Gary Leupp Corresponds with Wafaa'

 The Definition of 'Arabs'

Please note that there are errors in Gary Leupp's article. I appreciate from both Uruknet and Counterpunch to make sure to correct them in his article or delete them.

Leupp's writes, " Iraq was Persian (Iranian) territory then. We call its people “Arabs” today because they speak the Arabic language, just as we call Moroccans and Egyptians and Syrians “Arabs” for the same reason. But the original Arabs inhabited the Arabian Peninsula and what today is the kingdom of Jordan."

This is a history distortion typically committed by professors at the politically incorrect universities of Harvard, Tufts, Boston University and the like. We call them Arabs today because they speak Arabic language? What kind of "scholarly" conclusion is this when the majority of Iraqis today are Arabs ethnically and not just because they speak Arabic. So why aren't we calling them all English (all over Australia, The USA and Canada) if they all speak English? Then he makes another error: "..just as we call Moroccans and Egyptians and Syrians "Arabs" for the same reason"

Leupp needs to know that the Egyptians and Syrians are called Arabs because the vast majority of them are Arabs, descendants of Arab tribes with history predating that of the Persians (in both Syria and Yemen). Arab tribes existed all over the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and beyond from as early as the Abrahamic era or as known biblical time.

It is also shocking to read in his writing the term "original Arabs" as if there are original and copy Arabs. Leupp seems to come from the school of Bush and his neocons, by stating that Iraqis were (and are) not Arabs, and that courageous Persians, Parthians, Jews and anybody else, but Arabs, were the ones who defeated the Roman Empire. This is similar to what the Bush administration and mainstream media have been stating to distort the truth about IRAQ's Arab majority today.

Little does Leupp know that the current courageous Iraqi resistance against the American empire is made of mainly Arabs not Arabic speakers. From which corrupt source did he come to the conclusion that original Arabs come from the Arabian Peninsula and Jordan only? This is how the enemies of Arabs want to portray them as just few millions (in other words a minority) who only live in Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula, two countries that are comprised of mostly deserts in order to fit this with the western description of Arabs being originally and only nomads riding on camels. The rest are not Arabs because they are copies; they are Egyptians, Syrians and Moroccans! If I forward Leupp's nonsense to Egyptians and Syrians, he would never hear the end of it.

That entire paragraph I quoted above in Leupp's article is irrelevant to his article and primitive. It seems it was included to brainwash the reader about the insignificance of Arabs and to prove that they are a minority rather than presenting facts.

I am ccing a historian so that she hopefully comments on some of the damaging paragraphs in Luepp's article. I include the link below as well to read the entire article, in case there are more errors.

Please confirm receipt of this email. I appreciate that you, at least, delete this paragraph from Gary Leupp's article. If males keep writing history, then let history at least be corrected and modified by females.

Regards,
Wafaa
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Two Paragraphs from Gary Leupp's article:
A Lesson from Roman HistoryAn Earlier Empire's War on Iraq
GARY LEUPP, CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp10042005.htmlhttp://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16435&s2=05

October 4, 2005

The Roman emperor Trajan reigned from 98 to 117 and brought the empire to its maximum extent. He is generally considered to be one of the “good emperors” who ruled from 96 to 180, and indeed his administration was marked by relative tolerance (towards Christians, for example) and efficiency. Among his mistakes, however, was an attack on the Parthian Empire beginning in 115 or 116. He personally led his troops into Mesopotamia (what we now call Iraq) capturing the capital of Ctesiphon on the Tigris near modern Baghdad. He reached the Persian Gulf and in Edward Gibbon’s words, “enjoyed the honour of being the first, as he was the last, of the Roman generals, who ever navigated that remote sea.” A man of boundless ambition, he dreamed of sailing from there to far-off India.

Iraq was Persian (Iranian) territory then. We call its people “Arabs” today because they speak the Arabic language, just as we call Moroccans and Egyptians and Syrians “Arabs” for the same reason. But the original Arabs inhabited the Arabian Peninsula and what today is the kingdom of Jordan. Trajan had annexed the later (then called Arabia Petraea) about 106, bringing a large Arab population into the empire for the first time. Meanwhile he drew other Semites into the fold. By conquering Mesopotamia, with a population of perhaps a million Jews, he brought almost all the world’s Jews under Roman rule. (See Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, 1994).) (We tend to assume that the Jews were all concentrated in Judea, but there were according to Philo one million Jews in Alexandria, Egypt in the early first century, while Josephus writing later in the same century wrote that the Syrian cities of Antioch and Damascus had huge Jewish populations. At the time there were at least 10,000, and perhaps as many as 40,000 Jews in Rome itself.)

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Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades
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Subject: Re: Gary Leupp on Counterpunch & Uruknet. info -- Errors in Article
Date: 10/7/2005 1:32:33 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: gleupp@imap.tufts.edu


Dear Wafaa:

There is too much confusion in your letter in address in a short response. My being a male historian of European ancestry at Tufts should not factor into the conversation, and your association of me with Bush and his neocons indicates a complete lack of familiarity with my work. Obviously the point of the passage you question is that in Roman times, many areas whose peoples we today call "Arab" were populated by non-Arabs, such as Persians, Jews, Syrians, Phoenicians, Berbers, etc. but that at some point they became "Arab" in a cultural and linguistic sense. So in speaking about the people of Mesopotamia in the second century CE I am not necessarily referring only to Arabs. Surely there is a point of differentiating between "original Arabs" (although I might have chosen a better term) and those of varied ethnic backgrounds whose identity as Arabs stems from language. You are no doubt familiar with the hadith: "Being an Arab is not because of your father or mother, but being an Arab is on account of your tongue. Whoever learns Arabic is an Arab." And you may know that the Arab League defines an Arab as "a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples."

