ABSTRACT
In the seventh century ad the Arabs surged out of the Arabian peninsula andcreated an empire which stretched at its zenith from the Pyrenees, along North Africa, through what was later called the Middle East and deep into central Asia. The successors of Mahomet, or caliphs, failed to preserve the unity of this vast and increasingly polyglot realm and the Arab conquerors became, in their turn, subject for 1,000 years to Kurds, Turks, British and French. But they never lost the powerful links of a common language and a common faith, and when they began to recover their independence these links served to revive visions of a renewed unity. The collapse of the Ottoman empire in Asia in 1918 offered to its Arab subjects a prospect altogether different from that offered, by the more gradual withdrawal of the same empire in Europe, to the racially and linguistically divided Christians of the Balkans.
