Egypt in North Africa and the Middle East

  Hofheinz, Albrecht. “Beja”. K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas and D. J. Stewart (eds.),  Encyclopaedia of Islam Three Online . Brill, 2018.  https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_24008  Web. “Contacts with  Arab migrants and traders  go back to antiquity but gained importance under Islam. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt, several truce agreements were made between Muslim governors in Egypt and the Beja (first in about 111/730, then in 216/831);  these attest to a gradually increasing Arab Muslim penetration of the Beja lands for commerce and for exploitation of the rediscovered gold and emerald mines around al-Fawākhīr (east of Qifṭ) and Wādī al-ʿAllāqī (mid-third/ninth to sixth-eighth/twelfth-fourteenth centuries), as well as at least nominal claims of suzerainty over (and tribute from) the Beja.  Arab chroniclers and travellers recorded a growing amount of information on the Beja; most notable is the account by Ibn Sulaym al-Asw...

Egypt is Egyptian, not Arab. The word “Arab” appeared, for purely ideological and poltical reasons, for the very first time in the name of the country in 1958.   In 1958, the Republic of Egypt and the Syrian Republic became the “United Arab Republic.”  Since then, the name has stuck: the “Arab” Republic of Egypt and the Syrian “Arab” Republic.  A lot of people in the West think that “Arab” = Arabian = Muslim = Middle Eastern, or thinking it some kind of “ancestry” or “race.” If you ask an actual Arabian from Arabia, are Egyptians Arabs? The answer would be “Not all! Egyptians are not ethnic Arabs, they are Arabized Copts!” “ Among the tribes of Arabia today the term  ʿarab  seems to signify people with a genealogy or belonging to a lineage connecting them with certain forebears. This traditional definition is probably a heritage from the early Islamic period when the term was given this sense .  A modern definition of “Arab” was first advanced by the ideolo...