Central Asian Arabs Erotic

Central Asian Arabs are a people who kept the name long after most of them lost the language that went with it. They live in scattered villages across Uzbekistan, southern Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan, and they farm, dress and pray much like the Uzbeks and Tajiks around them. Yet many still answer Arab when asked who they are, and they trace their families to soldiers and settlers who crossed the Amu Darya more than a thousand years ago.

Their origin story runs through the Umayyad conquest of Transoxiana in the early 8th century. Campaigns under Qutayba ibn Muslim took Bukhara and Samarkand and left Arab garrisons behind. Scholars still debate how much of today's community descends from that first wave and how much from later arrivals, possibly by way of northern Afghanistan. For most of their history these were pastoral people. They were semi-nomadic herders working the steppe edges of the Bukhara and Kashkadarya oases, living in close-knit settlements where lineage was remembered long after other differences wore away.

Their language is where the story gets unusual. A few villages, best known among them Jogari near Bukhara and Jeinau in Kashkadarya, kept a spoken Arabic that developed for centuries largely cut off from the Arab heartland. Soviet linguists who recorded it in the mid 20th century found a dialect with ties to Mesopotamian Arabic. Tajik and Uzbek had reshaped its vocabulary and even its word order. It was a village vernacular, not a written language, and it has been fading ever since. Most Central Asian Arabs now speak Uzbek or Tajik at home, or Dari and Uzbek in Afghanistan, and the old dialect survives mainly among older speakers.

Their religion is Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school, the same as their neighbors'. It is lived through the village mosque, the rites that mark births, weddings and deaths, and the yearly round of fasts and feasts. Soviet nationality policy pushed assimilation further. A people with an Arab name and a Turkic or Persian mother tongue fit poorly into census categories, and over the decades many were counted simply as Uzbek or Tajik. Claims to Arab ancestry are even more widespread in the region, among sayyid and khoja families. Those are religious prestige lineages, though, and separate from the herding communities who plainly called themselves Arabs.