Talk:Arabia

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Sources

I have never heard of "Arabia" as a civilization, only as a region/location. Does anyone know where I could read on this? - Soranin (talk) 13:32, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Arabia is a geographic region. There never was a civilization called Arabia. The closest thing to a civilization with that name is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia which was founded in the 1930s. The Cat Master (talk) 16:41, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

I assume what is meant here is the Arab world. Lacrossedeamon (talk) 17:36, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

This is close to the mark, but not entirely as I meant to exclude North African countries. Arabia here refers specifically to any country which indisputably was established by Arabs and had its origins in Arabia, principally the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates. At the time of their existence, they were commonly known as Arabia. For the modern state field, I simply included all states in Asia whose majority identifies as Arab if I'm not mistaken. With Arab states in Africa, it is more complicated since, to my knowledge, not all Egyptians, Berbers, etc. who some might consider Arabized are comfortable being called Arabs, so I wished to avoid this controversy. However, I do not mind not using that field on this page if you guys think it is too confusing. Unlike in the case of Islamic Republic of Iran, which is considered the legal successor state to the Safavid Empire, and to the Sasanian Empire, and to the Achaemenid Empire, etc.; there is no clear contemporary claimant as a successor state to Arabia when it was originally a country under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates. There was an attempt to do so under Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca during World War I, but it fell apart when the British passed their support over to the Saudi family for their conquest of most of Arabia while they also divided other parts of the Ottoman Empire which Hussein had expected to go to his kingdom. It is on this basis that people get confused with this idea that Arabia has apparently never been a country. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 23:48, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Yeah it’s not perfect that was just the best wiki article for what I thought you were getting at. It does however include groups that were heavily Arabized rather than only those that are intrinsically Arab. Question: what are your thoughts on the Nabataeans? Lacrossedeamon (talk) 02:10, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

I think I may not have explained my rationale for this page as clearly as I should've, so I would like to break down the concepts I am working with here.

• The first is a bias known as presentism. In geopolitics, presentism usually takes the form of a backwards projection of modern state identities, taking them for granted to inform our understanding of how identities were like in the past or treating them as what always was "meant to be". In this regard, we take for granted today's countries in how we define nations.

For example, textbooks often talk about the "national awakening" of the Italians or Germans, Greeks or Spanish, Chinese or Indians. Implicit in this rhetoric is a narrative of the modern national identity as some sort of realization of a truth that was always there but the people were too ignorant or insufficiently modern before to see it, to unify, or to aspire for independence. In reality, the nations we have today and the identities they have shaped, while real, could have been vastly different if history had played out differently.

• The second is a Eurocentric bias in how nations are popularly defined. The way it is still commonly taught in Western schools and universities is that a state is only a nation when it fulfills certain criteria like exclusive territoriality (i.e. adhering to an idea of atomized sovereignty where borders are nominally impermeable), the bureaucratic and technological capacity to ensure the government truly has monopolized the legitimate use of violence, a "modern constitution" along the Euro-American framework, a nationalized language, etc. For various reasons I will not get into here because it did require a whole thesis, this concept of a nation (typically conflated with a nation-state aka ethno-state anyways) is a myth, and it is not objective. Even in our present-day world, official sovereign states don't necessarily satisfy all these criteria perfectly. In fact, historically, this idea of nationhood that ties it to so-called modernity was used by European colonial empires (and then the United States) to strip indigenous peoples everywhere of their sovereign rights. Thus, my working approach is to use the term nation the way indigenous scholars use it: only that it is a sociopolitical identity a group of people view themselves as belonging to.

I referred to this in the "Roman civilization" talk page to explain why the Romans should be seen as a nation as well. There's no better scientific word for their continuous self-identity spanning the Roman Kingdom, Roman Empire, and Byzantine Empire. Although the Europeans generally admire the Romans, we often still deny that theirs was a nation due to the presentist bias that only modern states can be called nations. This is also tied with a false binary between empire vs. nation, where an empire is defined as a multi-ethnic state where one ethnic group dominates the rest and a nation as a state with a unified ethnic identity. Again, this demonstrates how often nation is just used to refer to an ethno-state. (Besides, which of the two terms better describe the United States?)

