Arab
From Wikipedia
| Arab (عرب) |
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| Jumlah orang: | 250-300 juta | |
| Tumpuan penduduk: | Dunia Arab Afrika Eropah Amerika Syarikat - 3.5 juta Brazil - 10 juta berketurunan Arab |
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| Bahasa: | Arab | |
| Agama: | Islam, Kristianiti, Druze, Agama Yahudi, tiada, atau lain | |
| Kelompok etnik terdekat: | Yahudi Mizrahi, Yahudi Sephardi, Canaanite, kumpulan Semitik lain | |
Arab (Arabic: عرب ʻarab) adalah satu kumpulan etnik yang heterogeneous dijumpai di kawasan Timur Tengah dan Africa Utara, berasal dari Semenanjung Arab, Asia Barat-Laut.
Jadual isi kandungan |
[Sunting] Siapakah seorang Arab?
Definisi seorang itu Arab meliputi beberapa aspek
- Identiti etnik: Sesiapa yang menganggap diri mereka seorang Arab (Tak kira bangsa atau etnik asal) dan diterima oleh orang lain.
- Linguistik: seseorang yang mana bahasa pertamanya adalah Bahasa Arab (termasuklah apa-apa keperlbagaian dialeknya); definisi ini merangkumi lebih daripada 250 juta orang. Arab termasuk kepada golongan keluarga Bahasa Semitik.
- Genealogi: seseorang yang boleh mengesan keturunan asalnya datangnya daripada Semenanjung Arab.
- Politik: seseorang yang menduduki atau menjadi warganegara sesebuah negara di mana Bahasa Arab merupakan bahasa rasmi atau bahasa kebangsaan, atau ia menjadi ahli kepada Liga Arab atau ia menjadi sebahagian daripada dunia Arab; definisi ini merangkumi lebih daripada 300 juta orang , tetapi ia lebih mudah dan tegar bahawa ia tidak termasuk keseluruhan Diaspora tetapi termasuklah orang asli atau [penghijrah]]an etnik minoriti.Kepentingan relatif faktor-faktor ini adalah ia dianggarkan secara berbeza oleh setiap kumpulan.
Kebanyakan orang akan melihat dirinya sebagai orang Arab dalam pertindihan antara definisi politik dan linguistik.
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However, some members of groups which fulfill both criteria reject the identity on the basis of the genealogical definition; Lebanese Maronites, for example, may reject the Arab label in favor of a narrower Phoenician-Lebanese national identity, as do many Coptic and Muslim Egyptians who embrace the continuation of their ancient heritage. Groups using a non-Arabic liturgical language - such as Copts in Egypt - are especially likely to consider themselves non-Arab, even though they are not ethnically distinct from their Muslim compatriots. Not many people consider themselves Arab on the basis of the political definition without the linguistic one—thus, Kurds or Berbers do not usually identify themselves as Arab—but some do (for instance, some Berbers do consider themselves Arabs, and Kurds were in some historical circumstances seen as Arabs or Persians).
A hadith of questionable authenticity[1], related by Ibn Asakir in Târîkh Dimashq and attributed by its narrator Salmân b. `Abd Allah to Islam's prophet Muhammad, expresses a common sentiment in declaring that:
"Being an Arab is not because of your father or mother, but being an Arab is on account of your tongue. Whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab."
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."
On its formation in 1946, the Arab League defined an "Arab" as follows:
"An Arab is 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."
A definition based on sociological variables is widely used since medieval times (Ibn Khaldun, for example, does not use the word Arab to refer to the arab people as defined by any of those definition, but only to those who are still living a bedouin life;i.e. a nomadic life, which he -Ibn Khaldoun- contrasts with urbanized life at the cities), this definition is still used by many Arabs.
[Sunting] Agama
Before the coming of Islam, most Arabs followed a religion featuring the worship of a number of deities, including Hubal, Wadd, Al-Lat, Manat, and Uzza, while some tribes had converted to Christianity or Judaism, and a few individuals, the hanifs, had apparently rejected polytheism in favor of a vague monotheism. The most prominent Arab Christian kingdoms were the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms. With the expansion of Islam, the majority of Arabs were rapidly conquered and became Muslims, and the pre-Islamic polytheistic traditions disappeared.
At present, most Arabs are Muslims. Sunni Islam dominates in most areas, overwhelmingly so in North Africa; Shia Islam is prevalent in Bahrain, Iran (though Iranians are not Arab), southern Iraq and adjacent parts of Saudi Arabia, southern Lebanon, parts of Syria, and northern Yemen. The tiny Druze community, belonging to a secretive offshoot of Islam, is usually considered Arab, but sometimes considered an ethnicity in its own right.
