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Arab Trick Makers, Saudi Arabia
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Arab identity is defined independently of religious identity, and pre-dates the rise of Islam, with historically attested Arab Christian kingdoms and Arab Jewish tribes. Today, however, most Arabs are Muslim, with a minority adhering to other faiths, largely Christianity. Arabs are generally Sunni, Shia, or Ismaili Muslims, but currently, 7.1 percent to 10 percent of Arabs are Arab Christians. This figure does not include Christian ethnic groups such as Assyrians, Syriacs and those designated as Arameans or Phoenicians.
Muslim but non-Arab people, who are about 80 percent of the world's Muslim population, do not form part of the Arab world, but instead comprise what is the geographically larger, and more diverse, Muslim World.
Arabic, the main unifying feature among Arabs, is a Semitic language originating in Arabia. From there it spread to a variety of distinct peoples across most of West Asia and North Africa, resulting in their acculturation and eventual denomination as Arabs. Arabization, a culturo-linguistic shift, was often, though not always, in conjunction with Islamization, a religious shift.
With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, and as the language of the Qur'an, Arabic became the lingua franca of the Islamic world. (Anwar G. Chegne, "Arabic: Its Significance and Place in Arab-Muslim Society," Middle East Journal 19 (Autumn 1965), pp. 447-470. It was in this period that Arabic language and culture was widely disseminated with the early Islamic expansion, both through conquest and cultural contact.
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