Second, the designations “Arab” and “Ajam” have become blurred. We noted earlier that in the Arabic language the term Ajam originally covered everyone who is not an Arab. Because learning and faith came to be found among the sons of Persia more than among other non-Arab peoples, they became the foremost of the non-Arabs, and in the usage of later common folk the word Ajam came to be applied predominantly to them, so that it became, in popular parlance, a colloquial convention referring to Persians in particular.
The term Arab, in its original sense, denoted a people who combined three qualities:
- Their tongue was the Arabic language;
- They were of Arab lineage;
- Their homeland was the territory of the Arabs—the Arabian Peninsula—stretching from the Sea of Qulzum (the Red Sea) to the Sea of Basra (the Persian/Arabian Gulf), and from the farthest limits of Ḥijr in Yemen to the outskirts of Greater Syria. Thus Yemen lay within their domain, whereas Syria did not. It was in this land that the Arabs dwelt at the time of the Prophet’s mission and before it.
When Islam came and the new provinces were opened, they settled throughout the lands, from the farthest East to the farthest West, reaching the coasts of Syria and Armenia—regions that had formerly been the abodes of the Persians, the Byzantines, the Berbers, and others.