Talk:Arab culture

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2020 and 1 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Mahooith.

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NPOV Arab Imperialism Section

Someone should fix that; I'm not qualified to do so, but it clearly smacks of bias. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 63.26.97.154 (talk • contribs).

Great article, but needs more citations

This is a well written article, but it currently relies on a lot of unreferenced statements. I'm not saying the article is inaccurate; just that it isn't saying what sources of information it's relying on to state its facts. (The Literature section is the main exception, since it cites various books for reference). For example, the Mythology section has no footnotes or citations at all stating where it gets its information about the Kaaba being covered in symbols, what the symbols represented, and which scholars are "inferring" the context in which Arabian mythology flourished.

More citations would be a good idea to back up the information in the article as verifiable. Dugwiki 21:26, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Cultural Expansion

Shouldn't food, dance and fashions be added to this page? After all those are rather definitive elements of what's considered 'culture.' -Mokha

This page should be expanded to give way more detail then there already is.Jehuty Strife 17:21, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the job you did in this page

I will try to enrich the debate with the following comments. I quote from the article: "Although it contains elements of both prose and poetry, and therefore is closest to saj' or rhymed prose, the Qur'an is regarded as entirely apart from these classifications. The text is believed to be divine revelation and is seen as being eternal or 'uncreated'. This leads to the doctrine of i'jaz or inimitability of the Qur'an which implies that nobody can copy the work's style nor should anybody try. This doctrine of i'jaz possibly had a slight limiting effect on Arabic literature; proscribing exactly what could be written. The Qur'an itself criticises poets in the 26th sura, actually called Ash-Shu'ara or The Poets: And as to the poets, those who go astray follow them. 16:224 "

And I concentrate on the passage about i'jaz, where you say: "This leads to the doctrine of i'jaz or inimitability of the Qur'an which implies that nobody can copy the work's style nor should anybody try." This is not very accurate. The Ijaz on the contary implies that no one is able to produce a text as the Coran -be it in its unique style that is neither prose nor poetry, or in its contents-. When the Coran was revealed to Muhammad, Arabic Poetry has reached its edge, and the Coran came also to defy and challenge the poets to produce a similar text. And indeed, Poets were very sensitive to the beauty and the composition of the divine text.

The challenge is very evident is the 23rd and 24th verses of the 2nd Chapter of the Coran that read: [[2:23] And if ye are in doubt as to what We have revealed from time to time to Our servant, then produce a Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers (if there are any) besides Allah, if your (doubts) are true. [2:24] But if ye cannot - and of a surety ye cannot - then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones which is prepared for those who reject Faith.]

The Coran has a linguistic structure that is unique. Its uniqueness is called Linguistic i'jaz. It carries a lot of scientific information and that's what's called scientific i'jaz..

Thanks for your patience. -Ouadoud-

Racism

There needs to be an examination of the virulent anti-black racism in Arab culture here. deeceevoice 13:59, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

We should also discuss racisme against whites, jews and asians in this article. 85.146.24.65 (talk) 16:36, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Don't forget racism against Persians, Kurds and other Middle Easterners as well. The Scythian 06:51, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

what about Persians, and Copts, and Kurds, that are Racist against Arabs?? like the Arabs in Ahwaz, or copts, who describe Arabs as Camel riders, sand eaters, and scum!! or Persians who describe Arabs as Barbarians?? Arab League User (talk) 04:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 17:02, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

How about a link to Islamic Science?

How about a link to Islamic Science? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Renatops (talk • contribs) 18:41, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

That's just data, not information

The section "Influence on European science" is a long list of books without anything mentioned about their content.

BTW, have you ever heard about algebra ? About architecture ? About astronomy ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Srelu (talk • contribs) 21:07, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

How about Lifestyle

Arab traditions and Lifestyle needs to be included in this article, like the culture of going to the Cafe, or their daily lifestyle, and traditions, etc... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.238.191.208 (talk) 18:09, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Subsections moved from Regional Differences section

These need more work before going into the article. -- 204.167.92.26 (talk) 19:42, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Character

The family is the key social unit to an Arab. This loyalty influences all aspects of an Arab’s life. Arabs honor and respect their family. Family is the center of honor, loyalty, and reputation forArabs. Males are always the head of the Arab family. The Arab culture is one of the most hospitable cultures in the world. Kindness, hospitality, loyalty, generosity, and thoughtfulness are all signature characteristics of the Arab people. Whether one visits the Middle East or whether they visit an Arab community in the U.S., hospitality, generosity and friendship are always experienced by the guest.

Art

Arab customs and traditions in all of their various forms express the beauty of the Arab people. “For over five thousand years henna has been a symbol of good luck, health and sensuality in the Arab world. The plant has been associated with positive magic and provides us with a link to an ancient age full of good and bad spirits, baraka and jnoun. Generations of women have used a paste made primarily of dried ground henna leaves to cover their hands and feet with designs ranging from simple blobs to intricate geometric patterns designed to ward off evil, promote fertility and attract good energy.”

Pass time

Socializing is big part of tradition in an Arab society. Usually Arab men socialize over matters of business and politics. Tea, coffee, and hookah are very popular in the Middle East as a way of relaxation and socialization.