Reliable estimates of the number of Arab Christians, which in any case depends on the definition of "Arab" used, vary. According to Fargues 1998, "Today Christians only make up 9.2 % of the population of the Near East". In Lebanon they now number about 39% of the population [2], in Syria they make up about 10 to 15 %, in the Palestinian territories the figure is 3.8 %, and in Israel Arab Christians constitute 2.1 % (or roughly 10 % of the Israeli Arab population). In Egypt, they constitute 5.9 % of the population, and in Iraq they presumably comprise 2.9 % of the populace. Most North and South American Arabs (about two-thirds) are Arab Christians, particularly from Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon.
Jews from Arab countries - mainly Mizrahi Jews and Yemenite Jews - are today usually not categorised as Arab. Sociologist Philip Mendes asserts that before the anti-Jewish actions of the 1930s and 1940s, overall Iraqi Jews "viewed themselves as Arabs of the Jewish faith, rather than as a separate race or nationality". [3] Prior to the emergence of the term Mizrahi, the term "Arab Jews" (Yehudim ‘Áravim, יהודים ערבים) was used to describe Jews of the Arab world. The term is rarely used today. The few remaining Jews in the Arab countries reside mostly in Morocco and Tunisia. Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, following the creation of the state of Israel, most of these Jews left their countries of birth and are now mostly concentrated in Israel, but many also live in France, and however more Jews reside within the United States. (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands).
[Sunting] Sejarah
The first written attestation of the ethnonym "Arab" occurs in an Assyrian inscription of 853 BC, where Shalmaneser III lists a King Gindibu of mâtu arbâi (Arab land) as among the people he defeated at the Battle of Karkar. Some of the names given in these texts are Aramaic, while others are the first attestations of Proto-Arabic dialects. The Hebrew Bible likewise refers occasionally to peoples called `Arvi (or variants thereof), translated as "Arab" or "Arabian". The scope of the Hebrew term at this early stage is unclear, but it seems to have referred to various desert-dwelling Semitic tribes in the Syrian Desert and Arabia. Its earliest attested use referring to the southern "Qahtanite" Arabs is much later.
Proto-Arabic, or Ancient North Arabian, texts give a clearer picture of the Arabs' emergence into history. The earliest such texts are written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor in its Nabataean ancestor, but in variants of the Epigraphic South Arabian musnad, beginning in the 8th century BC with the Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, and continuing from the 6th century BC on with the Lihyanite texts (in southeastern Saudi Arabia) and the Thamudic texts (found throughout Arabia and the Sinai, and not in reality connected with Thamud). Later come the Safaitic inscriptions (beginning in the 1st century BC) and the many Arabic personal names attested in Nabataean inscriptions (which are, however, written in Aramaic.) From about the 2nd century BC, a few inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (near Sulayyil) reveal a dialect which is no longer considered "Proto-Arabic", but Pre-Classical Arabic.
By the fourth century AD, the Arab kingdoms of the Lakhmids in southern Iraq and Ghassanids in southern Syria had emerged just south of the Fertile Crescent and ended up allying respectively with the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires. Thus they were constantly at war with each other on behalf of their imperial patrons. However, their courts were responsible for some notable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and for some of the few surviving pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet. The Lakhmid kingdom was dissolved by the Sassanids in 602, while the Ghassanids would hold out until engulfed by the expansion of Islam.
In the Qur'an, the word ʿarab does not appear, only the nisba adjective, ʿarabiyyun: The Qur'an is referring to itself as ʿarabiyyun "Arabic" and mubinun "clear". The two qualities are connected, for example in ayat 43.2-3, "By the clear Book: We have made it an Arabic recitation in order that you may understand", and the Qur'an came to be regarded as the prime example of the al-ʿarabiyyatu, the language of the Arabs. The term ʾiʿrāb is from the same root, referring to a particularly clear and correct mode of speech. The plural noun ʾaʿrāb refers to the Bedouin tribes of the desert who resisted Muhammad, for example in ayat 9.97,
- ʾaʿrābu ʾašaddu kufrān wanifāqān "the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy".
Based on this, in early Islamic terminology, ʿarab referred to sedentary Arabs, living in cities such as Mecca and Medina, and ʾaʿrāb referred to the Arab Bedouins, carrying a negative connotation due to the Qur'anic verdict just cited. Following the Islamic conquest of the 8th century, however, the language of the nomadic Arabs came to be regarded as preserving the highest purity by the grammarians following Abi Ishaq, and the term kalam al-ʿArab "language of the Arabs" came to denote the uncontaminated language of the Bedouins.
The relation of ʿarab and ʾaʿrāb is complicated further by the notion of "lost Arabs" al-ʿArab al-ba'ida mentioned in the Qur'an as punished for their disbelief. All contemporary Arabs were considered as descended from two ancestors, Qahtan and Adnan, of which Qahtan was related to the "lost Arabs", and the Southern Arabs were identified as of his lineage, regarded as the "real Arabs", al-ʿArab al-ʿariba, while the Northern Arabs, including the tribes of Mecca, were considered the descendents of Adnan, in Islamic tradition traced back to Ismail son of Abraham, said to have been arabized at a later period.
