Arab pride has seen better days. People are in no rush to declare their Arab credentials or make bids for the Arab League. Arabic passports do not wield much relative ‘power’ and pretty much since Team America depicted a crude mock-Arabic “Derka Derka Allah Muhamad Jehad”, a curtain of shame has fallen over the Arab identity causing closet Arabs to stay in the woodworks.
The Middle Eastern Arab heartland is in serious existential trouble, spitting out citizens in refugee floods. With the region’s self-esteem at an all time low, the Arab peoples have taken a hit and are in serious need of a PR rescue operation. If they’re not (seen as) suicidal mass murderers, they're filthy rich playboys trying to own London. It’s not necessarily tempting to cling to your Arabic heritage.
The haters are on the rise. From without, and within. Self-haters, who shun their Arab-ness in favor of any other facet of their identity they can latch on to, are whitewashing their Arab I.D.s. Try citing ancient links like Aramean — think Passion of the Christ – that while technically true are tenuous. Or, I’m not Arab, I’m a Pharaoh!
Some non-Arab minorities of the Middle East get saddled with the scarlet A-for-Arab despite their different ethnicities. Many do speak a native Arabic (a major criterion for ‘being Arab’), and are often happy to pass as Arab, ironically.
So who is a bona fide “Arab?”
It’s a question Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish recalled asking his friend Edward Saïd when penning the latter’s eulogy. Saïd said of identity: “It’s self-defence … Identity is the child of birth, but at the end, it’s self-invention, and not an inheritance of the past.”
"Arab,” then, is an identity - a language, a cultural tradition, a community - as easily claimed and cherished as it is rejected. And whatever the reasoning, there is a substantial motley crew of people in the Arab World claiming to be something other than, well, Arab, from ethnic minority groups like the Circassians whose claim to non-Arabness is grounded in historical fact, to the rather more dubious modern-day Phoenician pretenders of Lebanon.
Check out these claims and pick out the fact from the fancy in Arab denial. You may have heard of the (politically motivated) Jewish S.H.I.T List for Jews charged with being self-haters. Albawaba brings you the cousin. Meet self-hating Arabs and their attending S.H.A.M.E list: Self Hating Arabs and Middle Easterners, for shame!
Our S.H.A.M.E list includes people who take the attitude that they are 'not Arab' and resist the language, as well as those who ethnically are not Arab but speak the language and fit all other definitions of 'being Arab'.
Disclaimer: The following list of ethnic and cultural profiles assumes a subjective stance on identity; and the writer does not purport to speak for the spectrum of peoples and politics in the Middle East. Please consider that Arabization and assimilation may foster Arab pride; and a repressed Arab pride may manifest in surprising ways.
Our S.H.A.M.E list, like all attempts to profile the Middle East, is complicated. Non-Arab Middle Eastern ethnicities – usually Arabicized after generations raised in Arab countries – may resent being mistaken for their Arab neighbors. And resent being featured on this list, for that matter. But this identity crisis may just consolidate their very eligiblity to the list, as quasi-self-hating 'Arabs'.
Read with a pinch of Dead Sea-salt!
