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Afro-Arabs

Ethnic group in the Arab World with African ancestry From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"African Arabs" and "African Arab people" redirect here. For Arabs living in North Africa, see North African Arabs.
"Afro-Arab" redirects here. Not to be confused with the Africa-Arabian Peninsula relations of the African Union.

Afro-Arabs, African Arabs, or Black Arabs are Arabs who have predominant or total Sub-Saharan African ancestry. These include primarily minority groups in the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Western Sahara, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. The term may also refer to various Arab groups in certain African regions.[6]

Quick Facts عرب أفارقة, Regions with significant populations ...
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Afro-Arab man of the Congo (ca. 1942).

From the 7th century onward Muslim communities were established along the coast of Eritrea and Somalia, subsequently spreading inland. The Arab slave trades, which began in pre-Islamic times but reached their height between 650 AD and 1900 AD, transported millions of African people from the Nile Valley, the Horn of Africa, and the eastern African coast across the Red Sea to Arabia as part of the Red Sea slave trade. Millions more were taken from West Africa and East Africa across the Sahara as part of the trans-Saharan slave trade.[7]

By around the first millennium AD, Persian traders established trading towns on what is now called the Swahili Coast.[8][9]

The Portuguese conquered these trading centers after the discovery of the Cape Road. From the 1700s to the early 1800s, Muslim forces of the Omani empire re-seized these market towns, mainly on the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar. In these territories, Arabs from Yemen and Oman settled alongside the local "African" populations, thereby spreading Islam and establishing Afro-Arab communities.[10] The Niger-Congo Swahili language and culture largely evolved through these contacts between Arabs and the native Bantu population.[11]

In the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, descendants of people from the Swahili Coast perform traditional Liwa and Fann at-Tanbura music and dance,[12] and the mizmar is also played by Afro-Arabs in the Tihamah and Hejaz.[citation needed]

In addition, Stambali of Tunisia[13] and Gnawa music of Morocco[14] are both ritual music and dances that in part trace their origins to West African musical styles.

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Notable Afro-Arabs

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Omar Hawsawi, a Saudi footballer at the 2018 World Cup.
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