Talk:Arabia

This is the discussion page for Arabia. Here, you may discuss improving the article.
Please sign and date your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~). Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.	Be polite Assume good faith Do not insult other people

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 a typical issue stemming from privileging modern sovereign states (and nation-states) as the determinant for our concept of a civilization. For example, I'm assuming you guys have no problem conceptualizing Greece, Japan, or India as individual civilizations and that is because these names are synonymous with contemporary sovereign states. Cat Master's reply is especially indicative of this misconception because he calls the closest thing to an Arabian civilization ever existing to be Saudi Arabia; in this same sentence, he conflates civilization with nation, privileges Saudi Arabia as the premier Arab state, and forgets the existence of the Rashidun Caliphate which was an empire originating in a unified Arabia from which it expanded.

So I will have to give an extensive explanation, first by introducing the problematique with an example familiar to me. Where one civilization starts or ends should obviously not be taken as absolute. There are no clear-cut lines. Chinese people would usually argue that Chinese civilization, i.e. China, has a millennia-old continuous history. However, which historic state should conceptually fall under this broad category of "China" is disputable when we get to regimes like the Yuan and Qing, which were foreign empires which annexed China. Chinese nationalists tend to argue vociferously that these were obviously Chinese regimes, so that they may maintain the traditional historiographical myth of fluid, dynastic continuity, and so that they may use Mongol and Manchu conquests as justification for Chinese conquests today. Anti-CCP activists, on the other hand, tend to argue that the Yuan and Qing are more accurately analyzed as distinct states discontinuous with those that came before and after, that they were foreign empires, but also that the debate as to how "Chinese" a state was is inconsequential.

Moreover, some recent historians have argued for a shift in the traditional paradigm for Chinese history, where we recognize that it is more accurate not to conceptualize a "Chinese civilization" but a Sinic civilization encompassing Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, parallel to an argument that the post-Roman European world is best conceptualized as a broad Christian civilization rather than anything narrower of the sort (like English, French, German, etc.) The caveat to this argument is that we should not be taking for granted modern nation-states (be they Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese) in our understanding of the geopolitical world across time. I have been largely convinced of this argument, but my critique is that general distinctions between a "China", a "Korea", a "Japan", and a "Vietnam" are still significant if only because peoples ages past did conceptualize such categories, and this informed their politics, even where national lines were not as strictly drawn as they are today. (Some Chinese ultranationalists will abuse this concept that Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are part of a Sinic civilization to argue that they all belong to China, but the scholars who formulated this analysis argue that they moot Chinese ultranationalists' imperialistic claims on the basis of "historically belongs to China").

A similar perspective I commonly encounter among Eurocentric students is to instead project medieval Europe's feudal geopolitical make-up onto all non-Western European countries' history, be it China, Greece, Iran, etc. and arguing that such countries were nothing but warring states (of different nationalities) prior to the development of "national awakening" on the heels of a modern European order, with no prior concept whatsoever of being "Chinese", "Greek", "Persian", "Japanese", or whatnot. This is an extreme position that is deeply fallacious and stems from a misunderstanding of the sophisticated analysis given in the previous paragraph while also assuming that because the concept of being Spanish or being English did arise relatively late, this is the exact same historical trajectory for peoples outside of Europe. This perspective begins to dabble in the fundamental flaw of the nation-state, yet still internalizes it as the unit of reference, by suggesting that peoples like the Greeks were "unaware" that they were actually Greek before they had a consolidated, unified state whose name is synonymous with their ethnic group. It is premised on the erroneous notion that a people cannot have a concept of a shared cultural identity if they have not formed an ethnonationalist state, i.e. one ethnicity, one state.

It also alternatively carries with it the implication that, even if the people within the borders of a modern sovereign state did not have a shared identity before, it was their destiny to do so, that it is part of a natural progression for them to develop that national identity they simply weren't "conscious" of before, as though it existed in fact as a milestone hanging above their heads for them to reach before that sovereign state came to be. An example I can give for and which I keep coming back to for this is Syria, as we long had an article for the modern Syrian Arab Republic to stand-in for peoples who happened to live in the region at the time of the Crusades, but the Syrian Arab Republic was a product of European colonialism in the wake of the partition of the Ottoman Empire as a betrayal of a promise made to Arabs for a unified state.

