Arabization in the context of "Copts"

Algeria, officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered to the northeast by Tunisia; to the east by Libya; to the southeast by Niger; to the southwest by Mali, Mauritania, and Western Sahara; to the west by Morocco; and to the north by the Mediterranean Sea. The capital and largest city is Algiers, located in the far north on the Mediterranean coast.

Algeria has been at the crossroads of numerous cultures and civilisations for millennia, including the Phoenicians, Numidians, Romans, Vandals, and Byzantine Greeks. Its modern identity is rooted in centuries of Arab Muslim migration since the seventh century and the subsequent Arabisation of indigenous Berber populations. Following a succession of Islamic Arab and Berber dynasties between the eighth and 15th centuries, the Regency of Algiers was established in 1516 as a largely independent tributary state of the Ottoman Empire. After nearly three centuries as a major power in the Mediterranean, the country was invaded by France in 1830 and formally annexed in 1848, though it was not fully conquered and pacified until 1903. French rule brought mass European settlement that displaced the local population, which was reduced by up to one-third due to warfare, disease, and starvation. The Sétif and Guelma massacre in 1945 catalysed local resistance that culminated in the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. Algeria gained independence in 1962. It descended into a bloody civil war from 1992 to 2002, remaining in an official state of emergency until the 2010–2012 Algerian protests during the Arab Spring.

Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in North India and Pakistan as the lingua franca of the region. It is also spoken by the Deccani-speaking community in the Deccan Plateau. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi (Prakritised and Sanskritised register written in the Brahmic script) and Urdu (Persianised and Arabised register written in the Perso-Arabic script) which serve as official languages of India and Pakistan, respectively. Thus, it is also called Hindi–Urdu. Colloquial registers of the language fall on a spectrum between these standards.

The concept of a Hindustani language as a "unifying language" or "fusion language" that could transcend communal and religious divisions across the subcontinent was endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi, as it was not seen to be associated with either the Hindu or Muslim communities as was the case with Hindi and Urdu respectively, and it was also considered a simpler language for people to learn. The conversion from Hindi to Urdu (or vice versa) is generally achieved by merely transliterating between the two scripts. Translation, on the other hand, is generally only required for religious and literary texts.

The Islamization of Iran began with the Muslim conquest of Iran, when the Rashidun Caliphate annexed the Sasanian Empire. It was a long process by which Islam, though initially rejected, eventually spread among the Persians and the other Iranian peoples. Although Arabization was a common element of the early Muslim conquests, it did not have as significant of an impact in Iran as it did elsewhere, as the Iranian populace persisted in maintaining many of their pre-Islamic traditions, such as their language and culture, albeit with adaptations to conform to the nascent religion. A distinctly Iranian Muslim identity emerged in this context and later sidelined the Arabs in what is known as the Iranian Intermezzo.

Iranian society was deeply transformed by the spread of Islam, which greatly influenced the nation's cultural, scientific, and political structure; the blossoming of Persian literature, philosophy, medicine, and art became major elements of Islam in Iran. Integrating a heritage of thousands of years of civilization and being at the "crossroads of the major cultural highways" in the Near East contributed to the Iranians emerging at the forefront of the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate.

Syrian Turkmen, also called Syrian Turks or Syrian Turkish people (Arabic: تركمان سوريا, romanized: Turkumān Sūriyā; Turkish: Suriye Türkmenleri) are Syrian citizens of Turkish origin who mainly trace their roots to Anatolia (i.e. modern Turkey). Turkish-speaking Syrian Turkmen make up the third largest ethnic group in the country, after the Arabs and Kurds respectively.

The majority of Syrian Turkmen are the descendants of migrants who arrived in Syria during Ottoman rule (1516–1918); however, there are also many Syrian Turkmen who are the descendants of earlier Turkish settlers that arrived during the Seljuk (1037–1194) and Mamluk (1250–1517) periods. Some estimates indicate that if Arabized Turkmen (those who no longer speak Turkish as their main language) are taken into account, they form the second-largest group in the country. The majority of Syrian Turkmen are Sunni Muslims.

Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares maritime borders with Italy through the islands of Sicily and Sardinia to the north and Malta to the east. It features the archaeological sites of Carthage dating back to the 9th century BC, as well as the Great Mosque of Kairouan. Known for its ancient architecture, souks, and blue coasts, it covers 163,610 km (63,170 sq mi), and has a population of 12.1 million. It contains the eastern end of the Atlas Mountains and the northern reaches of the Sahara desert; much of its remaining territory is arable land. Its 1,300 km (810 mi) of coastline includes the African conjunction of the western and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Basin. Tunisia is home to Africa's northernmost point, Cape Angela. Located on the northeastern coast, Tunis is the capital and largest city of the country, which is itself named after Tunis. The official language of Tunisia is Arabic. The vast majority of Tunisia's population is Arab and Muslim. Vernacular Tunisian Arabic is the most spoken language, and French serves as an administrative and educational language in some contexts, but has no official status.

