Arabization
This process reached its zenith between the 10th and 14th centuries, widely considered to be the high point of Arab culture, during the Islamic Golden Age.
After Alexander the Great, the Nabataean Kingdom emerged and ruled a region extending from north of Arabia to the south of Syria.
The Arab Ghassanids were the last major non-Islamic Semitic migration northward out of Yemen in late classic era.
They initially settled in the Hauran region, eventually spreading to the entire Levant (modern Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan), briefly securing governorship of parts of Syria and Transjordan away from the Nabataeans.
The Arab Lakhmid Kingdom was founded by the Lakhum tribe that emigrated from Yemen in the 2nd century and ruled by the Banu Lakhm, hence the name given it.
They adopted the religion of the Church of the East, founded in Assyria/Asōristān, opposed to the Ghassanids Greek Orthodox Christianity, and were clients of the Sasanian Empire.
The most significant wave of "Arabization" in history followed the early Muslim conquests of Muhammad and the subsequent Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates.
These Arab empires were the first to grow well beyond the Arabian Peninsula, eventually reaching as far as Iberia in the West and Central Asia to the East, covering 11,100,000 km2 (4,300,000 sq mi),[7] one of the largest imperial expanses in history.
On the eve of the Rashidun Caliphate conquest of the Levant, 634 AD, Syria's population mainly spoke Aramaic; Greek was the official language of administration.
The invasion of Ifriqiya by the Banu Hilal, a warlike Arab Bedouin tribe, sent the region's urban and economic life into further decline.
[36] The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote that the lands ravaged by Banu Hilal invaders had become completely arid desert.
Many were also what the Arabist Mikel de Epalza calls "Neo-Mozarabs", that is Northern Europeans who had come to the Iberian Peninsula and picked up Arabic, thereby entering the Mozarabic community.
These were the Muladi or Muwalladun, most of whom were descendants of local Hispano-Basques and Visigoths who converted to Islam and adopted Arabic culture, dress, and language.
Traditional genealogies trace the ancestry of the Nile valley's area of Sudan mixed population to Arab tribes that migrated into the region during this period.
[57] While trying to build an independent and unified nation-state after the Evian Accords, the Algerian government under Ahmed Ben Bella's rule began a policy of Arabization.
Some Berber groups, like the Kabyles, felt that their ancestral culture and language were threatened and the Arab identity was given more focus at the expense of their own.
The only fluent speakers that are left are older than the child-bearing age, which ultimately makes integration of the language into subsequent generations highly improbable.
[77] Until around as little as forty years ago, Shehri was spoken by all of the inhabitants of Dhofar as the common language, including by the native Arabic speakers in Salalah who spoke it fluently.
Around 1960, Hajj Omar Abdeljalil the education minister at the time reversed all the effort made to Arabize the public school and reverted to pre-independent policies, favoring French and westernized learning.
[82] Although Tunisia gained its independence, nevertheless the elites supported French values above Arabic, the answer to developing an educated and modern nation, all came from Westernization.
[86] During the Iran-Iraq War, the Anfal campaign destroyed many Kurdish, Assyrian and other ethnic minority villages and enclaves in North Iraq, and their inhabitants were often forcibly relocated to large cities in the hope that they would be Arabized.
The Baathists also pressured many of these ethnic groups to identify as Arabs, and restrictions were imposed upon their languages, cultural expression and right to self-identification.
The government imposed ethnically-based programs, regulations and exclusionary measures on various aspects of Kurds' lives — political, economic, social and cultural.
[87][89] Expressions of Kurdish identity like songs and folk dances were outlawed[88][89] and frequently prosecuted under a purpose-built criminal law against "weakening national sentiment".
In 1973, the Syrian authorities confiscated 750 square kilometers of fertile agricultural land in Al-Hasakah Governorate, which were owned and cultivated by tens of thousands of Kurdish citizens, and gave it to Arab families brought in from other provinces.
[88][92] Describing the settlement policies pursued by the regime as part of the "Arab Belt programme, a Kurdish engineer in the region stated: "The government built them homes for free, gave them weapons, seeds and fertilizer, and created agricultural banks that provided loans.
"[93]In 2007, in another such scheme in Al-Hasakah governate, 6,000 square kilometers around Al-Malikiyah were granted to Arab families, while tens of thousands of Kurdish inhabitants of the villages concerned were evicted.
[87] After the Turkish-led forces had captured Afrin District in early 2018, they began to implement a resettlement policy by moving Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army fighters and Sunni Arab refugees from southern Syria into the empty homes that belonged to displaced locals.
[94] Refugees from Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, said that they were part of "an organised demographic change" which was supposed to replace the Kurdish population of Afrin with an Arab majority.
[104] The re-conquered territories were Hispanicized and Christianized, although the culture, languages and religious traditions imposed differed from those of the previous Visigothic kingdom.
