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The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the western Indian Ocean islands (including the Comoros). An Arab diaspora is also present around the world in significant numbers, most notably in the Americas, Western Europe, Turkey, Indonesia, and Iran. In modern usage, the term "Arab" tends to refer to those who both carry that ethnic identity and speak Arabic as their native language. This contrasts with the narrower traditional definition, which refers to the descendants of the tribes of Arabia. The religion of Islam was developed in Arabia, and Classical Arabic serves as the language of Islamic literature. 93 percent of Arabs are Muslims (the remainder consisted mostly of Arab Christians), while Arab Muslims are only 20 percent of the global Muslim population.

The first mention of Arabs appeared in the mid-9th century BCE, as a tribal people in eastern and southern Syria and the northern Arabian Peninsula. The Arabs appear to have been under the vassalage of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as well as the succeeding Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Parthian empires. The Nabataeans, an Arab people, ruled a kingdom near Petra (modern-day Jordan) in the 3rd century BCE. Arab tribes, most notably the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids, began to appear in the southern Syrian Desert from the mid-3rd century CE onward, during the middle to later stages of the Roman and Sassanid empires. Before the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate, the term "Arab" referred to any of the both largely nomadic and settled Arabic-speaking people from the Arabian Peninsula, the Syrian Desert, and Lower Mesopotamia, with some even reaching what is now northern Iraq. Since the height of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s, "Arabs" has been taken to refer to a large number of people whose native regions became part of the Arab world due to the spread of Islam, which saw the expansion of Arab tribes and the Arabic language throughout during the early Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. These cultural and demographic influences resulted in the subsequent Arabization of the indigenous populations.

The Arabs forged the Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates, whose borders at their zenith reached southern France in the west, China in the east, Anatolia in the north, and Sudan in the south, forming one of the largest land empires in history. In the early 20th century, World War I signalled the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, a Turkish polity that had ruled much of the Arab world since its conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517. The Ottoman defeat in World War I culminated in the 1922 dissolution of the empire and the subsequent partitioning of Ottoman territories, which formed the modern Arab states. Following the adoption of the Alexandria Protocol in 1944, the Arab League was founded on 22 March 1945.Arab League formed , This Day in History — 3/22/1945
" ''HISTORY''. US: A&E Television Networks. 2010. Retrieved on 28 April 2014. The Charter of the Arab League endorsed the principle of a unified Arab homeland whilst respecting the individual sovereignty of its member states.

Today, Arabs primarily inhabit the 22 member states of the Arab League. The Arab world stretches around , from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean in the southeast. People of non-Arab ethnicities associated with non-Arabic languages also live in these countries, sometimes as a majority; these include Somalis, Kurds, Berbers, the Afar people, Nubians, and various others. The ties that bind Arabs together are ethnic, linguistic, cultural, historical, identical, nationalist, geographical, and political. The Arabs have their own customs, language, literature, music, dance, media, cuisine, dress, society, sports, and mythology, as well as significant influence on Islamic architecture and Islamic art. Arabs have greatly influenced and contributed to diverse fields, notably architecture and the arts, language, Islamic philosophy, mythology, ethics, literature, politics, business, music, dance, cinema, medicine, science, and technology in ancient and modern history.

Arabs are a diverse group in terms of religious affiliations and practices. In the pre-Islamic era, most Arabs followed polytheistic religions. However, some tribes had adopted Christianity or Judaism and a few individuals, known as the '' hanifs'', apparently observed another form of monotheism.*
* Presently, there is a sizable Christian minority in the Arab world. Arab Muslims primarily belong to the Sunni, Shia, Ibadi, and Alawite denominations. Arab Christians generally follow Eastern Christianity, such as those within the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Eastern Catholic Churches, or the Eastern Protestant Churches.*
* There also exists a small numbers of Arab Jews still living in Arab countries, and a much larger population of Jews descended from Arab Jewish communities living in Israel and various Western countries, who may or may not consider themselves Arab today. Arabic-speaking Christian minorities in Arab-majority states may also not ethnically identify as Arabs, such as Copts and Assyrians. Other smaller minority religions also exist, such as the Druze and the Baháʼí Faith.

Etymology

The earliest documented use of the word ''Arab'' in reference to a people appears in the Kurkh Monoliths, an Akkadian-language record of the Assyrian conquest of Aram (9th century BCE). The Monoliths used the term to refer to Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula under King Gindibu, who fought as part of a coalition opposed to Assyria. pp. 105, 119, 125–27. Listed among the booty captured by the army of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in the Battle of Qarqar (853 BCE) are 1000 camels of "''Gîndibuʾ'' the ''Arbâya''" or " he manGindibu belonging to the ''Arabs''" (''ar-ba-a-a'' being an adjectival nisba of the noun ''ʿarab'').

