Most Muslims in the world today are non-Arabs. It’s an ironic fact, given that Islam and Arab chauvinism are inseparable.

Even though it’s not well-known, Islamic history paints a clear picture: Islam elevates Arabs over others.

The Beginnings of Arab Chauvinism

To see this, we have to go back to the 600s and the Arab conquests. Then, Islam was unambiguously the faith of ruling Arab conquerors. “At first,” writes historian Bernard Lewis, “Arab and Muslim were virtually the same thing.” The Arabs constituted a ruling caste, with the conquered territories’ native populations as their subjects. Non-Arab converts to Islam (mawlas), when they did emerge, were treated as second-class citizens.

One justification for such attitudes, recounted by medieval Arab author Ibn Abd Rabbih, was that Muhammad had been an Arab. At meals, according to Ibn Abd Rabbih, mawlas had to stand while Arabs were seated, and mawla women had to be married off not by their male relatives, but by their Arab patrons.

Overall, Lewis concludes that “the struggle for equal rights of the non-Arab converts was one of the main themes of the first two centuries of Islam.” Even “half-breeds” were treated as inferior to pure-bred Arabs, though superior to non-Arabs.

During Islam’s early history, according to historian Daniel Pipes, a non-Arab convert to the faith was called a mawla, meaning that he joined an Arab tribe by becoming affiliated with an Arab patron.

One medieval story holds that Muhammad made a foreign convert his mawla. The anecdote is dubious, but, if believed, suggests “that Muhammad himself inaugurated the mawla-convert status.” Pipes even reckons that the mawla status had a loose basis in the Qur’an. Since pre-Islamic times, notes Pipes, the term mawla also referred to freed slaves. Yet after the advent of Islam, Arabs could not become mawlas of this kind, either, since “Islam prohibits the enslavement of Arabians.”

Mawlas in territories conquered by Arabs faced heavy discrimination. They also depended on their patrons for financial security and legal protection. And it wasn’t just the convert himself who was placed in this category but also his descendants.

As Pipes quotes historian Marshall Hodgson, “[Islam] was above all a badge of a united Arabism, the code and discipline of a conquering élite.”

Only as the balance of power gradually shifted in the non-Arabs’ favor did converts—at least, those who had not been slaves—cease to be called mawlas.

Islam and Arab Culture

Despite this change, in Why I Am Not a Muslim, writer Ibn Warraq notes the erasure of non-Arab culture in Muslim societies. Partly to blame for this, he says, is “the official Muslim dogma that pre-Islamic times were times of barbarism and ignorance” and ought to be ignored. Many non-Arab Muslims, he stresses, are better acquainted with Arab history than with their own nations’ pre-Islamic past, while pre-Islamic monuments are allowed to fall into ruin. Tellingly, it was Western scholars who first practiced Egyptology, Assyriology, and Iranology.

Lewis further refers to the Islamic legal principle of Kafa’a. This doctrine, he explains, means that a woman’s male guardian can prevent her from marrying a man of lower status, or even revoke such a marriage after the fact. Status, in this context, is partly a question of ethnicity: “The jurists insist very clearly on the distinction between Arab and non-Arab. A non-Arab man is not the equal of an Arab woman in any circumstances.”

Not all schools of Islamic jurisprudence understand Kafa’a in the same way, and Lewis notes that Shi’ites make no use of the concept at all. Still, the viewpoint described by Lewis is at least a common one. The 14th-century legal tract Reliance of the Traveller has this to say:

The following are not suitable matches for one another:

(1) a non-Arab man for an Arab woman (O: because of the hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “Allah has chosen the Arabs above others”)[…]

The book in question is a “Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that in 1991 was certified by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as conforming ‘to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.’” The Shafi’i school is one of the four major schools of Islamic law. Unsurprisingly, one Islamic website calls Reliance of the Traveller “the primary Sunni manual of Islam in English.”

Though the Qur’an is the core text in Islam, Pipes argues that Islamic civilization includes not just doctrines from core Islamic texts, but also a vast complex of “Islamicate” traditions. These may not be explicitly mandated by the Qur’an or hadith but have developed from general attitudes in the scriptures and from Islamic concepts taken to their logical conclusions.

Secularizing Arab Chauvinism

In this vein, we can note that one downstream effect of Islamic teachings is supporting Arab chauvinism. Thus, Ibn Warraq contends that Islam’s dualistic division between believers and infidels has influenced even some non-Muslim Arabs, leading them to blame Western nations for all the Middle East’s problems.

Arab nationalism makes frequent use of the term Nakba (“catastrophe”). Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq, who popularized the term, used it to refer to the failure of Arab armies to erase the state of Israel.

Zureiq also, adds writer Husein Aboubakr, reinterpreted Islamic ideas as secular Arab nationalist ones. For example, Zureiq wrote: “At the dawn of Arabs’ nationalist awakening, the voice of [Mohammad] their unifier called them.” Muhammad’s leadership would enable the Arabs to “cast their shadow on all of the earth.” Here we see Islamic chauvinism easily converted into Arab chauvinism in a core Arab nationalist text.

Indeed, historians Patricia Crone and Michael Cook argue that Islam likely evolved from an earlier religious doctrine that appealed to “the Abrahamic descent of the Arabs as Ishmaelites … to endow them with a birthright to the Holy Land.” Islam, therefore, emerged from a fusion of “a religious truth borrowed from the Judaic tradition with a religious articulation of … [Arab] ethnic identity.”

The imposition of Islam has brought about an obvious cultural Arabization of non-Arab lands. For a long time, observes historian Richard Bulliet, it wasn’t even clearly agreed where the line between Arab culture and Muslim practice should be drawn. Thus, in the mid-ninth century, a Central Asian dignitary accused of apostasy argued: “Truly I have given in to these people [the Arabs] in everything I hated, even to the extent that because of them I have eaten oil and ridden camels and worn sandals.”

Rewriting History

Hugh Fitzgerald lists similar behaviors, mentioning that Muslims “pray five times a day in the direction of Arabia (Mecca), ideally take Arab names, read the Qur’an in Arabic, and sometimes even construct a false Arab ancestry (as the ‘Sayeeds’ of Pakistan) that links them to the Prophet.”

Scholars, in fact, have speculated that Mecca was chosen as Islam’s holy city specifically to give the religion a more Arabian character. Robert Spencer, summarizing previous academic work, writes that “the origins of Islam could have been placed in Mecca” during the eighth century, “thereby anchoring the Arabic empire firmly in Arabia.”

Let’s review: Islam includes doctrines that specifically privilege Arabs over non-Arabs. It has historically functioned as a tool of Arab supremacism, as it sanctified the Arab conquests and was interpreted to legitimize subsequent discrimination. Islamicate culture is shot through with Arabism, from the erasure of non-Arab history to the commonplace secularization of Islamic supremacism into Arab chauvinism. As a cherry on that cake—and maybe a partial explanation of it—some scholarship suggests that Islam began as an Arab ethnic religion.

Islam’s Arabist character, though rarely acknowledged, is difficult to deny.

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