The Arab World Today

Abstract

THE Arab world is the world that speaks Arabic. Language is its one satisfactory test, and a much better one than the territorial. It is true that a continuous and fairly well de fined area of the earth's surface contains all the Arabic-speaking peoples (except voluntary exiles living in Java, America, East Africa and other foreign regions) ; but the same area includes too many speakers of other tongues ? of Turkish, for example, or Kurdish or Armenian or Hebrew or Berber or some European language ? whose non-Arab speech invariably goes with lack of conscious community with Arabs and even with contempt or hostility. A religious test would be more faulty still; for Christian minorities, which are not only in, but of, the Arab world are numerous. Such are the Egyptian Copts and several denomina tions which carry on in Syria a pro-Arab tradition, dating from distant days when hatred of Greeks drove Syrian Christians, as eager allies, into camps of the Prophet's Companions. On the other hand, roughly speaking, all societies whose mother tongue is Arabic, whatever they be racially, are more or less conscious of integral community with an Arab world. These societies fall into two divisions, Asiatic and African. Such dictotomy by continents is no mere fiction for classifica tion's sake. It does, in fact, correspond to a difference of political outlook. While the societies of the Asiatic Arab world feel some