Most certainly. The term "Arab" has become a vague term these days, and those who are considered to be "Arab" today are a mix of several different ethnic groups, such as the Turkic peoples, Albanians, Circassians & Africans.
“…the predominant complexion of the Arabs is dark brownish black and that of the non-Arabs is white.” Ibn Mandour (14th Century) Lisaan al-Arab IV:209.
“The south Arabs represent a residue of hamitic populations which at one time occupied the whole of Arabia. “ John D. Baldwin from Pre-historic nations or inquiries Concerning Some of the Great peoples and Civilizations of Antiquity. Harpers 1869
“The Zanj say that God did not make them black in order to disfigure them; rather it is their environment that made them so. The best evidence of this is that there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as the Banu Sulaim bin Mansur, and that all the peoples settled in the Harra, besides the Banu Sulaim are black.” Abu Uthman Al-Jahiz of Iraq 9th century A.D.
One might be surprised, but it is noteworthy that in our time black American soldiers in Northern Iraq have found themselves surrounded by children exclaiming excitedly “the original Muslim, the original Muslim!” Professional basketball players from teams in America including the NBA upon visiting Turkey have also found themselves called “Arab” or "Arapy". In fact in much of the area directly North of the so-called Arab world the word "Arab" is the equivalent of black African.
As David Goldenberg writes, “This view of the Arab as dark-skinned is also found among other peoples, as is indicated by the term arap (i.e., Arab) meaning 'black African' in modern Turkish, Greek, and Russian, as well as in Yiddish” (Goldenberg, 2005, p. 124). And, this is the case because their peoples still have folk history of the original Arab invaders of their lands. The descriptions and depictions of the earliest Arabs or kara-Arapy (“black Arabs”) are not infrequent in their histories and folktales.
There is, for example, the texts of the Kurdish writer Ibn Athir (12th – 13th century) which speak of the Sulaym/Sulaim folk hero "Sa’d al-Aswad" as being literally black because he came from the “purest” Arabs. A Persian Jewish Targum to Song 1: 5 uses the phrase “black as the Kushites who live in the tents of Kedar.” to describe peoples of north Arabia. (Goldenberg, p. 244) There are also numerous early indigenous paintings as found below.
1.bp.blogspot.com/-ivCAvKxaHes/UP8TAiBEPXI/AAAAAAAAAls/MTof6WNh15s/s1600/Serbian+Arab.jpg^^
Depiction of a Serbian man, defeating an Arab invader.
Arab tribes had been settled since not long after the birth of Christianity in the region of Turkey (Anatolia) and northern Mesopotamia so the peoples of those regions had become quite familiar with what such people looked like. These early accounts with descriptions of the earliest Arabians, along with physical anthropological evidence show that until approximately 600 years ago peoples of mainly African-Asiatic affiliation dominated most of peninsular Arabia. Though today a good number of people of the Arabian peninsula resemble the majority of the people of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine). In fact certain writers of Syrian and Andalusian origin such as Al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun of the 14th century considered Arabia part of the “Bilad es-Sudan” - or lands of “the Sudan” or black peoples. Ibn Khaldun in particular includes the regions of Arabia (Hijaz, and Central Arabia or Nejd) in his chapter on “the 2nd zone of Sudan”.
Ibn Khaldun in his own words asserts the following about the zones of Bilad as-Sudan or “the lands of the blacks”. He writes first, “The first and second zones are excessively hot and black…The inhabitants of the first and second zones in the south are called the Abyssinians, the Zanj, and the Sudanese. These are synonyms used to designate the particular nation that has turned black” (Rosenthal, 1954, p. 171).
Another modern scholar Uthmān Sayyid Ahmad Ismā’īl Bīlī summarized in more detail what Ibn Khaldun relates of the peoples and geography of the two zones of the blacks or Bilad es-Sudan.
West Africa, according to these sub-zonal divisions, falls in the first section of the first zone. This section also includes the lands of the Veiled Berber. Nuba is in the middle of this first zone, in the fourth section of it and Abyssinia is in the fifth section, the same section in which the Indian ocean ends. Yemen is in the sixth section of the first zone. Ghana and Zaghawa as well as Qanuriyah (the lands of the Kanuri or Bornu) fall in the first and second sections of the second Zone and Hijaz and Nejd are in the sixth section of that zone. The Buja lands lie in the third and fourth sections of the second zone. Upper Egypt lies in the fourth section of the second zone and lower Egypt lies in the fifth section of it (Bili, 2008, pp. 17-18).
Thus Khaldun names the regions comprising the “hot and black” zones the Nejd or Central Arabia, Hijaz or Western Arabia and the Yemen which refer to each of the portions of Arabia, except for the East where Persians had already settled in large numbers. After the 1st zone which includes the Yemen and Abyssinians and the 2nd zone comprising the Ghana, Hijaz, Nejd, the Beja (Buja). He asserts that most of Egypt falls also into the bilad-es-Sudan. Interestingly he leaves out Western "India" which included modern day Pakistan and Punjab which was apparently in his day was already much closer to the peoples of Syria and the Mediterranean in appearance.
p.s the text above was copied from here:
afroasiatics.blogspot.no/2013/01/normal-0-false-false-false.htmlMs. Reynolds wrote a great piece in Ivan Van Sertima's "Golden Age Of The Moor"
