The Arabs

1940

Brasch DS39 GD94

Oxford: The Clarendon Press

As Orientalist historian, Hamilton Gibb (1895-1971) says in the first page of his pamphlet, The Arabs, ‘[they] are a people clustered round an historical memory’. There is no definite delineated Arab territory, but parts of the African continent, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine are part of the ‘Arab World’, an area of 13.6 million square kilometres. United by their language, Arabic, and their religion, Islam, Arabs began to populate various countries in the Middle East after Muhammed’s death in the 7th century. Arabs are townspeople and nomads, Sunni and Shi’ite, Asian and African. Today in the world, there are around 420 million people who identify as Arabian.