Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Muslim? Arab? Persian?

Slate's Jack Shafer takes the New York Times to task for a gaggle of problems in the story "Arabs in U.S. Raising Money to Back Bush."
The story seems to switch indeterminately between Arab and Muslim. And then it throws in some Iranian and Pakistani information to really mess things up.

Slate needs an Explainer on this. Oh, wait, it already published one, kind of:
Alone among the Middle Eastern peoples conquered by the Arabs, the Iranians did not lose their language or their identity. Ethnic Persians make up 60 percent of modern Iran, and modern Persian is the official language. (Persian also has official status in Afghanistan, where Dari, or Afghan Persian, is one of two official languages.) In addition, the majority of Iranians are Shiite Muslims while most Arabs are Sunni Muslims. So Iran fails most of the four-part test of language, ancestry, religion, and culture.
Here's a list of Arab countries:
Algeria
Bahrain
Comoros
Djibouti
Egypt
Iraq
Jordan
Kuwait
Lebanon
Libya
Mauritania
Morocco
Oman
Palestinian areas
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Sudan
Syria
Tunisia
United Arab Emirates
Yemen

Middle Eastern countries that aren't Arab:
Cyprus
Iran
Israel
Turkey

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