One Language, Many Faiths, and the Question of Descent

Arab is a linguistic and cultural designation rather than a genealogical one, and it always has been. The conquests of the seventh century carried Arabic across the Near East and North Africa, and the populations that adopted it over the following centuries became Arab without any general movement of people out of the peninsula.

The result is that Arab and Muslim are not the same category in either direction. Arabic speaking Christians have been continuous since before Islam, in the Coptic, Melkite, Syriac and Maronite churches, and Arabic was a Jewish language for a millennium; Judah Halevi and Maimonides wrote in it, and S. D. Goitein's reconstruction of Mediterranean Jewish life from the Cairo Geniza documents an Arabic speaking Jewish world in detail.

Arabic itself became a religious instrument of the first order. It is the language of the Quran, held by Muslims to be inimitable, and its grammar, lexicography and prosody were developed as sciences in the service of reading scripture. Paul Kunitzsch's work on Arabic star names records a different transmission: astronomy passed through Arabic into Latin Europe and left several hundred star names in English that are Arabic words. The religious history of the Arabs is therefore also the religious history of a language.