Was Prophet Muhammed saw an Arab?

[niggaibnh]

I’m confused. He’s definitely an Arab but there’s 2 kinds. Arabized Arab and an Arab.

If Qahtanis are the OG arabs and prophet Muhammed saw doesn’t descend from them but from the Arabs of Ismael then what does that make him? Aren’t the Arabs of Ismael are arabized people. Ismael himself is a descendant of Abraham and he was sent to these people. They taught him Arabic. Is it wrong to say that our prophet was an Arabized Arab?

Arab but arabised Arabs

Nabi prophet (saw) used to mention nabi ishmeal , his sons and his descendants ( non of them was Arab or arabised then yet )

 

[niggaibnh]

Yeah but Ishmael was taught Arabic by the people in Southern Arabia. It’s not like he created the language/people. Arabs existed already and Ishamel ain’t one. He Arabized himself by taking up their language and marr




Read my edit. My opinion still stands. If we keeping it real, we descend from Ibrahim too. The time we left Natufian region adds up and we are paternally Natufian. Which prophet do you think we are descendants of?

Arabic didn’t come from southern Arabia nor the Arabic language was common there.


Arabic came from sons of ishmeal and the evidence we have is that the oldest Arabic scrip was in Jordon/Syria

 

[niggaibnh]

I don’t think people know who is Arab and where did the Arab origins came from.

Prophet Muhammad forefathers wasn’t arabised nor was claiming Arab (or they wasn’t Arab) until 5-7 generations or 4 generations later (I forgot how they got arabised) where the descendants of nabi ishmeal got arabitzed.

The word arab origin came from ancient Yemenis/Oman who are completely different to the descendants of ishmeal in terms of language and forefathers but culturally the same.

Arabic language origins was Levant and it make sense since historically sons of ishmeal have spread to levent and stayed there for centuries

 

[Step a side]

Qahtanis, Sabeans, Himyarites and other people of greater Al Yaman region are Arabized Arabs from a linguistic point view because they used to speak South Semitic languages that are distant from the Arabic language which originated in the Northern half of the Arabian peninsula and Southern Levent.

The prophet ﷺ was pure Arab

They did not speak south Semitic. Old south Arabian aka Sayhadic is classified together with old Arabic as Central Semitic.

Also there is no proof of Arabic being from the Levant other than graffiti on stones. In fact some of the oldest Arabic text from up north was written by Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th century. Banu Lakhm have origin in Yemen.

 

[Step a side]

Ismhael didn't mix with the Arabs his descendants developed the Arabic language.

Both Arabic and Hebrew stem from the Archaic Semitic language Prophet Ibrahim and his sons used to speak.

Your partially wrong. Ismaeel did mix because how else did he get married? Banu Jurhum from Yemen settled in Makkah. This ancient Arab tribe was on its way to Mesopotamia initially but Allah diverted them to Makkah when only baby Ismaeel and his mother were there.

 

[Step a side]

Do you really believe Yemenis Arabized the people of Hejaz and Jordan?

Yemeni is geographical term. The people are genetically identical to the Hejazi and northern tribes around the Syrian desert.

Ibrahim (as) was from a Semitic group that settled in Mesopotamia. Most tribes in Arabia that claim Adnan are FGC11 which has the highest diversity in Yemen today. This is a strong indication that the Semitic group that Ibrahim (as) came from were from Arabia and had close links with the southern Arabians from a genetic and linguistic standpoint.

 

[Step a side]

It's actually the other way around in reality. Linguistics tells us quite plainly that the true Arabs were the 3adnani/Northern-Arabs and that Arabic originated around the Levant and Mesopotamia then expanded southwards into areas like the Hejaz and Najd until it eventually overwhelmed all of Arabia through the 7th century and onwards conquests. Pre-Islamic Yemen was more like Koonfur; a hotbed of West-Semitic linguistic diversity the way Koonfur used to be a hotbed of different Somaloid languages and still kinda is though Af-Maxaa is dominating more and more. Proto-Ethiosemitic, the Old-South Arabian languages, the Modern South Arabian languages (not descended from the previously mentioned group), Himyaritic and even some Arabic. It was only after the Islamic conquests that Yemen became a truly Arabic speaking region and until recently a noticeable chunk of it still remained natively non-Arabic speaking like in the case of the MSA speakers who, similar to us Somalis, used Arabic for trade and writing but spoke day to day in their native tongues:

The traditional 3adnan wa Qahtan Arab myth is pretty much assed backwards.

Those shown on the map are south Semitic groups. Old south Arabian which is completely different is grouped with Old Arabic into the central Semitic group.

