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When is an Arab not an Arab?
For many people, the idea of an Arab comes straight out of the movies. Lawrence of Arabia, riding a camel across a sand dunes, face wrapped in a light colored scarf. Wikipedia says Arabs inhabit the Arab world in North Africa, Western Asia, the Horn of Africa and the western Indian Oceans. For most of us on the outside the Arabic-speaking world, anyone who speaks Arabic and is Muslim by default is probably an Arab.
“Oh, but we’re not Arabs”
A phrase I heard not once or twice, but from a host or contact in just about every Arabic speaking nation I travelled to for work. So Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia … none of whom see themselves as Arab. Pretty much all of North Africa, and some of the Middle East. According to the people who live in a lot of that area, they are not Arabs at all. Clearly, speaking Arabic and being Muslim isn’t a defining feature, at least among the Arabic-speaking and Muslim populations of the world.
So, what exactly is an Arab, then?
The Maghreb
The Arabic word for Morocco is Maghreb, meaning the west. In English, the Maghreb region encompasses the western part of the Arabic speaking world. It is the traditional home of the Berber people, who still make up the majority of the ethnic population in Morocco. Around a third of Moroccans speak some flavour of…
