Often in the news and also in textbooks and magazines, we see the expressions "Arabic" and “Muslim” and we often think that these are synonymous terms or that a conceptualization is contained on the other. However, this is a myth that was created from the ignorance of these peoples.
In many cases, a person Arabic and also Muslim or islamic, but this is not always true. So much so that the largest Islamic country in the world – which has the largest number of Muslims – is India, which is not a country Arab, home to more than 170 million Muslims (bearing in mind that this amount makes up only 16% of the total population of this region. parents).
So what is the difference between Arabs and Muslims?
Basically, Arabic is the ethnolinguistic composition and Muslim refers to religion of islam. There are people, for example, who are considered Arabs, speak the Arabic language, but profess other religions, including Christianity.
There is, however, some controversy about what it is to be an Arab or, properly, an Arab country. For many, if a person or country adopts this language, it is enough; for others, it is necessary that ethnic traits also correspond to what can be considered Arab.
To the Arab League, “an Arab is a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arab-speaking country and who is sympathetic to the aspirations of Arab-speaking peoples”.
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Please note the following maps below. The first indicates the greatest demographic concentration of Arab peoples and the second indicates the countries that most follow, in proportion to their absolute population, the Muslim religion.
Map of the predominant distribution of the Arab population ¹
Map of Islamic countries around the world ²
As we can see, the Arab population regions do not always coincide with the areas of practice of the Islam, even though most Arab peoples are Islamic and a good part of Muslims are Arabic.
The call "arab world” – group of countries considered as such – brings together a total of 22 countries, namely: Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Bahrain, Qatar, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, UAE, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia. In these countries, in addition to Islam, several other religions are also professed.
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¹ Image credit: Phobos92 / Wikimedia Commons
² Image credit: MapLab / Wikimedia Commons
By Me. Rodolfo Alves Pena
