The Ancient History of Arabic Heritage, parts 1&2

The truth about Ismail

It is the nature of humanity to want to know from where they came and to where they are going. In some ways the past and future are connected to each other. In this short, 3 part series, we will reexamine the roots of Arab descendancy, how they mixed with other Middle Eastern cultures and how they have been robbed of a most glorious future! If you are Arabic, read on…

In an age of increasing ethnic diversity, it is quite easy to lose track of one’s heritage. In some western cultures (such as the United States), one is considered “racist” if they speak too proudly of their heritage. Certainly, pride in one’s heritage can lead a person to be nasty to other people, and this isn’t good but on the other hand, knowledge of one’s heritage can be beneficial. How so? For one, it can guide someone to their destiny. If one knows their history, one can get an idea of their future.

Knowledge of one’s heritage bridges a gap between the Past, which we can never prove because no one can travel back to the past to confirm something historical, and the present, the time you live in. In this case, family histories and dynasties are useful but when it comes to a large group of people such as the Arabs, tracing a lineage isn’t so straightforward and clear because the Arabic people have been around nearly 4,000 years! A lot has happened in that time and some people, namely Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars have been working on some assumptions. What are they you might ask??

Islam has been warring since it first was birthed but the problem with wars is that historical records are destroyed and Truths lost. That hurts everybody. But in the case of the Arab identity or heritage, the Arabs may have lost more than anyone can realize! The Arab people pre-date Islam and with Islam’s forced conversions in times past, some Arabic people may be missing out on the biggest reward in human history!

Pre-Islamic Arabs

Let’s start with an observation: “the Muslims assumed that Islam was a religion for the descendants of Ismail”[1] First of all, ethnicity is usually very tightly woven with religion. But when one starts out with an assumption, one can draw many incorrect conclusions! As you the reader know, assumptions are useful starting points like in a scientific experiment but if it leads you down a road to an incorrect conclusion, then sometimes the assumption must be discarded. When people destroy historical records (all races on earth are guilty of this in some way), all you are left with are “assumptions” which is a very dangerous and unstable place to be.

With this, we will begin this investigation…

Some people don’t trust History because they say that it is written by those who conquer in a war but not all history is written by the Victors. Many people write history merely because they are recording who, what and when things happened like a police report: who was involved, what happened and when did it happen? They don’t attempt to analyse it, just report the facts of the day.

If and when history can be proven to have “changed” or been “manipulated”, it only makes sense to use older history books because 1.) It was closer to the source event and 2.) It was written before some conflict broke out. Thankfully, not all ancient historical books have been destroyed. There are those whose civilizations have been around since early history like the Chinese, Hindu, Israeli and Iranian people, there is the Judeo-Christian Bible and then there are other historical books. It is without a doubt hard to find the genealogy or history of a single family line at this point in history BUT, it is not impossible to uncover! Let us start with the lineage of Ismail/Yishma’el[2]: Ismail was the son of Ibrahim/Avraham and Hagar, Ibrahim’s 2^nd wife who was from Egypt[3]. Ibrahim had another wife whose name was Sarah and she had a son named Ishaq/Yitzchak. For the moment, we will digress from the line of Ishaq and return to him later.

Tracing Ismail

When Ibrahim’s 2^nd son was born from his first wife, Sarah, the Judeo-Christian chronology says she became jealous because Ismail/Yishma’el was mocking Ishaq/Yitzchak, Ibrahim’s second-born son. Sarah demanded that Ismail and her mother, Hagar, be banished from the land that Ishaq would inherit. Ibrahim regrettably agreed to do so and it says in the biblical chronology that “Elohim[4] was with the youth…he lived in the desert of Paran, and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt/Mitzrayim.”[5] This is an important point we will return to in a while – Ismail married an Egyptian. Egyptians in earlier history were much darker in skin than they are now because they are the descendants of Ham/Cham, which all scholars agree are the Africans.

Another note from the above quotation is that he lived and grew up in the desert of Paran which is in today’s Egyptian peninsula. (in the middle of the graphic here – sorry for the poor resolution) This is not surprising since his mom was Egyptian. Further on in the story about Ibrahim’s/Avraham’s descendants, it is recorded that Ismail’s descendants (in that day) lived in the region between Sur and Havilah.[6] Sur and Havilah don’t exist on a map today so we will come back to that just below.

After Ibrahim’s wife Sarah died, the biblical chronology says he married Keturah and had a whole other family with her. Jewish tradition says Keturah was Hagar because in polygamy, when the first wife dies, you automatically take your concubine as your 2^nd wife. The Quran goes beyond tradition and says he did marry Hagar for sure and that they lived in Paran. It says that they eventually moved to Mecca. There is no other historical record to contradict this so why not? This does not positively identify where the Arabic people descended from though. To say that Arabs are Ismailis is an assumption because Ibrahim had two sons. Let’s look at the evidence we do have…

