Arab

Arab, any member of the largest ethnic group of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), defined primarily by the use of the Arabic language, or one descended from this population. Although often considered an ethnic term, Arab does not imply a particular race or physical stereotype; the term unites people of varying ancestry and local customs who are connected by broad cultural similarities and a common language. 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 Maghreb of North Africa, Egypt and Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Syria and Iraq. It also includes Arab diaspora communities in the Americas, Europe, and other parts of the world.

Language

The use of the Arabic language is central to Arab identity. Arabic is a Semitic language with several written and spoken varieties. The majority of Arabic-language texts before the modern period, most famously the Qurʾān, were written in Classical Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic, which differs minutely from Classical Arabic in stylistic and lexical considerations, is used in most publications, ranging from newspapers to novels, and in formal broadcasts such as news programs and political speeches. Spoken Arabic varieties often differ significantly and are, in some cases, mutually unintelligible. The chief dialect groups are those of Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa.

Origin

The earliest attestation of a word similar to the modern ethnonym Arab dates to the Neo-Assyrian period in the early 1st millennium bce. For example, in the account of his eighth campaign Sennacherib describes his defeat of “Te’elhunu šarrat Arabi” (“Te’elhunu, queen of the Arabs”). The extent of what is meant by the term is unclear, and there is no evidence that any group of people called themselves Arabs during this period. Subsequent empires adopted the label, which entered into Greek as a generic term for groups who lived in the desert lands to the south of their region of influence, which at its height included the territory from Egypt through the Levant and Mesopotamia, and eastward into Iran and southern Central Asia. Pre-Islamic Arabian texts dating to the early centuries of the Common Era suggest that those living in the Arabian Peninsula saw themselves not as a single people but as separate groups, often with their own cultural and political traditions.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

More From Britannica

Arabia: Ethnic groups

Indeed, pre-Islamic Arabia was home to a variety of lifeways and languages. Pastoralism of sheep, goats, and cattle has been practiced on the peninsula since the 7th–5th millennium bce. Permanent agricultural settlements have been a feature of the coastal regions since the 3rd millennium bce. Written records appear in the early 1st millennium bce and represent a variety of Semitic languages used throughout the region. In the north and center, the dominant linguistic form was Old North Arabian, subclassified into Lihyanic, Thamudic, and Safaitic. To the south were inscriptions in Old South Arabian, subclassified into Minaean, Sabaean, Qatabanian, and Hadhramautic.

Variants of the term Arab were used throughout these centuries and into the Common Era. Such terms, however, were not used by any group for itself but only for referring to other peoples, particularly surrounding nomadic groups. It would not be until the 7th century ce that the term would be used as a self-name, adopted by the conquering political and military elites of early Islam to distinguish themselves from local converts, known as mawālī, who joined them as clients. Over the course of the next two centuries, Arab began taking on some ethnic connotations, as a notion of shared history and genealogies started to form.

Arab identity spread through a mix of conquest, assimilation, religious conversion, and the propagation of the Arabic language and script. The process was not uniform. Rather, different groups joined or emphasized Arab identity in times when it was politically beneficial and highlighted other social relationships when it was less important. The modern conception of Arab identity has been strongly influenced by Pan-Arabism, a nationalist notion that took root in the Arab-majority regions of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as the related Arabic literary renaissance. Christians and Jews were at the forefront of the nationalist movement, which emphasized the shared culture of Arabs over religious divides. Particularly during the final decades of Ottoman rule, many non-Muslim Arabs saw nationalism as a path to equal citizenship, as opposed to their limited autonomy under the millet system. By the middle of the 20th century, Pan-Arabists had gained a degree of political power: The socialist Baʿath Party was founded by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar in 1943 and took power in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s; in 1945 the Arab League was created; and in 1958 Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic, although Syria would claim independence from Egypt after a military coup in 1961.

Religion

The majority of Arabs are Muslim. Though the exact percentage of Arabs who practice Islam is difficult to determine, about 94 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa—a region in which Arabs are the majority but which also includes such non-Arab majority countries as Iran and Turkey—was Muslim in 2025. Globally, a minority of Arabs are Christian, although Christians constitute the majority of Arabs in some diaspora communities. For example, in the early 2020s about 60–80 percent of Arab Americans were Christian. Some members of the Druze community—who speak Arabic and practice a distinct religion that began as an offshoot of Ismaʿīlī Shiʿism—consider themselves Arab, whereas others see themselves as a distinct ethnic group. There are some Jewish Arabs, although many Jews of Middle Eastern extraction no longer identify as Arabs but rather as Mizrahim.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Arts and culture

Literature

Arabic literature goes back at least to the time of the Qurʾān. With the advent and spread of Islam, that tradition was carried far and wide during the course of the 7th to the 10th century. It initially sought to preserve the values of chivalry and hospitality while expressing a love of animals and describing the stark realities of nature, but it proceeded to absorb cultural influences from every region brought within the fold of “Dār al-Islam” (“Abode of Islam”). Early contacts with the Sasanian empire of Persia (present-day Iran) led to a noisy but fruitful exchange of cultural values. The foundation in 762 of Baghdad, built expressly as a caliphal capital, brought about further expansion to the east and contacts with the cultures of India and beyond; one of the results of such contact was the appearance in the Middle East of the world’s greatest collection of narrative, Alf laylah wa laylah (The Thousand and One Nights). By the 10th century political fragmentation allowed for the flourishing of court poets and scholars as competing petty dynasties provided ample opportunity for patronage at court. However, literary production and creativity were inevitably marked by the ongoing series of Crusades, carried out by Christians from western Europe, the Mongol invasions and later those of the Turkic conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the fall of Granada in the Reconquista in 1492, and the fall of Cairo to the Ottomans in 1517. It has been customary in surveys of the Arabic literary tradition to write off the era between 1258 and 1800 by declaring it a “period of decadence.” However, a more nuanced analysis of the situation would acknowledge the political turmoil that characterized many regions and periods and would also suggest that a degree of caution is needed in applying Western criteria for literary evaluation to a period in which the aesthetic yardsticks were clearly different.

The nature of “the modern” in the context of Arabic literary history involves twin processes: first, renewed contacts with the Western World, something that was considerably accelerated by European imperial incursions during the 19th century, and second, a renewed interest in the classical heritage of the Arabic language and Islam. Particularly in analyzing the earlier stages in the process known as al-nahḍah (“renaissance”), Western historians have for a long time placed more emphasis on the first of these factors. It is true that the 19th century witnessed a vigorous translation movement that introduced to the readership of Arabic literature examples of genres such as the novel, the short story, and the drama. These genres were subsequently produced within the literary milieu of Arabic, although the chronology and pace of that process varied widely in different regions. However, as Arab literary historians endeavored to trace the development of a modern literary tradition in different regions and as creative writers strove to find indigenous sources of inspiration and modes of expression, a perceived need to incorporate the second category mentioned above—that of the linkage between the classical heritage of the Arab past and the creativity of the present—became more pressing and led in many regions to a reexamination of the balance between these two forces.

At the turn of the 21st century, the Arab creative writer operated at a local level within a social environment that, more often than not, constrained freedom of expression and indeed subjected literature to strict forms of censorship. Many prominent Arab authors spent large segments of their life in exile from their homelands for political reasons. More broadly, the confrontation between secularism and popular religious movements, which might in the best of circumstances provide for a fruitful interaction of opinions, instead—because of local, regional, and global factors—created an atmosphere of tension and repression that was often not conducive to creative thought. This confrontation also prompted Arab litterateurs to view the global environment with considerable circumspection.