"ARABS"

After our class discussion today, I was trying to find more about what being "Arab" might actually mean. Of course Wikipedia popped up first but it didn't tell me much about how Arabs are perceived. Then I found Urban Dictionary (which seems like a pretty racist entity in itself...), which described Arab as:

Arab= Arabian. Arabic is their main language and alot of arabs also speak other languages. Arabic can be spoken in diffrent "accents" and alot of words are diffrent from one country to another but it's all the same language. For example in the UK we say "Biscuit" in the USA they say "Cookie". Thats just a small example but yeah it's kinda like that a Iraqi might not understand everything a egyptian would say because of their accent. Anyone who comes from the middle east and north Africa, alot of whom leave all around the world, but orginate from there. Most of the population is Muslim but you can also get other relgions among Arabs e.g. Christians, Jews and some are ethicists but this is rare. (All the spelling and grammatical errors come directly from the website.) I thought this was a pretty okay description, it was more encompassing then what we talked about in class but I'm still not sure if the people we consider Arab would consider themselves Arab. But then Urban Dictionary went on to state:

Warning, not all arabs are suicide bombers!

Seriously like no more than 100 that are alive today are planning to blow something up, and probablly won't anyway.

What a way to make people believe you...I have to wonder who's writing this stuff???


A second definition stated that Arab is commonly used incorrectly to describe Muslims who are actually all over the world. It's nice to know that someone at least has some of their facts straight.


But anyway, the terms Arab and Orientalist were pretty new to me. Of course I've heard the term Arab but I've never used it to describe someone, probably because I never really knew what it stood for. I'm still a bit in the dark about Orientalists though, are Arabs considered Orientalists? Or is that reserved for "Eastern" Asia?