• Finally, there is the concept of a common name. A common name for a country is the everyday name people contemporaneously use for a state, as opposed to its official name or its historiographical name. For example, we don't usually say the United Mexican States, the Republic of Korea, or the Hellenic Republic except in high-level diplomatic settings; we say Mexico, South Korea, and Greece. We also have a habit of taking for granted historiographical names and acting like it's awkward to use a common name for certain historical states. For example, the Ottoman Empire was already commonly called Turkey (or the equivalent in other languages) in its heyday. Most people already know that the people of the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans, not Byzantines, but as for their country's common name? Well, in all likelihood it was Romania, and Romania is probably the most correct page title for "Roman civilization", but I have refrained from proposing that since I expect that would be too radical and confusing for everyone.

I have striven for a more objective approach that avoids the common presentist and Eurocentric biases. For country articles, my approach has been to write from a more "timeless" perspective, where we can situate ourselves neutrally across history rather than privileging our present-day vantage point. I think this is better too since the most relevant time period for our content is usually a point far in the past rather than now anyways.

So to summarize my rationale for this article, "Arabia", then:

• First, I interpret Arabia as the contemporaneous common name of the Rashidun Caliphate and the Umayyad Caliphates in various languages, just as Turkey was the common name of the Ottoman Empire. This tracks because Islam was still closely tied with Arab ethnic identity in this early period, and the Umayyad Caliphate practiced Arab supremacist policies. It was essentially the Arab nation. This is further reinforced by the usage in Assassin's Creed: Dynasty, which calls both the Umayyad Caliphate and the Abbasid Caliphate "the Arabian Empire", treating the Umayyad and Abbasid as two different dynasties of the same country. We often lack a unifying term tying the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid together, but the scientific way to describe them is indeed as a nation with successive governments. This nation became more Persianized and more pluralistic with the advent of the Abbasids, which is what begins to muddy the continued usage of Arabia as a common name. Note also that imperial possessions do not change a country's common name. Just like how the Ottoman Empire conquering Greece, Egypt, and the entire Middle East didn't make it no longer Turkey, the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates making similar conquests beyond the confines of the Arabian peninsula do not mean they were no longer Arabia, especially when the Umayyad pursued Arab supremacist policies.
• Second, the reason why we have come to see Arabia as only a geographic name instead of also a nation's name is due to recent historical developments which very much could have been different. As I mentioned above, there was a movement for an independent Arab nation during World War I under Hussein bin Ali, of the Hashimids. This movement was not so different from other independence movements against the Ottoman Empire, such as that of the Greeks or Albanians. However, Britain and France betrayed their promises to the Arabs by partitioning the Ottoman Empire among themselves and denying the Arabs the unified nation they had intended. When Hussein opposed this, the British switched their support from the Hashimids to the Saudis, which is how the modern sovereign state called the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia came into being. Note how still the usage of Arabia as a name for a nation was preserved in their state's name, albeit it is prefixed by their dynasty's name.
• Our perception today that Arabia refers only to a geographic region is historically contingent. The word evolved to the extent that we are no longer accustomed to using it as a nation name because colonial processes happened to deny the emergence of a singular Arab nation, that we conversely have in Turkey, Iran, Israel, Egypt, and Greece, which are words that belong in the same class as Arabia. We take for granted that the current geopolitical organization of the world is a truth that speaks to how state identities always were, always were intended to be, and always were meant to be. Thus, there is this idea that "Arabia was not a nation" or "there never was a civilization called Arabia" which is rooted in presentist and Eurocentric understandings of politics. I admit though that formerly I had used the word civilization imprecisely and that owed to lower confidence (at my state of research then) with using nation.

In any case, it is consistent with our timeless approach to country articles for this page to be written the way it is currently. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 02:27, 16 July 2024 (UTC)