2006-09-24
Arabia
My continuing studies of Islam and Arabia have now convinced me conclusively of the validity of the word, "Arabia", to describe (at the very least) the Arabian penensula, and all the countries there collectively. This website uses the term "Arabia" in its title, defines "Arab" as "populations of countries whose primary language is Arabic, e.g., Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen."
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3 comments:
So by saying the Arabian Peninsula, are you including Israel (Palestine) in your term "Arabia".
Are you also including other largely Muslim countries that speak Arabic like Sudan, Malaysia and Pakistan?
I think your use of the term to generalize all people of "arab" descent is inaccurate. It leaves out people like Persians and Chaldeans and Hebrews. It is also inaccurate geographically, though I will concede your use to describe the Arabian penninsula.
But it wouldn't apply to Afghanistan, and I certainly don't think it should apply to Egypt, which is in Africa.
I use the term as historians and the koran's authors have used it, in it one of its forms: I use "Arabia" to mean the Arabian penensula. Some have indeed used it, as that website does, to describe an even wider area where the Arabic language dominates, which indeed includes Egypt (as that website states), Algeria, and Libya, but not Persia or Afgahnistan.
The term "Palistine" is interesting. The Romans invented it to re-rename that area, after what's now the Gaza strip, which during their rule contained the Philistines. When the Romans conquered it, the rulers at the time called it either Judea or Isreal, I forget which. The Romans renamed it for the Philistines to humiliate the jews that they had conquered.
The Roman empire devolved into the Byzantine empire, which broke apart into various mostly European kingdoms, including what became known in in "Palistine" as the Kingdom of Jeruselum. The Islamic imperialists attacked and conquered that kingdom, inspiring the Catholic "Crusades".
http://www.colorq.org/MeltingPot/article.aspx?d=Africa&x=ArabBlacks
This article also uses the term Arabia to describe the Arabian penensula. It discusses the age-old interaction between Sudan/Ethiopia with "Arabia"; thus this article doesn't count this part of Africa as belonging to "Arabia" despite the dominance there of the Arabic language. The article does mention various invasions back-and-forth, which certainly included slavery, rape, massacre, and property theft.
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