Introduction
Any attempt to write an account of the Middle East faces the problem of how to
define “Arab” and the Arabs. This might seem an odd statement at first glance:
some 350 million people speak the language, ergo they are Arabs, and “Arab.” “The
Arabs” and “the Arab world” are terms used so ubiquitously today that the ques-
tion is rarely asked. But the need for qualification becomes clear when considering
political institutions, regional diversity, historical and cultural patrimony, and the
multiple discourses on identity of the region. The political institution par excel-
lence that houses the Arabs is the Arab League, an organization formed in 1944
when its founding countries were still subject to British and French colonial tute-
lage. Its 22 states include a country in which hardly any Arabic is spoken (Soma-
lia) and countries in which a significant section of the population speak another
language as their mother tongue and resist identification through the term Arab
(Berbers in Morocco and Algeria; Kurds in Iraq and Syria). Others have lost the
language of a previous identity and remain divided over “Arab” (Egyptian Copts).
Others do not attempt to define themselves as Arab yet control territory in which
around half the population are Arabic-speaking and embrace the Arab identity
marker (Israel and the occupied territories). It seems that what we are dealing
with then is a contingent identity, a complex political and cultural formulation that
favors or disfavors political deployment and cultural embracing at certain points
in the past and present.
In contemporary political and media discourse in both the West and the Middle
East, “Arab” is a term of convenience, often deployed to generalize the popularity
or relevance of policies favored by governments. For example, Gulf states engaged
in political conflict with Iran will talk of Arab objections to Iranian influence in
the Arab world, Iranian meddling in the Arab world, Arab fears of Iran acquiring
nuclear weapons, or Arab (understood as Sunni) fears of the spread of Shiism in the
Arab world. The term Arab is applied here to suggest the size and extent of opposi-
tion to Iranian policy, in geographic, demographic, and even Islamic terms because
that is a policy objective of the state deploying the term Arab in this context. Gulf
media project this discourse through Arabic-language satellite and printed media,
which are often referred to as pan-Arab because they direct themselves to as wide
an Arabic-speaking audience as possible (Al Jazeera, which is Qatari; Al Arabiya,
which is Saudi; the newspapers al-Hayat and Asharq al-Awsat, which are Saudi).
These vehicles have been used to propagate the associated notion of the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict as less important to “the Arabs” than “Arab” angst over Iran,
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