The Mahdi Times The Mahdi Times July 2014 | Page 29

Here again, one finds that there are more Black African Arabs based on this definition than any other regional phenotype that lays claim to that heritage. A hadith related by Ibn Asakir in Tarak Dimashq and attributed to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) states that: “Being an Arab is not because of your father or mother, but being an Arab is on account of your tongue. Whoever learns Arabic is an Arab.” . Genealogically, an Arab is someone who can trace his or her ancestry back to the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. Different groups estimate the relative importance of these factors differently. Most people who consider themselves Arabs do so on the basis of the overlap of the political and linguistic definitions. Since there are so many different phenotypes all considered as Arabs, the query posed and answered by this paper then is: who are the original Arabs? Were they Black or White or Black and White? It is posited here that the original Arabs were Black African Kushites from the Nile valley who had settled in southwest Asia in the Arabian Peninsula in ancient times. They were Kushitic-Ethiopians, speakers of an African prototypical Semitic language who had left from an area falling between the regions bordered by modern day Darfur in Sudan and Asmara in Eretria. They took their African genes, their African intelligence, their African culture, their African language and their African love and built the ancient and the modern civilization known as Arabic civilization. In the paragraphs that follow, one