Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Cultures

Arabs

Also Known As Arab · Arab Peoples
Peoples

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

The Arabs are the peoples of the Arabian peninsula and, after the seventh century conquests, of much of the Near East and North Africa, held together by the Arabic language rather than by any single line of descent. Pre-Islamic Arabian religion centred on tribal deities and on the sanctuary at Mecca, which the rise of Islam reorganised rather than abandoned. Arabic then became the liturgical language of a religion far larger than the people who first spoke it. Arab Christians and Arab Jews are long-standing communities within this world and not exceptions to it.

Facts
Origins
Origin Region
The Arabian peninsula, and after the seventh century conquests much of the Near East and North Africa. 1
Language Family
Arabic, Central Semitic within Afro-Asiatic, with a classical register that has held the written language together across a very wide range of spoken varieties. 2
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
Islam in its Sunni, Shia and Ibadi forms, held by the great majority; Christianity, continuous since before Islam in the eastern churches; the Druze and other communities of the Levant; and Judaism, long established and now largely departed from the region. 3
Practice
Practice Status
Living, and practised in varied local forms 3
Learn More
Before Islam: the Kaaba, the Jinn and the Poets

Pre-Islamic Arabian religion is known from inscriptions, from poetry, and from Muslim writers describing what was replaced, so it is reported chiefly by people with a case to make. What emerges is a body of local deities, among them Allat, Al-Uzza and Manat, worshipped at particular sanctuaries, alongside a high god whom the Quran assumes its audience already acknowledges. Sanctuaries were served by custodian families, pilgrimage and sacred months already existed, and the Kaaba at Mecca was one shrine among several before it became the only one.

The jinn belong to the same world and did not leave it. Amira El-Zein's study traces them from pre-Islamic poetry, where a poet's inspiration could be attributed to a familiar spirit, into the Quran, which affirms their existence as a created order with free will, obliged as humans are and capable of belief or unbelief. That continuity is why the jinn are a doctrinal category rather than a folk survival.

Divination by arrows, the reading of birds and the consultation of the kahin, a seer speaking in rhymed prose, were the ordinary religious techniques. The Quran's insistence that Muhammad is neither a kahin nor a poet is a response to the categories his first hearers already had available to them.

One Language, Many Faiths, and the Question of Descent

Arab is a linguistic and cultural designation rather than a genealogical one, and it always has been. The conquests of the seventh century carried Arabic across the Near East and North Africa, and the populations that adopted it over the following centuries became Arab without any general movement of people out of the peninsula.

The result is that Arab and Muslim are not the same category in either direction. Arabic speaking Christians have been continuous since before Islam, in the Coptic, Melkite, Syriac and Maronite churches, and Arabic was a Jewish language for a millennium; Judah Halevi and Maimonides wrote in it, and S. D. Goitein's reconstruction of Mediterranean Jewish life from the Cairo Geniza documents an Arabic speaking Jewish world in detail.

Arabic itself became a religious instrument of the first order. It is the language of the Quran, held by Muslims to be inimitable, and its grammar, lexicography and prosody were developed as sciences in the service of reading scripture. Paul Kunitzsch's work on Arabic star names records a different transmission: astronomy passed through Arabic into Latin Europe and left several hundred star names in English that are Arabic words. The religious history of the Arabs is therefore also the religious history of a language.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Arabs directly: ""They Came to Destroy": ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis, issued by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic under the United Nations Human Rights Council in..."

Source "They Came to Destroy": ISIS Crimes Against the YazidisIndependent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, United Nations

This source names Arabs directly: "Glanville Downey's A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest, Princeton University Press, 1961, is a scholarly history."

This source names Arabs directly: "The arabesque is the scrolling vegetal ornament of Islamic art: a stylised stem that forks at rhythmic intervals, each fork carrying a leaf or palmette that may itself become a new stem, with no..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Arabic, Languages

Arabic is what binds the Arab peoples together, in place of a single line of descent.

Balkh, Cities

This source names Arabs directly: "Balkh, in ancient Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan, is among the oldest cities of Central and South Asia and was traditionally called Umm al-Bilad, the Mother of Cities, in Islamic-era..."

Source A History of ZoroastrianismMary Boyce

This source names Arabs directly: "Egypt's Ministry of Awqaf (Ministry of Religious Endowments) is the state body responsible for administering waqf, Islamic religious endowments, and for overseeing the country's mosques, including..."

Source Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic WorldPascale Ghazaleh (ed.)

This source names Arabs directly: "Sudan's first postcolonial civil war began in August 1955, months before formal independence, when southern soldiers of the Equatoria Corps mutinied at Torit over fears of continued northern..."

This source names Arabs directly: "Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, Ahmad ibn Fadlan's medieval Arab travel account in Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone's 2012 scholarly translation from Penguin, is..."

Source Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far NorthAhmad ibn Fadlan; translated by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone

This source names Arabs directly: "An encaustic and tempera panel from the Monastery of Apollo at Bawit, Egypt, showing Christ standing beside Abbot Mena, the monastery's fifth century superior, Christ's arm resting on the abbot's..."

