"Arabised," "Arabisation," "Islamised," and "Islamisation" are terms I will curse you and your entire lineage for. I don't care if those are the terms imperially educated academics use; that's precisely why I will curse you and your entire lineage for pushing your imperial wording into society.
Those terms operate on assumptions of external imposition, of native replacement, of ethnic cleansing, of forced assimilation, treating local ethnic groups as passive objects, passive recipients. Those terms are the European/Western empire projecting its own crimes against humanity onto the region, assuming there was never a native group of people in that region exercising their own agency to adopt the language as their lingua franca and/or practice the religion.
Nobody calls the 1,300+ ethnic groups in Indonesia "Indonesianised." The Republic of Indonesia still records 700+ spoken native languages, yet we can all communicate with each other just fine because we all speak Bahasa Indonesia. I know you're not that stupid to be oblivious to the term "lingua franca." The Indonesian nation-state still records six official religions, despite Muslims being the majority in the country; Indonesia has the biggest Muslim population in the world, and Indonesia has more Christians than the entire Australian continent.
Yet, for some reason, you want ethnic groups native to the SWANA region and the rest of the African continent to think they have been forced to assimilate and convert like Indigenous peoples in North America and Australia, while conveniently forgetting Judaism and Christianity weren't first revealed in Europe, there were already Christians and Jews all over the SWANA and the rest of Africa's regions before refugees from Anatolia and Europe came, and the biggest Muslim population on earth isn't in the African continent or West Asia, and it was never part of the Arab conquest.
#history #politics #Orientalism #Palestine #SWANA
@indonesia@fedigroups.social