Beginning in early antiquity, Tunisia was inhabited by the indigenous Berbers. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people, began to arrive in the 12th century BC, settling on the coast and establishing several settlements, of which Carthage emerged as the most powerful by the 7th century BC. The descendants of the Phoenician settlers came to be known as the Punic people. Ancient Carthage was a major mercantile empire and a military rival to the Roman Republic until 146 BC when it was defeated by the Romans who occupied Tunisia for most of the next 800 years. The Romans introduced Christianity and left architectural legacies like the Amphitheatre of El Jem. In the 7th century AD, Arab Muslims conquered Tunisia and settled with their tribes and families, bringing Islam and Arab culture. A later large-scale Arab migration of Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym tribes in the 11th-12th centuries accelerated this process. By around the 15th century, the region of modern-day Tunisia had already been almost completely Arabized. Then, in 1546, the Ottoman Empire established control, holding sway until 1881, when the French conquered Tunisia. In 1956, Tunisia gained independence as the Tunisian Republic. Today, Tunisia's culture and identity are rooted in this centuries-long intersection of different cultures and ethnicities.

The Idrisid dynasty or Idrisids (Arabic: الأدارسة al-Adārisah) were an Arab Muslim dynasty from 788 to 974, ruling most of present-day Morocco and parts of present-day western Algeria. Named after the founder, Idris I, the Idrisids were an Alid dynasty descended from Muhammad through his grandson Hasan. Their reign played an important role in the early Islamization of Morocco and also presided over an increase in Arab immigration and Arabization in major urban centers.

Fleeing the Abbasid Caliphate to the east in the aftermath of the Battle of Fakhkh, Idris I first established himself in 788 at Volubilis in present-day Morocco with the help of local Berber allies. He and his son, Idris II, subsequently founded what became the city of Fez further east. Fez became the capital of an Idrisid state which ruled most of present-day Morocco and part of western Algeria. After Idris II's death, the realm was divided between his rival sons. After a period of conflict, the dynasty's authority resumed and remained relatively stable between 836 and 863. In the late 9th century, however, they faced repeated challenges and local opposition. In the 10th century the region came under the political domination of Zenata tribes who fought proxy battles on behalf of two rival powers in the region, the Fatimid Caliphate and the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba. The Idrisids were definitively expelled from Fez in 927, but held onto to a reduced territory in the north of Morocco from their base at Hajar an-Nasr. They were finally defeated and removed from power in 974, and a brief attempt to regain power in 985 also failed.

The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian peoples throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later — including among the Assyrians and Babylonians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, but not Samaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet, which they call "Square Script", even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew.

The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Writing systems, like the Aramaic, that indicate consonants but do not indicate most vowels other than by means of matres lectionis or added diacritical signs, have been called abjads by Peter T. Daniels to distinguish them from alphabets such as the Greek alphabet, that represent vowels more systematically. The term was coined to avoid the notion that a writing system that represents sounds must be either a syllabary or an alphabet, which would imply that a system like Aramaic must be either a syllabary, as argued by Ignace Gelb, or an incomplete or deficient alphabet, as most other writers had said before Daniels. Daniels put forward that this is a different type of writing system, intermediate between syllabaries and 'full' alphabets.

The War in Darfur, also nicknamed the Land Cruiser War, was a major armed conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan that began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel groups began fighting against the government of Sudan, which they accused of oppressing Darfur's non-Arab population. The government responded to attacks by carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfur's non-Arabs. This resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the indictment of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

One side of the conflict is mainly composed of the Sudanese military, police, and the Janjaweed, a Sudanese militia group whose members are mostly recruited among Arabized indigenous Africans and a small number of Bedouin of the northern Rizeigat; the majority of other Arab groups in Darfur remained uninvolved. The other side is made up of rebel groups, notably the SLM/A and the JEM, recruited primarily from the non-Arab Muslim Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic groups. The African Union and the United Nations also have a joint peacekeeping mission in the region, named UNAMID. Although the Sudanese government publicly denies that it supported the Janjaweed, evidence supports claims that it provided financial assistance and weapons and coordinated joint attacks, many against civilians. Estimates of the number of human casualties range up to several hundred thousand dead, from either combat or starvation and disease. Mass displacements and coercive migrations forced millions into refugee camps or across the border, creating a humanitarian crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described the situation as a genocide or acts of genocide.

The tribes of Arabia (Arabic: القبائل العربية) have inhabited the Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years and traditionally trace their ancestry to one of two forefathers: Adnan, whose descendants originate from West Arabia, North Arabia, East Arabia, and Central Arabia; or Qahtan, whose descendants originate from South Arabia. Further, it is held in the Abrahamic religions—particularly Islam—that the Arab people are descended from Abraham through his son Ishmael.

From the 7th century onward, concurrent with the spread of Islam, many of these tribes' members began migrating and settling in the various regions that were subdued during the early Muslim conquests, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Khuzestan, the Maghreb, and Sudan. This phenomenon triggered a process of Arabization that significantly influenced demographic shifts across most of West Asia and North Africa, culminating in the growth of the Arab population far beyond the Arabian Peninsula.