Long article

Main page: Wikipedia:Article size

This article is too long. We should break it up into several separate articles, each linked to from an introductory paragraph here. Heroeswithmetaphors (talk) 03:28, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Questionable sentence

Some Egyptians continue to believe that Egypt and Egyptians are simply not Arab, emphasizing indigenous Egyptian heritage, culture and independent polity, while pointing to the failures of pan-Arab nationalist policies, and publicly voicing objection to the present official name of the country as Arab Republic of Egypt and reject forced 'Arabization', yet the majority of the public label themselves as Arab.

No citation is given for the claim that the majority of modern-day Egyptians identify themselves as "Arab". In any case, I suspect that this claim is a bogus one (given that it contradicts other sections of the same article) and have requested citation. 124.149.71.232 (talk) 11:28, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Arabism section

is a sham. Seems like a parody of what would've been written of a FrontPage magazine editorial on the subject. 177.17.101.201 (talk) 08:47, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

You deleted sources and content.Please don't do that again.Also you addition about the contents of the book you need WP:RS that say this in this case the book is primary source.--Shrike (talk) 10:30, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Please write in English. I can't understand a word that you wrote. The only content I removed was the one-sided, partisan explanation of the Jewish exodus from Arab countries: a politically charged subject about which sources, political or academic, are very far from reaching consensus. If you, or other editors, insist on retaining it, then for the sake of balance I will have to insert the opinions of the many writers, historians, Israeli politicians, Zionist officials who have emphasized other motivations behind Mizrahi Jewish immigration to Israel - economic or religious motivations, Zionist political activism, etc. - thus making a unified, reductionist, Zionist, Arab-bashing narrative of the 800,000 Jewish "refugees" extremely controversial, to say the least. Rachel Shabi, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Yehoshua Porath, Ran Cohen are some of the Jewish names that have spoken on this subject from a different perspective than the one you prefer. Plus, it's ludicrous that you complain about content removal when you also deleted a paragraph of mine which was undoubtedly a reliable secondary source. 177.17.101.201 (talk) 11:08, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Its you POV its one sided and no one cares for you POV we report what WP:RS says.If there are other WP:RS that say different things you can bring them please don't delete content from wikipedia.--Shrike (talk) 11:25, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Arabophobia

This article as usually in Wikipedia is Arabophopic but that's expected from an "encyclopaedia" that creates an article named "mein kmpf in Arabic" but no article named "mein kampf in Turkic or Persian or English"

In this article Arabs are 11 times equated with being racist Really attested racist, genocidial, apartheidist countries like France, USA, Turkey, Iran, USA, Germany, Myanmar, China etc...in their wikipedia articles fot their culture there is not any mention to racism, genocide etc....

As for Darfur, it's not related to Arab culture besides Sudanese are not Arabs but are Black Africans merely speaking in Arabic same as Jamaicans are not English but merely Black Africans speaking English

Best Regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.227.166.243 (talk) 02:43, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Art

I was hoping to find something about the recurrent motifs in Arab art, but (to my surprise) there's nothing. Art history in Arab culture is rather significant and influential even in the west. Is there an article elsewhere that covers it? -- kosboot (talk) 13:19, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

You could try searching in the article on Islamic art, though it does not specifically cover Arabic artworks. Dimadick (talk) 15:59, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Edits to media values section

This is a notification that I plan to make edits and additions to the "Media Values" section of this page.

I will be adding a working definition of media values and cited information on objectivity in Arab media, new media in the Arab world, the role of Islam in reportage, and other challenges confronting Arab reporters. I also plan to add references to the existing content.

I would like to make the following deletions:

1.) "Arab news values strictly revolve around political news putting the human interest stories to the side" and "Investigative journalism is frowned upon in the Arab World."

These statement are overly general and are contradicted by evidence from the region. See, for example, Arab non-governmental organizations and media training groups like Arab Journalists for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ).

2.) "Generally, Arab governments seek to conceal political discourse and activity."

Although many Arab governments have sought to conceal political discourse and activity, this statement does not meet Wikipedia's standard of verifiability. It currently does not have any supporting citations or references and, given its extreme generality, should in fact be supported by exceptional evidence. Additionally, I do not think that a reader's understanding of media values will benefit significantly from such a broad statement about the region's political scene.

I look forward to your feedback on my edits and talking here. Thank you in advance.