Ahmed Abdul Ghafur Attar, a Saudi poet and linguist said in an article that the language of the Hejaz especially that which is spoken in Belad Ghamdi and Zahran, is close to the Classical Language.

Faisal Ghori, a famous scholar of Arabic literature, in his book Qabayil Al- Hejaz (Hejazi tribes) wrote: "We can say is that there are some tribes in Arabia whose language today much closer to the classical Arabic language. The tribes of Belad Ghamid and Zahran are a good example of this."

Both Zahran and Ghamid are of Qathanite southern stock. If they adopted Arabic they would not have spoken the purest form of it.

Even old south Arabian itself is identical to Arabic. Skip to 2:15 to hear a glimps

 

[Shimbiris]

Those shown on the map are south Semitic groups. Old south Arabian which is completely different is grouped with Old Arabic into the central Semitic group.

Ahmed Abdul Ghafur Attar, a Saudi poet and linguist said in an article that the language of the Hejaz especially that which is spoken in Belad Ghamdi and Zahran, is close to the Classical Language.

Faisal Ghori, a famous scholar of Arabic literature, in his book Qabayil Al- Hejaz (Hejazi tribes) wrote: "We can say is that there are some tribes in Arabia whose language today much closer to the classical Arabic language. The tribes of Belad Ghamid and Zahran are a good example of this."

Both Zahran and Ghamid are of Qathanite southern stock. If they adopted Arabic they would not have spoken the purest form of it.

Even old south Arabian itself is identical to Arabic. Skip to 2:15 to hear a glimps

South Semitic is an outdated and non-existent grouping. All of those languages are West-Semitic. Email any up to date Semitic linguist if you wish.

 

[Al hashimi]

Qahtanis, Sabeans, Himyarites and other people of greater Al Yaman region are Arabized Arabs from a linguistic point view because they used to speak South Semitic languages that are distant from the Arabic language which originated in the Northern half of the Arabian peninsula and Southern Levent.

The prophet ﷺ was pure Arab

No their language spread north to the Nabateans which later mixed with languages like Aramaic and Hebrew which brought modern Arabic

 

[Step a side]

The Yemenis spoke a Non-Arabic language. I thought the video I shared and Shimbiri's post which you claimed to not contradict your beliefs already established that. So if Yemenis populated Hejaz and taught their languages to Ismael and his sons, the prophet ﷺ and Quraysh would've spoken South Semitic language like today's Mahri. Obviously, this was not the case and the minority Yemeni migrants were absorbed by the more numerous Northern Arabic speakers.

There were actually more migrations from the North to the South instead of the vice versa. The earliest Inscriptions of the Arabic languages are found in Syria, Jordan and then in Northern Arabia, this indicates Southern movement of the earliest Arabic speakers.

The ancient Yemeni languages are more related to the Ethiopian languages like Amharic and Tigray than Arabic. It's not possible for Arabic to evolve from distantly related language like the ancient South Arabian ones.

You are completely wrong. The video shimbiris posted has nothing to with old South Arabian.

Arabic tribes can’t have come from the north because the dominant FGC11 has its highest diversity in the south in what’s now Yemen. Graffiti up north doesn’t mean much.

This is what a Semitic language Jewish student named Agamemnon who is quite knowledgeable told us and I quote

“South Semitic is an antiquated grouping which is almost entirely discarded nowadays except by a few diehard mohicans. Beyond geographic proximity, the features most commonly used to justify the classification of Arabic, Ethiosemitic and MSA together are:

• Broken or internal plurals as the main pluralisation strategy in those languages, as in Arabic عَـام ˁām "year" > أَعْـوَام ˀaˁwām"years" and Ge'ez ቤት bet "house" > አብያትˀabyāt "houses".
  
  
• The presence of a verbal stem (L-stem or conative stem) formed by insertion of a long vowel between the first and second radical as in Arabic قَـاتَـلَ qātala "to combat".
  
  
• Shift of Proto-Semitic */p/ > /f/.

The first two are retentions, not shared innovations, broken plurals for instance can be traced back to Proto-Afroasiatic and left traces in other branches of the Semitic family while the L-stem is also found in other branches of the Semitic family and isn't unique to Ethiosemitic, MSA and Arabic. Finally, the shift of /p/ to /f/ is cross-linguistically common, think of PIE *pṓds > Proto-Germanic *fōts "foot" for instance.

