In 1999…
M.E.N.T.O.R.S. remained the only Arab-American AIDS organization in New York
Case management team members help individuals access medical, financial and educational services
Nearly 80% of those served by M.E.N.T.O.R.S. are under 40 years old.
Volunteers provided almost all the infrastructure working hours of service. The financial value of this work is approx. US$15,000.
Algeria | Bahrain | Egypt | Iraq | Jordan | Kuwait | Lebanon | Libya | Morocco | Oman | Palestine | Qatar | Saudi Arabia | Sudan | Tunisia | United Arab Emirates | Yemen | Mauritania, Somalia, and Djibouti, Comoros Islands
The Social Basis of the Arab
The “Arabs” are:
- People who speak the Arabic language,
- Nationals or residents of member countries of the League of Arab States.
- About 5 percent of the world’s population. (In the late 1990s, the Arabs numbered over 260 million.)
The geographic area in which the Arabs live is:
A contiguous mass of about 14 million square kilometers.
Extending from the shores of the Arab-Persian Gulf in the east to the coasts of Mauritania and Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean in the West, and from the slopes of the Anatolian plateau and the Mediterranean Sea in the North to the Sahara desert, Equatoria, and the Indian Ocean in the south.
Mostly desert and
Consequently has a very low population density, though there are striking concentrations of people in some of the cities and river valleys.
The area is divided into twenty-two different states and territories ranging in size from the city-states of the Gulf (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait) through the agrarian states of the Maghreb and the Fertile Crescent to the overpopulated Nile valley state of Egypt
Economy:
The major economic resources of the area are oil and agriculture.
The major economic activities, at least until modern times, were farming, herding, and trading.
Race and Religion:
Being an “Arab” does not connote in itself either a particular “race” or a particular religion. Arabs come in all colors (e.g., white, brown, or black) and in many religions (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism).
Islam is the religion of over 85 percent of the population in this huge landmass. (Christianity is the second religion followed by Judaism).
Culture:
The land, the people, and the culture are dominated by the Arabic language.
Arabism are purely cultural concepts.
It has created, over several centuries, a unique entity called by the Arabs themselves the “Arab Homeland” (al-Watan al-Arabi), the “Arab world,” or, as I call it, “Arab Society.”
The Arab world is marked by considerable geographical, social, and cultural diversity. Arab society has traditionally been viewed as a trinity of Bedouins, peasants, and urban dwellers, living together in some kind of symbiosis. The cultural influence resulting from colonial expansion was either French or British (or both, as in Egypt), with smaller areas feeling Italian or Spanish influence. But many countries and the interior parts of most others were only marginally affected by such cultural influences.
Detailed studies have tended to stress the differences between these and other categories of people, differences that the social and economic politics of Arab and foreign regimes have long tended to exacerbate.
History:
Many of the Arab states have long individual histories. Egypt has its pharaonic past; Tunisia follows on Carthage; Morocco goes back at least to the Roman occupation of North Africa; Lebanon goes back to the Phoenicians; and Iraq has roots in Sumeria, Babylonia, and Assyria. Other states are recent creations with arbitrary boundaries resulting from the colonial period, such as the desert states of Mauritania, Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan. At the time, the Palestinian Authority is in a transitional phase, is almost, but not quite a state in the international legal sense.
Arabdom is neither eternal nor is it a creation of yesterday. It has been evolving over more than two millennia. It was only with the appearance of the new religion of Islam (A.D. 610) that the Arabs made an unprecedented unity, pride, and a sense of sacred mission. Within one century, the Arab Muslims managed to conquer all the leading empires of the time (Roman, Persian, and Byzantine) and to establish their own, extending from the borders of China in East Asia to the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe. Within this vast empire, an Arab-Islamic civilization flowered, incorporating the legacies and achievements of contemporary and previous cultures and civilization
Politics:
The Arab world is one broad cultural area, but remains politically divided among some twenty-two Arab states, including Palestine. There are also Arab minorities in neighboring countries. This “cultural unity” has been pragmatically reconciled with the “political divisions” by the creation in 1945 of a regional organization known as the League of Arab States (LAS). The Arabs, their world, cultural unity, and political division have been evolving throughout history. Even the cultural boundaries, let alone the political borders, have continued to change. Thus in the 1970s, three new countries in sub-Saharan Africa opted to identify themselves as “Arab” and joined the LAS: Mauritania, Somalia, and Djibouti, followed in the 1990s by the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. Of these, only Mauritania has a historic Arabic-speaking majority. At present the different political regimes are divided between republics, some military in origin, and various kinds of monarchies. The diversity of the population of many of these states reflects the ebb and flow of empires, and the spread of cultures and religions in the past thus the concentration of Berber-speakers in the Maghrib ( Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) , the inclusion of Nuer, Dinka, Azande, Fur, and others in Sudan, and the combination of Christians and Druze in Lebanon.
