullah nor Sunni or Shia. Islam consists of a significant number of branches and sub-branches (26 at last count), as well as non-Muslims.
“The question is not really whether it is correct but whether it is useful,” Hoyland says. “It is not correct in the sense that everyone that lives in this region is an Arab or wants to be referred to as Arab.”
We need to scrap the free memberships that misplace ethnicity, identity, culture and history. Doing so would not only go some way to preventing exclusion, but also give context, and provide a starting point in promoting understanding. It may even prevent incidents of racism and bias towards anyone or anything that comes from the Middle East and North Africa and happens to speak a dialect of Arabic.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/18/lets-banish-the-term-arab-world-what-does-it-mean-anyway