In the map given above, the descendants of Ismail lived between Sur, a major trading road in the Egyptian peninsula Paran, and Havilah. There is one problem though: there are two “Havilah’s” in the ancient world. Most people think Ismail are the Arabs because one Havilah is on the eastern side of today’s Saudi Arabia. The other Havilah is south of Sur, near today’s Eritrea and Ethiopia (look in the green area above). Since two ancient sources say they lived in the latter Havilah and Ismail’s wife was Egyptian, therefore it is more likely that eastern Egypt/Mitzrayim is the nation that came from Ismail.
A second possibility with weaker evidence is that Ismail became the nation of India.[7] They are a darker-skinned people like the children of Ismail would be and could be a colony of Egyptians who transplanted there later but the author of this pamphlet (you are reading) believes the evidence points to yet another ethnic group.
The ancient historical book of Jasher from the same chapter as footnote 6 above says that Ismail’s only daughter was Bosmat. Bosmat or Basmat married Esav[8], the brother of Yaqoub/Ya’acov, both who are direct descendants of father Ibrahim. Esav settled and founded the ancient kingdom of Edom centered around Mount Seir which is in SW Jordan As you full well know, family lineage is reconciled through the father therefore, even though Ismail’s daughter married Esav, that would make the Arabs, Esavian, not Ismaili!

When we expand the historical research to include books that are older than the Quran, we come up with a few possibilities. One is that the Ismailis are Epytian; one is that they are Hindi; and the third of course is that they descended from Mecca, as tradition says, but even if so, we will show next that the descendants of Ismail does NOT mean that they became the father of Arabs.

Part 2: Is this all the evidence?

This may seem like the end of the story of the Arab descendancy but it is not. The Arabic people are almost as ancient as the Jewish people and because they are closer than you think, the Jewish Bible, the Tenakh, reveals even more about the Arabs and Ismailis than the Quran does!

The first thing that is to be noted about the man Ismail is that even though he was born from Keturah (the Jewish name) or Hagar (the Christian name), by the time Sarah, his first wife had died, Ismail had grown up in Mitzrayim/Egypt and had taken an Egpytian wife[9] and when Sarah died, Ibrahim then took Keturah/Hagar and had a whole new set of children with her so that Ismail wasn’t living with Keturah anymore. If Ismail wasn’t living with Keturah in Mecca, then the Arabs are NOT the descendants of Ismail but ARE the descendants of Ibrahim/Avraham as their name suggests.

Secondly, the Tenakh names the area that Ismail inherited. It is not a specific country but a specific direction from where Ibrahim was when he was alive: “Ibrahim gave gifts [to the children of Keturah]; then he sent them away from Ishaq his son, while he was still alive, eastward to the land of the East.”[10] Ibrahim was promised multiple times that Elohim had given him the entire land between the Nile and the Parat/Euphrates rivers and since he gave Ishaq all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, northward until it reached the Parat river in Syria and since the lands directly east of the Jordan river were inherited by other family members of Ibrahim and other pagan nations were already settled there, that meant that the ONLY place for Keturah’s descendants could inherit was the land that bordered the Parat/Euphrates river and eastern Arabia that borders today’s Persian Gulf.

There is yet two other pieces of information that would narrow down where this inheritance would be though. One of the prophecies that the El of Israel promised Ismail is that he would become a single, great nation. And if that wasn’t enough, another prophecy implicates he would become a combative people (“his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him”).[11]

Where is that nation today?? It would seem that this is the nation of Iraq and certainly this region has been in many wars but if we consider that people migrate over centuries, it is possible that the Ismailis crossed over the river and became the nations of Iran or India. Iran is a good candidate because they began as the Elamite people which inhabited the lower Iraqi gulf of today. (See the Middle Eastern map above and note how the Elamites were a Semitic people. Due to the poor resolution, the Shemites are the yellow area)

So far, all we have shown is that the Ismaili people were not Arabs and as author, I would say the most direct descendancy of the Arabs is the Esavian or Edomite nation that is where SW Jordan inhabits today but even that could be dogmatic for there is one other obscure biblical passage that tells what the Arab people looked like around the year 900 BC. (Note: this is around 1500 years before Muhammed)

The ancient nations of Israel and Judah, after they split into two nations, wrote two sets of histories about their time and the description about their interaction with the Arab people at the height of their power before they divided is quite revealing:

In one book (called Divrei ha-Yamim), the nation speaks about the kings who bought alms to Sulaiman. In the other book (called Melekim), the same exact rendering calls the Arab kings “Kings of the mixed people”[12], that is, kings of an interracial ethnic group! What we learn from this is that by 900 BC, after 900-1100 years passed after Abu Ibrahim, the Arabic people were as diverse as a people group as the United States is today! This is an astonishing insight as it shows that the Arabic people were not from a pure bloodline as many would think today.

But it doesn’t end there! Read part 3 that shows how much more diverse they became and why that is so significant today, in the 21^st century!

[2] Arabic/Hebrew format will be attempted throughout but in some places English/Hebrew words will be used also

[3] Genesis/B’resheet chapter 16, verses 3,4,15 (B’re 16:3-4;15), taken from Complete Jewish Bible, a Messianic Bible translation

[4] “Elohim” is the non-titular word for “God”. It is a neutral term used before the Creator made his proper name known.

[5] Genesis/B’resheet chapter 21, verses 20 and 21 (21:20-21)

[6] Historical book of Jasher chapter 25 verse 20(author unknown); also New Canon Bible p.159

[7] see abrahamsbirthright.com

[8] Genesis/B’resheet chapter 36, verse 3

[9] Genesis/B’resheet chapter 21, verse 21

[10] Genesis/B’resheet chapter 25, verse 6

[11] Both in chapters 16 + 21 of Genesis/B’resheet

[12] 2 Divrei 9:14 and 1 Melekim 10:15 respectively