ABSTRACT
The notion of Arab nationalism is modern, and is not easy to define, for in it religion, language and geography are interwoven. The original homeland of the Arabs was the Arabian Peninsula. It was from its deserts and oases and mountain valleys that Islam spread out over the world—first to Syria; thence eastward to Persia and Central Asia, westward to Egypt and North Africa and Spain; later to India and Indonesia and Africa beyond the Sahara. Arabic was the sacred language of Islam, and it became the spoken language of many of the peoples whom the Moslems conquered. It reached its limits when it came up against other languages possessing a great culture, like Persian or Greek, or a powerful military organization, like Turkish or Spanish, or which were protected by inaccessible terrain, as were the Berber dialects spoken by the Moroccan tribes.
