Arab

Arab, Arabic singular masculine ʿArabī, singular feminine ʿArabiyyah, plural ʿArab, one whose native language is Arabic. (See also Arabic language.) Before the spread of Islam and, with it, the Arabic language, Arab referred to any of the largely nomadic Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. In modern usage, it embraces any of the Arabic-speaking peoples living in the vast region from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to southwestern Iran, including the entire Maghrib of North Africa, Egypt and Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Syria and Iraq.

This diverse assortment of peoples defies physical stereotyping, because there is considerable regional variation. The early Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula were predominantly nomadic pastoralists who herded their sheep, goats, and camels through the harsh desert environment. Settled Arabs practiced date and cereal agriculture in the oases, which also served as trade centres for the caravans transporting the spices, ivory, and gold of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa to the civilizations farther north. The distinction between the desert nomads, on the one hand, and town dwellers and agriculturists, on the other, still pervades much of the Arab world.

Islam, which developed in the west-central Arabian Peninsula in the early 7th century ce, was the religious force that united the desert subsistence nomads—the Bedouins—with the town dwellers of the oases. Within a century, Islam had spread throughout most of the present-day Arabic-speaking world and beyond, from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula. Arabic, the language of the Islamic sacred scripture (the Qurʾān), was adopted throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the rapidly established supremacy of Islam in those regions. Other elements of Arab culture, including the veneration of the desert nomad’s life, were integrated with many local traditions. Arabs of today, however, are not exclusively Muslim; approximately 5 percent of the native speakers of Arabic worldwide are Christians, Druzes, Jews, or animists.

Traditional Arab values were modified in the 20th century by the pressures of urbanization, industrialization, detribalization, and Western influence. Nearly half of Muslim Arabs live in cities and towns, where family and tribal ties tend to break down, where women, as well as men, have greater educational and employment opportunity, and where the newly emerging middle class of technicians, professionals, and bureaucrats has gained influence.

The majority of Arabs continue to live in small, isolated farming villages, where traditional values and occupations prevail, including the subservience and home seclusion (purdah) of women. While urban Arabs tend to identify themselves more by nationality than by tribe, village farmers venerate the pastoral nomad’s way of life and claim kinship ties with the great desert tribes of the past and present. Nationalism and the change in standards of living that have been made possible by the expanded oil industry, however, have radically altered the nomadic life.

The pastoral desert nomad, the traditional ideal of Arab culture, makes up barely 5 percent of the modern Arab population. Many of the remaining nomads have given up full-time subsistence pastoralism to become village agriculturists or stock breeders, or to find employment with oil companies or other employers in the towns and cities.