As for the Iraqis courageously resisting US occupation, I don't know the details of their DNA makeup, or what component of the gene pool is "Arab" in the sense you use the term. That's not really relevant to my historical piece. I certainly see no reason to alter it on the basis of your comments.
With best wishes,
Gary Leupp
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Dear Gary Leupp:

See my comments in red under each paragraph of your email reply below.

Regards,
Wafaa
Al-Wafaa News

In a message dated 10/7/2005 1:32:33 PM Eastern Standard Time, gleupp@imap.tufts.edu writes:


<<Dear Wafaa:
There is too much confusion in your letter in address in a short response. My being a male historian of European ancestry at Tufts should not factor into the conversation, and your association of me with Bush and his neocons indicates a complete lack of familiarity with my work. >>

There was no confusion in my letter. So to indicate that there was "too much confusion" is an exaggeration, if not an error. I did not associate you with Bush and the neo-cones. I meant that you used their (and the media's) tactics and writing style in the piece of information you provided about Arabs.

<<Obviously the point of the passage you question is that in Roman times, many areas whose peoples we today call "Arab" were populated by non-Arabs, such as Persians, Jews, Syrians, Phoenicians, Berbers, etc. but that at some point they became "Arab" in a cultural and linguistic sense.>>

Jews can be Arab too. There is an estimate of nearly one million Jewish Arabs from various parts of the Arab world some of whom still live in the Arab world and some are not. As a professor, I think you committed a serious error when you included Jews (in general) in the list of non-Arabs. The same can be said about the Syrians. You need to do your homework better with regard to pre-Islamic Arab history of Syria in Palmyra and the time of the Arabian queen Zenobia.

Then you made another error: Persians and Berbers (the way you included them in the lines above) never became Arabs. Everybody knows this fact except westerners who often confuse them with each other. Arabs, Persians and Berbers know that Persians and Berbers are not Arabs EVEN in "A CULTURAL and LINGUISTIC SENSE," especially in the case of Persians. I cannot tell you the many times your western writings have upset Arabs and Persians alike
when they were confused with each other, i.e. some sources indicate that Omar Khayyam is an Arab or that Rumi is a Persian (when he is half Arab), and so on and so forth.

<<So in speaking about the people of Mesopotamia in the second century CE I am not necessarily referring only to Arabs. Surely there is a point of differentiating between "original Arabs" (although I might have chosen a better term) and those of varied ethnic backgrounds whose identity as Arabs stems from language. You are no doubt familiar with the hadith: "Being an Arab is not because of your father or mother, but being an Arab is on account of your tongue. Whoever learns Arabic is an Arab.">>

It is extremely important to factor in the huge time difference between our era of the 20/21 centuries and that of the Prophet Mohammed. What he called for was completely different from what people are identifying with and why during our era!

The Islam Prophet Mohammed brought was that of tolerance to non-Arabs, and was inclusive of non-Arabs. It was also a religion that required prayers to be conducted in Arabic, the language of the Qur'an. So to encourage non-Arabs to join in one Moslem community, and to make sure that it is not comprised of only Arabs, and for non-Arabs not to feel excluded as well as to ensure that non-Arabs pray in Arabic, that hadith (Prophet saying) was a testimony for that notion. That is different from how and why the issue of who is an Arab and non-Arab perceived in modern time and how you argued it in your article..

<<And you may know that the Arab League defines an Arab as "a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples.">>

To use the Arab League's definition or the Prophet's Hadith to prove that the Syrians and Egyptians are not Arabs was interesting indeed, but it is NOT a valid point. Neither they were good examples for your claim of the so-called original Arabs, who according to you only existed in Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula.

<<As for the Iraqis courageously resisting US occupation, I don't know the details of their DNA makeup, or what component of the gene pool is "Arab" in the sense you use the term. That's not really relevant to my historical piece. I certainly see no reason to alter it on the basis of your comments. With best wishes,Gary Leupp>>


Do you see how your western perception of things just kicked in? DNA Make up? This is a 20/21-century perception of things and contradictory to your attempt to quote someone who said something about it nearly 1500 years ago; I mean about quoting the hadith of the Prophet.

Do you have a DNA make up to back up your claim that so-called original Arabs existed only in Jordan and the Arabian Peninsula? I did not appreciate your sarcasm about the gene pool and the DNA.

If you teach all of these contradictions and distortions at Tufts University, I think you and the University should be sued.

Everybody inside and outside of IRAQ (including the propagandists in this country and the non-Arab Iraqis) know that the courageous Iraqi resistance has been masterminded and executed by mainly Arabs.

In conclusion, yes I still think the terrible paragraph in your article about Arabs and non-Arabs should be altered or deleted. I include it below and hope that counterpunch and uruknet websites delete it, not only because it has errors, but because it is irrelevant to the subject of your article.

Best Regards,
Wafaa


Leupp's writes, " Iraq was Persian (Iranian) territory then. We call its people “Arabs” today because they speak the Arabic language, just as we call Moroccans and Egyptians and Syrians “Arabs” for the same reason. But the original Arabs inhabited the Arabian Peninsula and what today is the kingdom of Jordan."