Home  |  E-Mail  |  Download Lessons  |  Interactive Quiz

The Arabs

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 250 million Arabs live throughout the world. Arabs constitute the substantial majority of people in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

A century after Mohammad’s death, Islam spread as far as Spain in the west to northern India in the east. 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 numbers with Arabic numerals we use today. Algebra and Chemistry are both Arabic words.

World Languages Mandarin (spoken primarily in China), 874 million speakers Hindia (spoken primarily in India) 366 million speakers English (spoken primarily in the United and States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia, 341 million speakers Spanish (spoken primarily in Mexico, Central America, South America, and Spain), 322 million speakers Bengali (spoken primarily in India and Bangladesh), 207 million speakers Arabic (spoken primarily in the Middle East and North Africa), more than 200 million speakers Portuguese (spoken primarily in Brazil and Portugal), 176 million speakers Russian (spoken primarily in most--but not all--of Russia), 167 million speakers Japanese (spoken primarily in Japan), 125 million speakers German (spoken primarily in Germany), 100 million speakers Korean (spoken primarily in Korea), 78 million speakers French (spoken primarily in France and as the langauge of business and governments in African nations that were once French colonies), 77 million speakers Wu (spoken primarily in China), 77 million speakers

To cite this page:
Dowling, Mike, "Mr. Dowling's Arab Page," available from http://www.mrdowling.com/607-arabs.html; Internet; updated Thursday, November 24, 2005 . ©2008, Mike Dowling. All rights reserved.