The related word ''ʾaʿrāb'' is used to refer to Bedouins today, in contrast to ''ʿarab'' which refers to Arabs in general. Both terms are mentioned around 40 times in pre-Islamic Sabaean inscriptions. The term ''ʿarab'' ('Arab') occurs also in the titles of the Himyarite kings from the time of 'Abu Karab Asad until MadiKarib Ya'fur. According to Sabaean grammar, the term ''ʾaʿrāb'' is derived from the term ''ʿarab''. The term is also mentioned in Quranic verses, referring to people who were living in Madina and it might be a south Arabian loanword into Quranic language.

The oldest surviving indication of an Arab national identity is an inscription made in an archaic form of Arabic in 328 CE using the Nabataean alphabet as 'King of all the Arabs'. Herodotus refers to the Arabs in the Sinai, southern Palestine, and the frankincense region (Southern Arabia). Other Ancient-Greek historians like Agatharchides, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo mention Arabs living in Mesopotamia (along the Euphrates), in Egypt (the Sinai and the Red Sea), southern Jordan (the Nabataeans), the Syrian steppe and in eastern Arabia (the people of Gerrha). Inscriptions dating to the 6th century BCE in Yemen include the term 'Arab'.

The most popular Arab account holds that the word ''Arab'' came from an eponymous father named Ya'rub, who was supposedly the first to speak Arabic. Abu Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdani had another view; he states that Arabs were called ''gharab'' ('westerners') by Mesopotamians because Bedouins originally resided to the west of Mesopotamia; the term was then corrupted into ''arab''.

Yet another view is held by al-Masudi that the word ''Arab'' was initially applied to the Ishmaelites of the Arabah valley. In Biblical etymology, ''Arab'' (Hebrew: ''arvi'') comes from the desert origin of the Bedouins it originally described (''arava'' means 'wilderness').

The root ''ʿ-r-b'' has several additional meanings in Semitic languages—including 'west, sunset', 'desert', 'mingle', 'mixed', 'merchant' and 'raven'—and are "comprehensible" with all of these having varying degrees of relevance to the emergence of the name. It is also possible that some forms were metathetical from , 'moving around' (Arabic: , 'traverse') and hence, it is alleged, 'nomadic'.

History

Antiquity

Pre-Islamic Arabia refers to the Arabian Peninsula prior to the rise of Islam in the 630s. The study of Pre-Islamic Arabia is important to Islamic studies as it provides the context for the development of Islam. Some of the settled communities in the Arabian Peninsula developed into distinctive civilizations. Sources for these civilizations are not extensive, and are limited to archaeological evidence, accounts written outside of Arabia, and Arab oral traditions later recorded by Islamic scholars. Among the most prominent civilizations was Dilmun, which arose around the 4th millennium BCE and lasted to 538 BCE, and Thamud, which arose around the 1st millennium BCE and lasted to about 300 CE. Additionally, from the beginning of the first millennium BCE, Southern Arabia was the home to a number of kingdoms, such as the Sabaean kingdom ( ar, سَـبَـأ, Saba', Quran 34:15 possibly Sheba), and the coastal areas of Eastern Arabia were controlled by the Parthian and Sassanians from 300 BCE.

Origins and early history

According to Arab- Islamic-Jewish traditions, Ishmael was father of the Arabs, to be the ancestor of the Ishmaelites.
* Both Judaism and Islam see him as the ancestor of Arab peoples.
* Ishmael is recognized by Muslims as the ancestor of several prominent Arab tribes and being the forefather of Muhammad. ''A–Z of Prophets in Islam and Judaism'', Wheeler, ''Ishmael'' Muslims also believe that Muhammad was the descendant of Ishmael that would establish a great nation, as promised by God in the Old Testament.
* Genesis 17:20
*
* Ishmael was considered the ancestor of the Northern Arabs and Muhammad was linked to him through the lineage of the patriarch Adnan. Ishmael may also have been the ancestor of the Southern Arabs through his descendant Qahtan.
* Assyrians referred to the Arab Tribes as Ishmaelites, or "Shumu'ilu" as recorded in their inscriptions.
* " Zayd ibn Amr" was another Pre-Islamic figure who refused idolatry and preached monotheism, claiming it was the original belief of their rabsfather Ishmael.
* The tribes of Central West Arabia called themselves the "people of Abraham and the offspring of Ishmael."

The first written attestation of the ethnonym ''Arab'' occurs in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BCE, where Shalmaneser III lists a King Gindibu of ''mâtu arbâi'' (Arab land) as among the people he defeated at the Battle of Qarqar. Some of the names given in these texts are Aramaic, while others are the first attestations of Ancient North Arabian dialects. In fact several different ethnonyms are found in Assyrian texts that are conventionally translated "Arab": ''Arabi, Arubu, Aribi'' and ''Urbi''. Many of the Qedarite queens were also described as queens of the ''aribi''. The Hebrew Bible