People who speak Arabic
as their primary language
are known as Arabs. Traditionally,
they lived on the Arabian Peninsula, but the language and culture
of the Arabs spread throughout the Middle East with the expansion
of Islam.
Arabic is the
language of the Quran,
the holy book of Islam. Today more than 200 million Arabs
live in nations around the world. Arabs constitute the substantial
majority of people in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon,
Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.
When Muhammad,
the founder of Islam, died in AD632, Abu Bakr became caliph.
Caliph means
successor, or “one who comes after.” Abu
Bakr wanted everyone around to world to follow Islam and “to
submit to Allah.” H.G. Wells said, “With a faith that moves
mountains, he set himself simply and sanely to organize the subjugation
of the entire world to Allah – with little armies of 3000 or 4000
Arabs.”
A century after Muhammad’s
death, the lands of Islam, under Arab leadership, stretched from
Spain in the west across North Africa and most of the modern Middle
East into Central Asia and northern India. The Arabs were
great traders whose influence reached as far as southeast Asia.
Today more Muslims live in Indonesia, far from the Arab world, than
in any other nation.
The Arabs were interested
in learning and in other cultures. Western Europe was in a
period often called “the dark ages” because the civilizations of
Greece and Rome had been extinguished, but the Arabs made
great advances in mathematics, medicine, and physical science.
They replaced clumsy Roman numerals with the Arabic numerals we
use today. Algebra and Chemistry are both Arabic words.
