Arab-Persians (Arabic: الفرس العرب, Persian: فارس-عربها) are people who are of mixed Arab and Persian ethnic, cultural, or national background, which is common in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and to a lesser extent, Lebanon and Syria.
Self-identification
The term “Arab-Persian” is sometimes used as a self-appellation. Many tend to identify more strongly as either Persian or Arab and consider themselves to be members primarily of one ethnic group, but at the same time being aware of their mixed background and heritage. For most, the most important factor in determining their identity is that of the sovereign state in which they live as citizens.
History
In pre-Islamic times, there were many Arabic speakers who lived in the cultural sphere of Persia and used Persian as their written language. These are referred to as Persian Arabs (Arabic: العرب الفرس; Al-‘Arab Al-Furs).[5] There were also many Persians who lived in the cultural sphere of Arabia and used Arabic as their written language. One of Prophet Muhammed's early followers and disciples, Salman Al-Farsi, was Persian.[6]
After the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of Persia, Persians, in turn, began to use Arabic as their written language alongside Persian. Many famous Muslim scientists and philosophers during the time of the Abbasid caliphate were ethnic Persians who wrote their scholarly works in Arabic while continuing to write literary works and poetry in Persian - famous examples are Avicenna and Khayyam.[7][8][9][10][11]
Arabic speaking Iranians live alongside Persians primarily in the Khuzestan, Bushehr, Hormozgan, and Khorasan regions of Iran.[12][13] Intermarriages are very common among Iranian Arabs and Iranian Persians. Over 1 million Iranian Sayyids are of Arab descent but most are Persianized, mixed and consider themselves Persian and Iranian today.[14] The majority of Sayyids migrated to Iran from Arab lands predominantly in the 15th to 17th centuries during the Safavid era. The Safavids transformed the religious landscape of Iran by imposing TwelverShiism on the populace. 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. The Safavids offered them land and money in return for loyalty.[15][16][17][18][19]
Persian migration into Bahrain goes back to the days of the Sassanid and Achaemenid Persian empire, though in modern times there has been a constant migration for hundreds of years.[24] There has always been a migration of Persian-speaking Shi'a into Bahrain.[25]
In 1910, the Persian community funded and opened a private school, Al-Ittihad school, that taught Persian, besides other subjects.[26] In the Manama Souq, many Persians were clustered in the neighborhood of Mushbir. 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. Today, a significant number is based in Muharraq's Shia enclaves and Bahrain Island's modernized Shia towns.
In Syria, a small community of Arab-Persians exists in the Alawite/Nusayri-majority areas, mostly in Latakia and Tartus, with the rest being in Damascus.[36]
^Corbin, Henry (19 April 2016). Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-63054-0. Retrieved 12 August 2018. In this work a distinguished scholar of Islamic religion examines the mysticism and psychological thought of the great eleventh-century Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina), author of over a hundred works on theology, logic, medicine, and mathematics.
^Al-Khalili, Jim (30 September 2010). Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science. Penguin UK. ISBN978-0-14-196501-7. Later, al-Karkhi, Ibn-Tahir and the great Ibn al-Haytham in the tenth/eleventh century took it further by considering cubic and quartic equations, followed by the Persian mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam in the eleventh century
^Rosenfeld, B. A.; Fouchécour, Ch-H. De (24 April 2012). "ʿUmar K̲h̲ayyam". Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition.
^Floor, Willem; Herzig, Edmund (2015). Iran and the World in the Safavid Age. I.B.Tauris. p. 20. ISBN978-1-78076-990-5. Archived from the original on 3 September 2017. In fact, at the start of the Safavid period Twelver Shi'ism was imported into Iran largely from Syria and Mount Lebanon (...)
^The failure of political Islam, by Olivier Roy, Carol Volk, pg.170
^The Cambridge illustrated history of the Islamic world, by Francis Robinson, pg.72
^The Middle East and Islamic world reader, by Marvin E. Gettleman, Stuart Schaar, pg.42
^The Encyclopedia of world history: ancient, medieval, and modern ... by Peter N. Stearns, William Leonard Langer, pg.360
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