Cas244 (talk) 06:55, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

how are you — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.77.205.6 (talk) 07:50, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

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Requested move 17 September 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved  — Amakuru (talk) 10:38, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

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Arabic culture → Arab culture – The adjective form of the noun "Arab(s)" is "Arab". "Arabic" in English technically refers to the Arabic language, it's not necessarily a synonym for "Arab" as an ethnicity, as a pan-regional nationality, etc. (See also a useful explanation here.) Popularly, "Arabic" and "Arab" (and even "Arabian") are sometimes confused by English speakers (which is why Google is a not a good indication of proper terminology here) but English scholarly sources, especially in social sciences, tend to prefer the term "Arab". E.g. when I search "Arabic culture" in the catalogue of my university library the main sources that show up are all linguistics-related works; whereas "Arab culture" turns up results on a variety of topics using this term. A more accessible, but not quite as stark, example is to search for "Arab culture" versus "Arabic culture" on Google Scholar: the former turns up 37,000 results whereas the latter turns up 19,000. There are of course a lot of subtopics here that are closely relevant to the Arabic language and where "Arabic" can be more appropriate, like literature, media and music (since it's sung in Arabic), which is why "Arabic culture" can still come up. But other topics like sports, dance, art, and architecture are not really appropriately called "Arabic". "Arab" culture is thus better as a general term. Even in this article, some subsection titles use "Arab" and "Arab" is used as adjective at various points. Lastly, it's not a radically different name change anyways, so I don't think it'll create other problems along the way (or certainly not any new problems). Robert Prazeres (talk) 23:24, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Addendum: Since this discussion may be relevant to other page names in the future, I'll add some more concrete points/examples here for completeness:

- Many dictionaries accept "Arabic" as an adjective of "Arab" (as already noted here by Rreagan007), but the primary meaning is still always the language, and a couple dictionaries don't list it at all as a general adjective other than for the language, e.g. Cambridge or learner's dictionaries such as Oxford and MacMillan. However, all of these dictionaries always list "Arab" as a general adjective anyways.

- Insofar as I can find explicit commentaries which make recommendations on which adjective to use, I've already mentioned a style guide by an English literature professor at WSU here who is very explicit, but an educational organization about the Middle East also makes the main distinction here, another Middle East cultural correspondent does so here, and the Oxford Learner's dictionary (in another entry) also clarifies the same distinction here. Again, I can't find anybody who makes the opposite recommendation.

- Lastly, more informally but on a more day-to-day human level, all the English-fluent Arab friends and colleagues I know would absolutely always identify themselves as "Arab" (for the adjective) and not "Arabic"; and so it's not surprising that the most natural usage would be "Arab culture" (I've asked some of them explicitly about this too). More concretely, this is also reflected in a number of common terms and expressions such as Arab world, Arab League, Arab nationalism, Arab Spring, etc; again, the term "Arabic" is never used in these contexts unless it's something to do with language.

So in sum: "Arabic" is accepted as a general adjective by some, it is explicitly dispreferred by others, while "Arab" as an adjective in this context is universally accepted by everyone. So why not just use "Arab". Robert Prazeres (talk) 17:09, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose. Both "Arab" and "Arabic" are acceptable English adjectives of the noun "Arab". Per Webster's dictionary: "Arabic -- of, relating to, or characteristic of Arabia or the Arabs".[1] And I think that "Arabic" is a much more natural sounding adjective form than "Arab" in English, per WP:NATURALNESS Rreagan007 (talk) 05:44, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
• Support. The nom is persuasive. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:08, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
• Support. Clearer. Srnec (talk) 17:25, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
• Comment Although the nom does put a strong case, I'm still not quite convinced. "Arab" is an ethnicity. "Arabic" seems a little more elastic than that. "Arabic" always insinuated to me to encompass variations and contributions by ethnic non-Arabs to a common culture shared with Arabs. A bit like the difference between "Hellene" and "Hellenistic". We can talk about "Arabic" culture in, say, al-Andalus, but it becomes a bit eyebrow-raising to call it "Arab culture" when ruling classes happen to be of Berber ethnicity. Walrasiad (talk) 03:15, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

That's a very good point to consider. But I think that could also be a question about the scope/nature of this article? From looking over the page, it seems pretty clear that it's about the culture of the "Arabs" and of the "Arab world" today (itself a term that isn't without criticism of course). And "Arab" can be called an ethnicity but that's also arguably a narrower term than its mainstream definitions would imply. In any case, I don't think that "Arab culture" excludes the influence and presence of non-Arabs; e.g. Albert Hourani's "A History of the Arab Peoples" (a landmark work on the subject) is the history of the people who identify as "Arab" but it spends time explaining that much of this cultural history is dependent on contributions from non-Arabs living under the aegis of Arabo-Islamic civilization (Berbers, Iranians, Kurds, Turks, etc). This type of fact is inherent to most cosmopolitan cultures. (It may need to be reiterated here as the page develops.) Likewise, much of the Arab world was under non-Arab (Seljuk, Mamluk, Ottoman) control for centuries but I don't think anyone would refrain from speaking of an "Arab culture" during this time because of its coexistence with other cultural identities. Robert Prazeres (talk) 07:37, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

It's not really a question of identity, more a question of ethnicity vs. culture. Maybe general English-language usage is looser than I making it out. But I am admittedly used to North African history where the term "Arab" is usually used in a narrowly ethnic way, implying ancestry in the tribes and clans of the Arabian peninsula. So "Arab" has a strong ethnic vibe, while "Arabic" is looser cultural meaning. A Berber ruling class can be thoroughly "Arabized", and fully part of "Arabic" culture, but they are ethnically still Berbers, descended from Berber tribes. Walrasiad (talk) 13:22, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

• Support per a persuasive nomination. Arabic is not wrong, but Arab is better. —  AjaxSmack  21:45, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.