Versteegh (1997) is uncertain whether to ascribe this distinction to the memory of a real difference of origin of the two groups, but it is certain that the difference was strongly felt in early Islamic times, even in Islamic Spain, there was enmity between the Qays of the Northern and the Kalb of the Southern group. The so-called Himyaritic language described by Al-Hamdani (died 946) appears to be a special case of language contact between the two groups, an originally North Arabic dialect spoken in the South, and influenced by Old South Arabian.
During the 8th and 9th centuries, the Arabs (specifically the Umayyads, and later Abbasids) forged an empire whose borders touched southern France in the west, China in the east, Asia Minor in the north, and the Sudan in the south. This was one of the largest land empires in history. Throughout much of this area, the Arabs spread the religion of Islam and the Arabic language (the language of the Qur'an) through conversion and assimilation. Many groups came to be known as "Arabs" not through descent but through this process of Arabization. Thus, over time, the term Arab came to carry a broader meaning than the original ethnic term: cultural Arab vs. ethnic Arab. People in Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere became Arab through Arabization.
Arab nationalism declares that Arabs are united in a shared history, culture and language. Arab nationalists believe that Arab identity encompasses more than outward physical characteristics, race or religion. A related ideology, Pan-Arabism, calls for all Arab lands to be united as one state. Arab nationalism has often competed for existence with regional and ethnic nationalisms in the Middle East, such as Lebanese and Egyptian.
Anti-Arabism is hate or prejudice against Arabs. It is usually also associated with anti-Muslim hatred.
[Sunting] Genealogi tradisi
Medieval Arab genealogists divided the Arabs into three groups:
- the "ancient Arabs", tribes that had vanished or been destroyed, such as 'Ad and Thamud; they are often alluded to in the Qur'an as examples of God's power to destroy wicked peoples.
- the "Pure Arabs" of South Arabia, descending from Qahtan. The Qahtanites (Qahtanis) are said to have migrated the land of Yemen following the destruction of the Ma'rib Dam (sadd Ma'rib). The Qahtanite Arabs created the ancient civilizations of Yemen, notably the Sabaeans (known in the Bible as Sheba.)
- The "Arabized Arabs" (musta`ribah) of North Arabia, descending from Adnan.
The Arabic language spoken today in classical Quranic form was the result of a mix between the original Arabic of Qahtan and northern Arabic which shares a great deal with northern Semitic languages from the Levant. The Arabs take a great pride in their language and its survival as a usable and comprehensible language over thousands of years.
In Jewish and Christian traditions the Ishmaelites were described as an "Arabian people" at least by the time of Josephus, which became standard centuries prior to Islam (in which the term Hagarenes, a pun on the Arabic muhajir and the name of Hagar, was commonly used). Efforts to reconcile the Biblical and Arab genealogies later led to conflicting attempts to trace Adnan to Ishmael (Ismail), the eldest son of Abraham and Hagar. Joktan was identified with Qahtan, probably due to his Biblical identification as the ancestor of Hazarmaveth (Hadramawt) and Sheba.
[Sunting] Etimologi
- Rencana utama: Etymology of the word Arab
The term "Arab" or "Arabian" (and cognates in other languages) has been used to translate several different but similar sounding names of ancient peoples of the Middle East which do not necessarily have the same meaning or origin. The etymology of the term is of course closely linked to that of the place name "Arabia". The root of the word has many meanings in Semitic languages including "west / sunset", "desert", "mingle", "merchant", "raven", "comprehensible" all of which appear to have some relevance to the emergence of the name.
[Sunting] Rujukan
- Habib Hassan Touma (1996). The Music of the Arabs, trans. Laurie Schwartz. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press. ISBN 0931340888.
- Edward Lipinski, Semitic Languages: Outlines of a Comparative Grammar, 2nd ed., Orientalia Lovanensia Analecta: Leuven 2001
- Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language, Edinburgh University Press (1997) [4]
- The Catholic Encyclopedia, Robert Appleton Company, 1907, Online Edition, K. Night 2003: article Arabia
- http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/le.html#People
[Sunting] Lihat juga
- Arabia
- Arab League
- Arab World
- Arabic alphabet
- Arabic language
- Arabs of North America
- Bedouin
- Nabataeans
- Pan-Arabism
- Semitic
- Philip the Arab
[Sunting] Pautan luaran
- A is for Arabs: What the world owes Arabs and Muslims
- Maps of the Arab World
- News from Arabic countries
- Business news from Arab countries
- Jobs and Careers in the Arab World
- Arabia in ancient history - with a discussion of the ancient usage of the word Arab
- An Online Resource on Arab Culture and Civilization
- Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity by Martin Kramer
- A Criticism of the Idea of Arab Nationalism
