ETHNICITY

The Middle East is distinguished by its ethnic and cultural diversity. This diversity, often referred to as a "human mosaic," is the product of long historical processes of which the people themselves are acutely aware. Almost every country in the region has local communities and groups that are distinct from the larger society as a whole and are recognized as such both by themselves and by others. In fact, the recognition and acceptance of communal or ethnic differences has been a basic component of social and political organization in the Middle East. This is best exemplified by the Ottoman millet system whereby the ruling Sunni Muslim Ottomans formally recognized the authority of the religious and communal leaders of the different sectarian communities in their empire. By the nineteenth century, the Ottoman list consisted of about seventeen millets, which included Jews, Druze, Alavis, Armenians, and a number of Christian sects. Ethnicity basically refers to a social or group identity that individuals ascribe to themselves and that is accepted by others; ethnic identities are most commonly based on shared religious affiliation, language or dialect, tribal membership, and regional or local customs.

Ethnic identity, which tends to be perceived as immutable and ascribed at birth, is most commonly a cultural construction that, in practice, is both malleable and contextual. Individuals may choose to stress their ethnic identity in one context and mute it in another; thus an individual may claim to be a Kurd, a Muslim, or an Iranian depending on the particular social or political context. In the Middle East, the primary significance of ethnic identity is its role in the social and political structure of the society. Until the mid-1950s, for example, particular ethnic groups tended to be associated with specific occupational niches: the Jews of the Iranian city of Isfahan specialized in fine metal work and trading in gold and silver, Assyrian Christians of Iraq dominated the hotel and restaurant business, Azeri Turks in Iran were car mechanics and long-distance truck drivers, and most of the cooks in Egypt were Nubians. Today this pattern is changing; mass education, social mobility, and the emergence of new occupations have all but eroded the traditional ethnic divisions of labor in the region.

What are the basic sources of ethnic differentiation in the Middle East? The single most important source of individual and group identity and, by extension, social cleavages, is religious affiliation. Coreligionists perceive themselves as having rights and obligations to each other and interfaith marriage is generally discouraged if not strictly prohibited by all the communities. On a larger scale sectarian divisions have important implications for political action. Secular nationalistic movements within any one country or those like pan-Arabism that seek to transcend national frontiers are usually undermined by sectarianism. Likewise, pan-Islamist movements that presume to encompass all Muslims tend to fracture along Muslim sectarian divisions of Sunnis, Shi?a, and Alawis, among others. And while non-Muslim communities like the Jews (until the mid-fifties) and the various Christian sects have, on the whole, accommodated themselves to the dominant Muslim rule throughout the Middle East, questions of what constitutes nationality and full citizenship have yet to be resolved in most of the states in the area. This includes the modern Jewish state of Israel as well as that of the Muslim Wahhabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Ethnicity in the Middle East is also structured along linguistic differences which, in general, set the largest cultural boundaries between groups. There are three major language families in the region: Semitic, Indo-European, and Altaic or Turkic. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages. Hebrew is spoken exclusively in Israel while Arabic, with its many dialects, is the national language of the countries of North Africa, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Gulf states. Modern Persian and Kurdish are Indo-European languages; Turkish and Azeri belong to the Altaic family of languages. The Berbers of North Africa who, like the Arabs, are Muslims, speak different dialects of Berber, an Afro-Asiatic language and generally refer to themselves as Imazighin (or Imazighen). In countries where large linguistically differentiated populations exist, such as the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran and the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, language assumes a political dimension. National governments tend to strongly promote one national language and may even at times seek to suppress minority languages, as happened in Turkey with Kurdish. To educate their children and to participate fully in the national economy and culture, members of minority ethnic groups must adopt the national language and, to a certain extent, dissociate themselves from their mother tongue.

Of all the elements that may be used to define groups or social categories, phenotypic race or biological variation is the least important in the Middle East, where the vast majority of the people from the west in Morocco to the east in Afghanistan tend to fall within the same racial category often referred to as "Mediterranean." Where a markedly differentiated population exists such as the ?abid or blacks in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, the Nubians in Egypt, or the Turkmen of Iran (with their pronounced Mongolian features); such phenotypic differences are locally recognized but are not necessarily associated with an ethnic identity as such. Islam has no racial ideology based on color and, while slavery was practiced throughout the Islamic world, it was not exclusively associated with Africans or any other particular population. The Ottomans recruited slaves from both eastern Europe and the Caucasus and their descendants today do not form either racially or ethnically distinct groups. Outside of a few towns in southern Arabia, slavery in the Middle East was not a primary means of organizing menial labor; as a consequence, the association of class and race or ethnicity and race is not well developed and has no significant implication or social and political organization in the region.

See alsoPluralism: Legal and Ethno-Religious ; Tribe .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banuazizi, Ali, and Weiner, Myron, eds. The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Bates, Daniel G., and Rassam, Amal. Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2001.

Gross, Jo-Ann, ed. Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity And Change. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992.

Weekes, Richard V., ed. Muslim Peoples: A World of Ethnographic Survey. 2d edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Amal Rassam