Historically, inter-ethnic marriages between Arabs and Persians have been common in Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, and Bahrain, as well as in Lebanon and Syria, albeit to a lesser extent.

In pre-Islamic Arabia, there were many Arabs who lived in the cultural sphere of Persia and thus used Persian as their written language.

The term referred to any person who was born to an Arab mother and a Persian father amidst the Aksumite–Persian wars; it was especially common for Persian soldiers to intermarry with local Arab women during this time, as the Sasanian army had been garrisoned throughout South Arabia in order to repel the Aksumite Empire from the region.

Most tend to identify as either Persian or Arab, and consider themselves to be members of only one ethnic group, but at the same time being aware of their mixed background.

[14] The majority of Sayyids migrated to Iran from Arab lands predominantly in the 15th to 17th centuries during the Safavid era.

Since most of the population embraced Sunni Islam, and an educated version of Shiism was scarce in Iran at the time, Ismail imported a new group of Shia Ulama who predominantly were Sayyids from traditional Shiite centers of the Arabic-speaking lands, such as Jabal Amel (of southern Lebanon), Syria, Bahrain, and southern Iraq in order to create a state clergy.

However they resettled in other areas with the development of new towns and expansion of villages during the reign of Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa.