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Arabs, Turks, Magyars (Hungarians), and numerous other ethnic groups are not actually homogeneous. They are composed of two historical groups that intermarried and created a unified culture.

In the Arab case, it is critical to split the people from Arabia who are "genetically Arab" from the peoples of the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Northern Africa who would be conquered by the Arabs. After conquest, those Levantines, Mesopotamians, and North Africans who converted to Islam began to take on the same mannerisms as the foreign Arabs who had conquered them. They began to speak the same language, dress in the same clothes, and believe in the same general ideologies. This process is well-documented by Arabs and is called Arabization or Ta3arib (تعريب). This is why the Jews and the Christians of the Upper Middle East (the Levant and Mesopotamia) often do not consider themselves Arabs. Unlike their Levantine brothers whose conversion to Islam made them more susceptible to Arabization, they retained their pre-Arabized ethnic sensibility. Conversely, those groups that converted to Islam, but did not speak Arabic, like the Turks, Kurds, Persians, and Amazigh/Berbers were not Arabized.

Most "Arabs" today are actually the descendants of Arabized Levantines, Mesopotamians, and North Africans as opposed to the genetic descendants of the people from the Arabian Peninsula.

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9y ago

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