Toynbee quote: The rest are alien to the Turks and to one another. Those who speak
Arabic are as strong numerically as the Turks, or stronger, but they too
are divided, and their unity is a problem of the future. There are
pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs who have settled in
towns or on the land, some within the last generation, like the Muntefik
in Mesopotamia, some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan Koreish,
but who still retain their tribal consciousness of race; there are Arabs
in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their language--most of
the peasantry of Syria are such, and the inhabitants of ancient centres
of population like Damascus or Bagdad; in Syria many of these "Arabs"
are Christians, and some Christians, though they speak Arabic, have
retained their separate sense of nationality--notably the Roman Catholic
Maronites of the Lebanon--and would hardly be considered as Arabs either
by themselves or by their neighbours. The same is true of the Druses,
another remnant of an earlier stock, which has preserved its identity
under the guise of Islam so heretically conceived as to rank as an
independent religion. As for the Yemenis--they will resent the
imputation, for no Arabs count up their genealogies so zealously as
they, but there is more East African than Semitic blood in their veins.
They are men of the moist, fertile tropics, brown of skin, and working
half naked in their fields, like the peoples of Southern India and
Bengal. And on the opposite fringes of the Arabic-speaking area there
are fragments of population whose language is Semitic but
pre-Arabic[2]--the Jacobite Christians of the Tor-Abdin, and the
Nestorians of the Upper Zab, who once, under the Caliphs, were the
industrious Christian peasantry of Mesopotamia, but now are shepherds
and hillmen among the Kurds. The Kurds themselves are more scattered
than any other stock in Travel, and divided tribe against tribe, but
taken together they rank third in numerical strength, after the Arabs
and Turks. There are mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husbandmen
and herdsmen, Kurds who have kept to their original homes along the
eastern frontier, and Kurds who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread
themselves over the Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian steppes,
the Taurus valleys, and the hinterland of the Black Sea.
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