So what do I mean by civilization? I use the term broadly, for lack of a better one, to refer to a roughly, if imperfectly, continuous sociopolitical unit spanning across time and changing regimes, where the name has been used as a common name irrespective of contemporaneous regimes. This is just the same as how we often use "China", "Egypt", "Japan", "India", "Persia", "Vietnam" today. We refer to ancient forms of these countries even though this conceptualization is imperfect because lines are not so clearly drawn, and these concepts can have the effect of erasing minority groups who were subjugated and forcibly assimilated over thousands of years, like the Cham in Vietnam who were once their own independent nation, or the indigenous Ainu in Japan who had preceded the majority Yamato that had migrated later but still so long ago that we would usually call them indigenous as well, to say nothing of the myriad ethnic groups that had existed at all corners of China's frontier.

With every country, there is a complex and unique history which these common names do not do justice, but it is also necessary to recognize that we cannot accurately communicate a consolidated and general concept of continuous sociopolitical units by using their current regimes as a reference. The People's Republic of China is not one and the same as the Tang dynasty. It does not make sense that we had an article on China which used to define it in terms of the PRC today, information that is all drawn from real-world sources since the PRC has hardly featured in Assassin's Creed sources. The PRC is not the Song dynasty; it is not the Ming dynasty. Wikipedia treats the PRC and China as one and the same, as they do with the French Fifth Republic with France, the Republic of India with India, etc. without distinction between a current regime and the "civilization" that they represent, for the sake of readers' convenience since it deals in the real-world. However, Assassin's Creed deals with historical fiction, and in terms of organization, it was a mess back in the day when we used to have, as another example, an article on France which led as an article on the French Fifth Republic but where content relevant to Assassin's Creed related to the Kingdom of France and the French First Republic.

Hence, I use the term civilization broadly to refer to how we conceptualize France, China, Japan, and all these other "countries" as constant units across time, across various regimes, even though this conceptualization, you guys must understand, is imperfect. The alternative solution is to remove our articles on "China", "Greece", "Egypt", "Japan", "Spain", etc. and retain only articles on specific regimes, but that would be to the detriment, to the inconvenience, of all our visitors because we really do usually speak of such constant units across time, flawed as this may be.

So now we return to the specific case of Arabia. There are numerous arguments justifying this article's creation. When Islam was founded by Muhammad, his Islamic community was established as a political state in its own right. From their victory over the polytheists in 630 with the taking of Mecca, he went on to unify the entire Arabian peninsula, i.e. almost all the Arabs, into one empire, the Rashidun Caliphate.

One of the first things you guys seem to neglect is that even in historical times, everyday people referred to other countries with common names as well, not always the names we know them by today which are either later historiographical names or official names. For example, the Byzantine Empire was often simply known to foreigners as Rome or even Romania. The Ottoman Empire was already known alternatively as Turkey in Europe before its dissolution at the end of World War I. The first Arab state, the Rashidun Caliphate, would have been referred to commonly as Arabia, as was the Umayyad Caliphate that succeeded them, and it makes sense since it was a state founded by Arabs, originating in the Arabian peninsula, which expanded and engulfed other countries across Western Asia just as we would call a kingdom founded by Egyptians originating in Egypt and which conquered Canaan Egypt.

To the Tang, the Rashidun, the Umayyad, and the Abbasids were all called 大食 (Cantonese: Daai-sik; Mandarin: Dashi) as they were seen as different regimes for a continuous state or "civilization", and this is attested in the Assassin's Creed: Dynasty comic. Daaisik is commonly translated as the Middle Chinese name for "Arabia". The name "Arabian Empire" is also used in Chinese and also appears in the comic, so there are canonical sources for this terminology within Assassin's Creed.

The Umayyad Caliphate were known for their extreme racial policies favoring Arabs. During this period, Arab and Islamic identity were closely linked as the Umayyads wished to keep the Islamic community "pure" by restricting the religion solely to Arabs. This is another evidence in favor of the interpretation that an Arabian country has existed historically. Heavy discrimination against the non-Arab population was one of the major factors which led to the multi-ethnic Abbasid Revolution. Because the Abbasid Revolution overturned these racial policies and opened the gates for a pluralistic Islamic state which thereafter became increasingly Persianized, I am personally more hesitant to place the Abbasid Caliphate definitively as the "Arabian Empire", but Dynasty refers to it as such because historically it was perceived as still a continuation of the Arabian Empire by the Chinese.

