ISLAM / MUSLIMS / ARABS
A passage from “No Politics, No Religion?”:
Islam is a religion. A Muslim is a person who practices Islam. Arab can mean a person, a culture, a kind of music, or a kind of cuisine (for example, one can speak of cooking an Arab dish). An Arab (person) is one who belongs to the Arab ethnicity, which includes anyone who speaks Arabic and identifies with Arab culture. Arabic is a language. There are no Arabic people (which I hear all the time). Arabian is an old and outdated term describing or denoting an Arab (person), or it can refer to the peninsula that is now Saudi Arabia. Arabian is also a kind of horse, I think, I do not know much about horses; I’m allergic to them. Most Arabs are Muslim. But most Muslims are not Arabs. Most Muslims live in Indonesia (209 million), India (176 million), Pakistan (167 million), and Bangladesh (134 million).
