“If one understood Arab Culture it is immediately apparent that Blackness is highly cherished conceptually and in reality. In Arab culture the best camel is the black one the best Fig is the blackest, the best eyes are black, the best olives are black, the most beautiful rock is the Black Kaaba. Any Bedouin Arab that is asked his color, would undoubtedly respond Asmar or Aswad which means Black/Brown. No Arab ever describes himself as Bidan which means White. ” Who are the Arabs: In today’s world, one is seducively led by the racist western media to believe that the Arabs of Arabia and Africa represent a peculiar phenotype with all other non-conforming types being somewhat alien to that concept. In this way they impose a certain central Asian phenotype as the “racial Arab” and the almost ubiquitous Black Arabs of the modern times as either descendants of slaves or immigrants. In this way, they attempt to disconnect the linkage between the ancient Kushitic Black Arabs globally celebrated in antiquity (now reclassified as some “caucasoid” “semitics”) and their Kushitic African roots. This article is therefore another blow against the citadel of falsehood erected by the western intelligensia used to discourage, dis-empower dissipate and diffuse the energy of the Black nation. Again one notes and deplores the unrelenting effort by non-continental peoples to appropriate the history and the achievements of brilliant Black African luminaries as their own. Much confusion attends the word “Arabs”, because it has not always been used with rigourous consistency. Moreover, in the wake of the global dominance of the Arab culture and Islamic political power in the between 7AD and 14 AD, the number of Arabs increased exponentially by the addition of many non Arab Arabized people, because acculturation and assimilation were delibrately fostered by state policy. Today, the word Arabs does not strictly imply or designate any known racial category of people. It is an ethnic identification that has several aspect including liguistics, politics and genealogy. Its meaning is nuanced depending on the particular context. As an ethnic identity, an Arab is someone who considers himself to be an Arab regardless of racial or ethnic origin. This definition encompasses many Africans, Indians, Indonesians and Chinese who describe themselves as Arabs. Usually the first language of persons who claim to be Arab is Arabic. There are over 200 million people worldwide whose first language is Arabic. Again these peoples spread over a large portion of the globe spanning from central Africa to central Asia. More than 70% of the so-called Arabs in the world live physically in Africa. Given that the Arabic language is a Semitic language, which forms part of the Afro-Asia language family, which originated in Africa, one can rightly view Arabic as an African language. Of the official languages of the African Union that include English, French, Spanish, Portugese, and Arabic, Arabic language is the only Afro-Asiatic language spoken. The rest are Euro-Aryan English, French, Spanish and Portugese. See Uwechia Jide; Hamito-Semitic Africa: africaresource/rasta/2006/04/10/hamito-semitic-africa-semites-of-africa-ii/. See also Peter T. Daniels, Origin of Semitic: https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-January/011842.html. Viewed from a political perspective, someone who is a resident or citizen of a country where Arabic is an official or national language, or is a member of the Arab League or is part of the wider Arab world is an Arab. This definition would cover more than 300 million people. Under this definition, there are more Arabs in Africa than anywhere else in the universe. Most of those Arabs that live in Africa are Black Africans, from Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Eriteria, Kenya Tanzannia, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco. Many of them trace their ancestry to Yemen. On its formation in 1946, the Arab League defined an “Arab” as: “… 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 Arab League’s definition of an Arab leaves no room for any racialist twist on the meaning of Arab and Arabic. These words simply denote ethnicity. Yet again, based upon this definition, there are more Black Africans who have a legitimate claim to the Arabic ethnicity than anywhere else in the world. 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.” Here again, one finds that there more Black African Arabs based on this definiton than any other regional phenotype that lays claim to that heritage. A hadith related by Ibn Asakir in Tarak Dimashq and attributed to Islam’s prophet Muhammad states 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.”
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 14:41:24 +0000
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