Historical Anti-Arabism
Anti-Arab prejudice has been found throughout the Western world, notably in Europe and the Americas, for centuries. In the Iberian Peninsula, all non-Catholics, including Muslim Arabs, were targeted following the 15th century fall of Granada, the last Amazigh(Berber)state in Al-Andalus. In 1492, Arab converts to Christianity, called Moriscos, were expelled from Spain to North Africa after being condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish word "moro", meaning moor, today carries a negative meaning. Although ethnically different than the Arabs in Spain at the time, the term Moro was also used pejoratively by the Spanish since the 16th century to refer to Muslim tribal groups in the Philippines; the term indios was used to refer to Christianized tribal groups.
After the annexation of the Muslim-ruled state of Hyderabad by India in 1948, about 7,000 Arabs were interned and deported.
The Zanzibar Revolution of January 12, 1964, ended the local Arab dynasty. As many as 17,000 Arabs were exterminated by the descendants of black African slaves, according to reports, and thousands of others were detained and their property either confiscated or destroyed.
In The Arabic Language and National Identity: a Study in Ideology, Yasir Suleiman notes of the writing of Tawfiq al-Fikayki that he uses the term shu'ubiyya to refer to movements he perceives to be anti-Arab, such as the Turkification movement in the Ottoman Empire, extreme-nationalist and Pan-Iranist movements in Iran and communism. In al-Fikayki's view, the objectives of anti-Arabism are to attack Arab nationalism, pervert history, emphasize Arab regression, deny Arab culture, and generally be hostile to all things Arab. He concludes that, "In all its various roles, anti-Arabism has adopted a policy of intellectual conquest as a means of penetrating Arab society and combatting Arab nationalism."
In early 20th and late 19th century when Palestines and Syrians migrated to Latin America arabophobia was common in these countries. For example Chilean newspaper El Mercurio wrote the following in 1911 about Palestinian immigrants:
| “ | Whether they are Mahometans or Buddhists, what one can see and smell from far, is that they are more dirty than the dogs of Constantinople... | ” |
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“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
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