This source names Arabs directly: "Iraq's September 1980 invasion of Iran, driven by Saddam Hussein's territorial claim over the Shatt al-Arab waterway and his calculation that Iran's post revolutionary government was militarily..."

Source The Iran-Iraq War: 1980-1988 (Karsh)Efraim Karsh
Islam, Religions

Islam arose among the Arabs and made Arabic its liturgical language.

This source names Arabs directly: "Wikipedia's article on Islam in the Philippines, community-edited."

Source Islam in the Philippines (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Arabs directly: "Muslim diplomats and merchants reached Tang China within a few decades of Islam's own founding, arriving by both the overland Silk Road and maritime routes through southern ports such as Guangzhou."

Source Islam in China (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Arabs directly: "Muslim Malay and Arab merchants had long traded through the Southeast Asian archipelago when the Sunni scholar Shaykh Makhdum Karim reached the Sulu Archipelago and Jolo in 1380 and began..."

Source Islam in the Philippines (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Arabs directly: "An ongoing dispute over territory, sovereignty and national self-determination between the Zionist movement and, from May 1948, the State of Israel, and the Palestinian Arab national movement."

This source names Arabs directly: "Africa west of Egypt, known to the Arabs as Ifriqiya and the Maghreb, under caliphal rule."

Nabataean, Pantheons

This source names Arabs directly: "The pantheon of the Nabataean kingdom, the Arab caravan power centred on Petra that controlled the incense and spice routes of the northern Arabian Peninsula from roughly the fourth century BCE to..."

Near East, Regions

The seventh century conquests carried Arabic and Islam across the Near East.

Palmyrene, Pantheons

This source names Arabs directly: "The pantheon of Palmyra, the caravan city of the Syrian desert, headed by the triad of Bel, the sky and cosmic order god whose temple dominated the city until its 2015 destruction, and his two..."

This source names Arabs directly: "Benny Morris's history of the conflict between the Zionist and Palestinian Arab national movements from 1881 to 2001, published by Vintage Books."

This source names Arabs directly: "The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) is a Persian epic poem by the poet Ferdowsi, begun around 977 CE and completed in its final form on March 8, 1010."

Sogdian, Languages

This source names Arabs directly: "Sogdian is an Eastern Iranian language of the Middle Iranian period, native to Sogdiana, the region around Samarkand and Bukhara in Central Asia, and the working lingua franca of the eastern Silk..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Arabs directly: "Amira Bennison's The Almoravid and Almohad Empires is a scholarly survey of the two medieval Berber empires, published by Edinburgh University Press, that deliberately frames the Almohad movement as..."

Source The Almoravid and Almohad EmpiresAmira K. Bennison

This source names Arabs directly: "Arab Muslim armies attacked Sasanian territory beginning in 633, broke permanent Sasanian resistance west of Iran at the Battle of Qadisiyyah in 636, and completed the conquest of the empire in 651..."

Source Zoroastrianism In Iran (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Arabs directly: "Hugh Kennedy's narrative history of the early Arab conquests, from the first campaigns out of Arabia through the establishment of Umayyad rule across the Near East and North Africa into Iberia."

This source names Arabs directly: "Efraim Karsh's military and political history of the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War, published by Osprey in its Essential Histories series in 2002."

Source The Iran-Iraq War: 1980-1988 (Karsh)Efraim Karsh

This source names Arabs directly: "The Message is a 1976 film directed by Moustapha Akkad chronicling the origins of Islam and the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad."

Source The Message (1976 film) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Arabs directly: "Vali Nasr's account of the modern Sunni-Shia divide and its political consequences across the Middle East, published by W.W."

This source names Arabs directly: "A wave of revolts and civil war that broke out across the Umayyad Caliphate after the assassination of the caliph al-Walid II in 744, as rival claimants including Yazid III, Ibrahim ibn al-Walid and..."

This source names Arabs directly: "Francis M."

This source names Arabs directly: "The 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, which overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and led to violence against and flight of the island's Arab and South Asian minorities, forced the relocation of the Shri..."

Source Zanzibar Derasar (Jain Treasures)Jain Treasures

This source names Arabs directly: "Wikipedia's article on Zoroastrianism in Iran, community-edited."

Source Zoroastrianism In Iran (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Arabs directly: "Facing the gradual Islamisation of Persia after the Arab conquest, a group of Zoroastrians sailed for the west coast of India and, according to the community's own account, the Qissa-i Sanjan..."

Source Parsis (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Found In

Source The Semitic LanguagesRobert Hetzron (ed.)

Originated In

Arabia, Regions

Arabia is the peninsula from which the Arabic-speaking peoples spread.

Saudi Arabia covers most of the peninsular homeland, including Mecca and Medina.

Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. The Semitic Languages
Robert Hetzron (ed.), Routledge, 1997View the Source
3. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn
Amira El-Zein, Syracuse University Press, 2009View the Source
The Arabs and the Stars
Paul Kunitzsch, Variorum Reprints, 1989View the Source
A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza
S. D. Goitein, University of California Press, 1967View the Source
The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Brill, 2005View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.