The Arab Nation:
First, the Arab political regimes, on the normative prescriptive level, consider their states as parts of one nation. No Arab regime in any of the twenty-two states has dared formally to go against this proclaimed national self-identification.
Second, this belief in the importance of one Arab Nation is shared by most people in all countries, classes, and sub-groupings of the area extending from Iraq to Morocco.
Third, the increased volume of human movement and interaction across state lines in the last forty years has added a sociological dimension to both the pan-Arab political norms and institutional arrangements. In the l950s and 1960s, the bulk of interstate human movement was for study and tourism. In the 1970s and l980s, most of such movement was for work. In the 1990s the interstate movement has been for all purposes including trade and investment.
Unity and diversity:
The previous political reasons, and others, justify looking at the Arab world as one cultural and one societal unit. In this respect, it stands socio culturally at a midpoint between, say, Western Europe and North America-more culturally homogeneous than the former but less politically united than the latter. There are concentric political-cultural-legal identities for most Arabs, all of them salient and readily evocable. The broader political-cultural identity as an “Arab” is relevant when the person is outside the Arab world. The particularistic-country-legal identity (Syrian, Egyptian, Saudi, Iraqi, etc.) is mostly invoked within the Arab world itself, or when crossing sovereign state borders. Treating the Arab world as one single cultural area and as one Arab society implies an emphasis on the broad cultural “unifiers”-e.g., language, religion, shared traditions, common history, and common aspirations.
But there are as many cultural “diversifiers.” For example, within the common language there are different dialects, and within the common religion there are denominations and sects. Times of Arab strength and glory are those in which the “unifiers” are invoked. Periods of weakness or decline are those in which the “diversifiers” are manipulated by indigenous or external forces to divide the Arabs. Much of Arab history can be viewed as the continuous interplay between unifiers and diversifiers. The great heroes in Arab history are those who stimulated the cultural unifiers, especially in times of external challenge (e.g., Salah al-Din during the Crusades, Nasser in the immediate past). Individual and group loyalties in such times are to Islam, the Arab Nation, or the Motherland. On the other hand, the bleak moments in Arab history are when the diversifiers get magnified out of proportion and focus the passions and behavior of individuals and groups on primordial and local loyalties-e.g., ethnicity, sect, and tribe. The concerted Arab action in the October War of 1973 was an example of the power of broad unifiers. The civil wars in Lebanon (1975-1985), Sudan (1956-1973, 1983-1996), Iraq (1964-1975, 1991-1996) and Yemen (North, 1964-1967, and between North and South in 1996) are important examples of stimulating and manipulating diversifiers.
Family Size:
Just two or three decades ago in the Maghreb, and less than one decade ago in the Mashreq, large families were the rule. The reproductive life of an average couple included the births of seven to nine children. Less than one generation later, at the beginning of the 1990s, young adults construct families which, once complete, will be less than half the size of those in which they grew up. The decline in the Maghreb recalls the experience a quarter of a century ago in southern Europe, from Catholic Italy and Spain to Orthodox Greece and, by it magnitude, that of the Asian “dragons.” But both of these sets of societies emerged against completely different backdrops: burgeoning secularization in Mediterranean Europe and industrial take-off in East Asia. A similar point of transition is occurring in Arab countries, but there the revitalization of Islam and persistent underdevelopment creates an appearance of contradictory conditions. In all the Mediterranean Arab countries, the rate of population growth has actually begun to decline.
Women:
The admission of women into the professions and formal labor markets is the second component of differential fertility. The Arab countries, like most of the Muslim world, have surprisingly low rates of urban female workforce participation-from 5 percent in the Arabian Peninsula to hardly more than 25 per-cent in Tunisia, while the world average is around 50 percent. Are women absent from the world of work, or simply from the statistics compiled by men? (It is men, not their wives, who generally reply to census questions, thus attesting to the fact that, at least in the minds of the men, women do not or must not work.) The rate of female workforce activity is in perfect negative correlation with average fertility.
There is nothing exceptional about this. In all societies, domestic responsibilities that weigh upon women increase with the size of the family and, at a certain point, impede them from practicing a profession or occupation outside the home. Another mechanism, more specific to Arab societies, also seems to be operating. It appears that a large proportion, sometimes a majority, of Arab women working outside the home before marriage leave their jobs upon getting married.