An updated version of the South Semitic theory simply excludes Arabic and Sayhadic as the arguments in favour of a closer genetic relationship between those and Northwest Semitic are infinitely more convincing (as they are mostly based on shared morphological innovations, including in the verb system) however the arguments adduced to support grouping Ethiosemitic and MSA together are just as problematic, which leaves us little choice but to interpret those as archaic West Semitic branches on equal footing with Central Semitic. That being said, some of the features used to support South Semitic as a valid genetic grouping are better understood as evidence of contact between Arabic and the pre-Arabic languages of the peninsula (more on that below, see my answer to Shamash).
It could be argued that the early Central Semitic migrants were more mobile than normally assumed, this of course depends on when and where the camel was domesticated. Based on osteological, pictorial and archeological evidence, we can be more or less certain this happened between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, and most likely during the end of the second millennium BCE in the Levant. It seems likely that there were different epicenters for the domestication of the camel in SW Asia, one of which was in Mesopotamia, and there are grounds to suspect that the Umm al-Nar culture in SE Arabia was another early center for camel domestication (we also have evidence of wild dromedaries being hunted in Central Arabia roughly a thousand years before). In any case, those areas would not have been Central Semitic-speaking by that time (the Umm al-Nar culture for instance was preceded by the Hafit period, characterised by beehive tombs that are reminiscent of the Nawamis-type cairns in the Levant, which is bound to mark the arrival of the first Semitic-speaking groups in the area), nevertheless one might envisage a scenario where this enhanced contact of some sort.

Returning to the linguistic evidence, in my view we do have more than a few elements which suggest some sort of prolonged contact between the Proto-Arabs and the pre-Arab peoples of the Peninsula, I mentioned above some of the features usually cited to support the notion of a South Semitic branch uniting Ethiosemitic and MSA to Arabic (and Sayhadic as well), I'll keep this user-friendly but some of the features invoked point in the direction of intense contact between varieties of Old Arabic, Ethiosemitic, MSA, Sayhadic and other North Arabian languages instead of a straightforward genetic relationship. The internal or "broken" plurals for example, while those are a feature of Afroasiatic languages in general and aren't specific to the Semitic languages of Southern Arabia, the sheer productivity and nature of the patterns along which those are formed are not coincidental, notice for instance that in the two examples I've used (ˀaˁwām & ˀābyāt) the pattern is ˀaC₁C₂āC₃, this isn't an exception and those patterns are also present in other Ancient North Arabian languages. Speaking of those languages, yet another element I'd like to draw your attention to is the presence of innovations characteristic of Arabic in the non-Arabic languages of the peninsula, the following Dadanitic inscription (AH 203) is a pretty fitting example:

While Dadanitic, as far as we can tell, is not outstandingly similar to Arabic (beyond the fact that it is a Central Semitic language, somewhat archaic in nature as it retains h-prefixed causatives) in this text there is at least one innovation that is typical of Arabic, namely the complementiser ˀn (Classical Arabic أنَّ ˀanna) to which I would add the -a subjunctive which is what probably underlies the ykn form here (parallel with Classical Arabic أَن يَـكُـونَ ˀan yakūna). So two shared morphological innovations unique to Arabic, despite the fact that Dadanitic did not partake in those innovations. What are the odds that this inscription was made by someone who was familiar with an early variant of Old Arabic or spoke a dialect of Dadanitic influenced by Old Arabic? I'd say those are very high indeed. And this is but a single example, there are other examples of the sort, not only in Dadanitic (where the relative pronoun ˀallatī, an innovation characterising the Old Hijazi dialect of Arabic, is also attested) but in Sayhadic as well (the negative particle lm, also a Proto-Arabic innovation, is attested in the Amiritic dialect of Minaic).

To picture the setting, here's a map of the Semitic languages consistent with genetic subgrouping:

Without complicating the matter further, the sum of the evidence (in conjunction with the genetic data) seemingly points towards the Central Semites being much more mobile than usually imagined (this would count for all sub-branches), and supports the existence of a sprachbund extending over much of Western Arabia comprising Old Arabic, Sayhadic, Ethiosemitic, MSA and possibly a few other Ancient North Arabian languages (including Taymanitic, which can be classified as NW Semitic). This further strengthens a 1st millennium (BCE) date for the initial introduction of Ethiosemitic in the Horn of Africa (it is otherwise hard to account for this type of prolonged contact), which is to put in parallel with the recent developments under P56. So a set of early back-migrations from Yemen cannot be discarded, and should probably be considered if more splitters show up in Yemen and its immediate surroundings”.

 

[Step a side]

South Semitic is an outdated and non-existent grouping. All of those languages are West-Semitic. Email any up to date Semitic linguist if you wish.