Regardless, I believe that, as a matter of organizational consistency, it makes logical sense to employ the name Arabia in the same capacity that we employ the names China, Egypt, Japan, Iran, and India. The instinct to do otherwise stems from the fact that we do not, in the present day, currently have one single state encompassing a majority of the Arab people. On the sole basis of this, on the basis that there isn't a state commonly named "Arabia" (with the exception of Saudi Arabia which I should point out is just the name of the ruling house appended to the name Arabia), the idea that an Arabian country ever existed becomes readily objectionable. This, once again, privileges our modern geopolitical world as the definers of what political categories are "factual", but if China, Iran, and Japan at certain points in time being splintered into a multitude of states for a duration as long as a century does not change our notion that "China", "Iran" and "Japan" exist and have existed, I don't see how it is objective to take the current frame of time that we live in where the Arab world is divided to argue that Arabia as a country has never existed. Our conceptualization is being biased towards our own current time.

As a massive disclaimer, I am not arguing for a pan-Arabist ideology that Arabs must reunify into one state someday. This disclaimer is one of the main reasons why I felt the need to go into such a lengthy exposition on the problems with using the term civilization. On one hand, we should be considerate that the British had promised the Arabs an independent, unified Arabian state in return for their revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. That they betrayed this promise and arbitrarily drew lines across West Asia to partition colonial territories for themselves and for France is one of the reasons why I am inclined to find it distasteful to presume that the concept of Arabia as a sociopolitical category has no basis. On the other hand, I must reiterate that the nation-state concept of one ethnicity, one state has always been extremely destructive towards minority groups whenever nationalization projects in the name of this ideal has occurred. Moreover, I recognize that Arab identity is tremendously complex, and I would be out of my depth to comment further on it. Hence, I am by no means making any political statement regarding how Arabian identity should be constituted. I do not have that right, for I am not Arab and have no personal experience with their political issues.

Rather, I am arguing for the organizational soundness of having an article on Arabia paralleling that of our articles for Greece, Egypt, Iran, Japan, and China. I would make the same argument for having an article on Rome as a "civilization" or constant political unit transcending multiple regimes, which encompasses the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire. If anything, this usage is, again, already attested in Assassin's Creed: Dynasty. Once more, I have been well aware that the boundary of where one civilization begins and where one civilization ends is fraught with contention and highly arbitrary. I have been conscious that writing our articles in this way, we could inadvertently exhibit ethnonationalist implications, such as by implying we politically support pan-Arabism, which is not the meaning.

The same issue arises elsewhere, such as how our China article treats both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) as current states of China. As a supporter of Taiwanese independence myself, I understand that this may be discomforting to Taiwanese people who desire the Republic of China to be reorganized and recognized as a solely Taiwanese state, removed from the KMT's claims to China and free from threats of CCP conquest. At the same time, it would also be a gross political statement to designate the People's Republic of China as sole representative of all China. This is all notwithstanding that Assassin's Creed: Templars is set during the Warlord era, where the Republic of China was the nominal government of China (even though in actuality the KMT's ROC initially only controlled the south while the rest of the country was a patchwork of other states claiming the ROC name), so treating the ROC as a Chinese government is more relevant lore-wise.

It is not possible to avoid appearing to make a political statement when we are forced to organize our articles around countries because erasure of certain perspectives is an issue fundamental to the concept of a nation. I have to emphasize that the problem would have been worse had we continued to equate modern sovereign states with historical peoples, states, and societies which lived in the same region, for then, we would be basing our understanding of past countries on modern states which emerged out of violent ethnonationalist projects or colonialism.

I hope this helps explain my extensive thought process behind the creation of this article and more broadly, the way I have reorganized our articles around countries. I realize I could have just focused specifically on Arabia, but I thought it would be safer to share all the problems I had anticipated ahead of time. But as I close this, I have to return directly to Cat Master's reply to home in on this. The statement that Arabia was never a civilization is tantamount to saying that Arabs never had a civilization, i.e. they never developed a culture or society, and even if you were not aware of the implications of that statement, it was still very inappropriate. I understand that you had probably meant to say that a nation named Arabia never existed—which I have already explained is false—but a conventional understanding of the term civilization does not refer to a sovereign nation-state but to a complex society distinguished from paleolithic or neolithic levels of technological and social development. Now I use the term more narrowly to refer to a shared cultural and sociopolitical identity as a constant across different states because I have struggled tremendously to find a better word to encapsulate the category which words like "China", "Iran", "Greece", "Egypt", "India", etc. belong to. Either way, that comment is a prime example of what I was referring to by individuals typically privileging modern sovereign states as the codifiers for how countries and societies ought to be conceptualized throughout all time. If there isn't a sovereign state with that exact name as a common name, suddenly a people cannot ever have had a shared cultural identity to speak of irrespective of state boundaries? Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 23:28, 18 January 2021 (UTC)