Great Arab history
Aug 04,2007 00:00
by
rajab
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The desert nature of native Arab soil in the Arabian Peninsula was the reason Arab civilizations emerged on the edges from Mesopotamia in the north to Yemen in the south. Arab culture was therefore transmitted verbally in a creative and vocabulary rich language. Culture was rarely marked on rocks, stones, or similar objects. Instead, poetry was most valued among Arabs before the Quran. Arab tribes showed pride in poetry and poets were highly revered. Often times poets were their tribe‘s spokespeople.While nations of the Far East, such as the Chinese and Japanese, were known for skilled handicrafts that left marks on their civilization and assisted them in modern times to produce tools necessary for daily life, Arabs were becoming more creative in imagination in a land where the desert horizon expanded. This contributed to the Arab character of sharpness, haste and a lack of a language of dialogue resulting from interaction with other nations, perhaps in part because the Arabian Peninsula was closed around desert dwellers who did not master sea travel.
Arabs arrived to occupy a high rank among nations in the aftermath of the dawn of Islam. The belief of the Arabs is based on the linguistic miracle of the Quran, which is further exhibited for other nations within the borders of the Islamic state while Arabs were the governors and politicians, and authors of poems.
Despite the expansion of the borders during later eras and Arab emergence from their desert native soil, the Arab cultural legacy still made up the Arab personality. Such personality remained hostage to what was imaginative and theoretical through verbal transmission and a mentality of faith. Moreover, the most important of political conflicts among Arabs were mostly based on philological argumentation.
The Arab reality of modern time is not too different from their legacy. The “goods of words” continued to be the most important Arab product until petroleum was discovered. Petroleum could have provided an opportunity for Arabs to be a producing nation, but petroleum did not become an industry. Even the modern cities that were built during the past few decades on the edges of the desert – nicknamed salt cities by novelist Abdul Rahman Muneef – and in the countryside became consumer cities because the modern state failed to compete in the international product cycle.
Oil revenues relieved millions of Arabs from having to use their hands for production. Arabs built cities and consumed the most up-to-date products, while preserving traditional cultural practices and social relationship networks.
Therefore, when borders were flung open during the age of globalization, Arabs found themselves inundated with imported cultures and face-to-face with conflicting cultural pressures from outside.