Why show these irrelevant minor languages in the first place? They were always a minority and quite distant from the sayhadic speakers who made up the bulk of Arabia. No linguist ever said Adnan was the true Arabic speaker. And only one guy pushes the northern theory which is a Ahmed jalaad who is an irrelevant student that relies on graffiti.

 

[Step a side]

No their language spread north to the Nabateans which later mixed with languages like Aramaic and Hebrew which brought modern Arabic

Nabatean themselves have Hejazi origin. Arabic evolved over time. The dialect spoken by the Quraish is not the only one that was called Arabic.

 

[Shimbiris]

Why show these irrelevant minor languages in the first place? They were always a minority and quite distant from the sayhadic speakers who made up the bulk of Arabia. No linguist ever said Adnan was the true Arabic speaker. And only one guy pushes the northern theory which is a Ahmed jalaad who is an irrelevant student that relies on graffiti.

Dunno what you're talking about. It's completely mainstream that Arabic, and all Semitic languages, came from further up north around the Levant. And linguists don't tend to talk about Adnan or Qahtan. That's just me saying that the old Arab myth doesn't fit with reality. Talk all you want, walaal, but the simple fact is that most of what is now Yemen was not historically Arabic speaking whereas Arabic clearly came from more north and therefore it was plainly the Adnan/Northern Arabs who were the true Arabs who Arabized Qahtani/Yemeni Arabs. Simple. But believe whatever you want. I'm not interested in arguing.

 

[Step a side]

Dunno what you're talking about. It's completely mainstream that Arabic, and all Semitic languages, came from further up north around the Levant. And linguists don't tend to talk about Adnan or Qahtan. That's just me saying that the old Arab myth doesn't fit with reality. Talk all you want, walaal, but the simple fact is that most of what is now Yemen was not historically Arabic speaking whereas Arabic clearly came from more north and therefore it was plainly the Adnan/Northern Arabs who were the true Arabs who Arabized Qahtani/Yemeni Arabs. Simple. But believe whatever you want. I'm not interested in arguing.

No one wants to argue. It’s just that I need to point out some of the flaws in your arguments. No linguist ever said Arabic came from the north. If you mean central Semitic then that’s different. In that case old South Arabian also came from the north. We see this clearly with the Arabian cluster that it has origins from the south. Dominant Adnan lineages like FGC11 have southern origins too.

Quran was revealed in 7 a7rufs (dialects).
Quraysh, Hudhayl, Tameem, Hawaazin, Thaqeef, Kinaanah and Yemen each with their own dialect at the time the Quran was revealed. The tribes of Medinah Aus and Khazraj were migrants from Yemen. Banu Khuza’a ruled Makkah for 400 years prior to the prophet Muhammad (saw) rule. They were of southern origin.

 

[Step a side]

Arabic didn’t come from southern Arabia nor the Arabic language was common there.


Arabic came from sons of ishmeal and the evidence we have is that the oldest Arabic scrip was in Jordon/Syria

Wrong. The oldest known scripts were found at a Nabatean site. The 2nd oldest script was the infamous Namara script written by imr al qays a Lakhmid king. Lakhmids have roots in Yemen and are known by everyone to have migrated from Yemen to settle in Mesopotamia. As for the Nabateans their origins is not clear cut but many believe they originated from the Hejaz as they share many deities with the ancient people there; nbṭw, the root consonant of the tribe's name, is found in the early Semitic languages of Hejaz.

 

[ZBR]

It's actually the other way around in reality. Linguistics tells us quite plainly that the true Arabs were the 3adnani/Northern-Arabs and that Arabic originated around the Levant and Mesopotamia then expanded southwards into areas like the Hejaz and Najd until it eventually overwhelmed all of Arabia through the 7th century and onwards conquests. Pre-Islamic Yemen was more like Koonfur; a hotbed of West-Semitic linguistic diversity the way Koonfur used to be a hotbed of different Somaloid languages and still kinda is though Af-Maxaa is dominating more and more. Proto-Ethiosemitic, the Old-South Arabian languages, the Modern South Arabian languages (not descended from the previously mentioned group), Himyaritic and even some Arabic. It was only after the Islamic conquests that Yemen became a truly Arabic speaking region and until recently a noticeable chunk of it still remained natively non-Arabic speaking like in the case of the MSA speakers who, similar to us Somalis, used Arabic for trade and writing but spoke day to day in their native tongues:

The traditional 3adnan wa Qahtan Arab myth is pretty much assed backwards.

Aramaic and other Sementic languages supplanted Arabic for centuries in the north whilst it was preserved in the south

 

[senor chang]

Yup