Really, because most reasonable people would think when you claim that the Zoroastrians were “wiped out” that you meant they’d been slaughtered.
It’s extremely difficult to believe that you weren’t trying to imply that and are now back-tracking and trying to use weasel words to pretend otherwise, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were just extremely careless regarding your terminology.
Please define what an “Arab” is because I get the impression you don’t understand just how complicated and arbitrary the concept is.
Nope. I meant exactly what I said. And I used the exact terminology for it.
Someone who calls himself an “Arab” today. Resident of - let’s pick Syria. Go ahead and answer the question. Oh and for argument’s sake let’s say all the ancestors in question are from the same area.
Does the fact that Iranians tend to intensely dislike Arabs color your definition?
Exactly, you’ve just destroyed your own argument.
Your definition is “someone who calls himself an 'Arab”.
The people you were referring to didn’t call themselves “Arabs.” They thought of themselves as Muslims. They also considered fellow Muslims who didn’t speak Arabic their brothers and saw Arabic-speakers who practiced a religion other than Islam as foreigners.
When determining who is and Isn’t an Arab, the question is how they identify themselves and it’s often quite arbitrary.
The Arabic-speaking Druze of Israel don’t view themselves as Arabs while the Arabic-speaking Druze of the Golan Heights, Syria, and Lebanon insist they are.
Similarly, the Arabic-speaking Christians of Egypt insist they aren’t Arabs, while the Arabic-speaking Christians of Syria insist they are.
The Muslims of the time period didn’t consider themselves Arabs and we should accept what they say.
Why are you guys arguing? It sounds like you and Terr have been saying the same thing. He’s just saying “Arab” like we say “Jew” even though no one said “Jew” circa 1500 BCE.
That’s a distinction without meaning. If I consider myself an Arab, my father considers himself an Arab, but his father, who was born in the same place in the same culture doesn’t, his father is still of the same ethnicity as I and my father. Whether he call himself that or not, he’s an Arab.
That’s not exactly true.
There certainly have been issues between the Sunnis of Iraq and the Shia of Iran, but you’ll notice that the Shia Arabs of Iraq and Lebanon get along great with Iran.
In fact Hezbollah swears allegiance to the Ayatollah Khamenei who’s obviously not Arab.
And no, what exactly constitutes “an Arab” is not necessarily all that obvious and obviously different people different ideas.
Throughout the medieval era, nobody in the Middle East was considered an Arab except for the Bedouin.
This may seem weird to us that most of the people who spoke Arabic didn’t consider themselves Arabs, but keep in mind that most people today who speak English don’t consider themselves “Englishmen” and aren’t considered that and most people who speak French don’t consider themselves Frenchmen and aren’t.
It wasn’t until the late 19th Century that Arab national consciousness arose inspired by the European concept of Nationalism.
The major proponents of the common Arab identity were Christians who had a fairly obvious desire to convince the Arabic-speaking Muslims that they were part of the same group.
Moreover since then, as mentioned, there’s been quite a bit of seemly schizophrenic concepts of who are and aren’t Arabs.
As mentioned before, the Druze of Israel insist they aren’t Arabs while the Druze elsewhere aren’t and Egyptian Christians don’t consider themselves Arabs while Syrian Christians do and of course Arabic-speaking Jews aren’t considered Arabs anywhere.
It’s your own description.
You said that the people had to consider themselves “Arabs” to be that.
The people you’re referring to didn’t consider themselves Arabs nor did their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren etc. until about 12 Centuries later.
You’re saying well, if I consider myself an Arab and my father thought he was an Arab, then even if he doesn’t think he was then my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was an Arab even if he didn’t consider himself one and nor did any my ancestors after my father.
So what made them finally right? 
No we’re not.
When someone insists they’re not an Arab and would be insulted by being called an Arab they shouldn’t be viewed as one.
Moreover his distinctions doesn’t help understanding the Middle East because it would make us argue that people who saw themselves as the same(Muslims who spoke Arabic and those who didn’t) and part of the same group weren’t.
As far as they were concerned, they identified themselves as members of the Ummah(Muslim community) along with non-Arabic speakers, but based on his views, the Kurdish speaking Muslims, such as Saladin, and the Arabic speaking Muslims, whom he led, weren’t part of the same group and should be primarily viewed by a group identity they didn’t believe in.
The answer is once they decided they were.
Frankly, I think nationalism was one of the worst curses Europe inflicted on the world and that blood and soil nationalism has caused untold misery.
I believe we have different definitions of “Arab”. Is it even the same word in English and Farsi?
Generally, Americans and Europeans use “Arab” to describe someone from the geographic expression of the “Arab Peninsula”.
I would be annoyed if someone called me a “Yankee”, because I hail from the Southern USA. I’ve learned to live with it. While most of us are willing to consider Iranians as Indo European, things might be easier for you in dealing with us if you do, too.
No. You asked me who the top one in the chain would be. I told you. Now, answer the question.
Such a definition would exclude probably around 80% of all people who are consider themselves Arabs.
To give a few examples, that would exclude Libyans, Tunisians, and Egyptians.
In short, just about everyone who participated in “the Arab Spring.”
I’m not sure why I should be grateful that you’re “willing to consider Iranians as Indo European” since it sounds more than a little condescending.
Beyond that, I’m not sure who the “us” you’re referring to is because most Americans and Europeans don’t generally spend a lot of time obsessing about “Indo Europeans” and most Americans would look at you like you’d grown a second head if you started asking questions about whether or not Iranians should be considered “Indo Europeans”.
I’m a bit weirded out by this discussion regarding whether or not we’re “Indo Europeans” since it’s reminiscent of a lot of the pseudo-scientific racist bullshit that used to be spouted by the Eugenicists when they’d talk about how the “Aryans” needed to unite.
If it means anything to you, yes, we are the original Aryans and Iran literally means “land of the Aryans” but the whole concept of “Aryan” was and still is complete bullshit.
Where did I ever ask “who the top one in the chain would be”?
I asked you how you defined who is and who isn’t “an Arab.”
Good God, you really are entirely impervious to facts. Yet again, Arab is not a synonym for Muslim. Zoroastrianism was not wiped out by either the Arabs or the Muslims. It has been practiced continuously and is still practiced to this very day in what is modern day Iran. It has 210,000 adherents today. It was not and has not been wiped out by Arabs, Muslims, or anyone else.
That being said, the later Safavids and Qajars did do their best to wipe out Zoroastrianism, and most of the existing Zoroastrians are in India, where their ancestors fled to get away from the rulers who wanted to destroy the religion.
But I will point out, of course, that both the Safavids and Qajars were native Persian dynasties, and not “Arab” in any sense of the word.
