Hello! This is my first question ever posed to reddit, so I apologize if I do not do this correctly (is there an incorrect way to ask a question?)
The reason that I am asking this question is because I am a Maltese woman (half Maltese, half British to be exact), and have just recently been told by my mother that I am an Arab. For my entire life I have always considered myself to be Maltese, and I did not know that Malta was also considered to be an Arab country. I have been trying to do some research on this topic but I have been getting mixed answers. The top three answers usually go like:
1] Maltese people are not Arab's because they were colonized by the Arab's a long time ago. Many of them look white (even though it is possible to have white Arabs, no?), and they are so close to Italy that they should be considered European.
2] Maltese people are Arab's. They are mixed with a lot of things, but Arab if definitely one of them and that cannot be discounted. Just because they are now considered a European country by the EU does not mean that they are not Arab's.
3] some Maltese people are Arab's, some aren't. There is no way of knowing because it is such a diverse country with a diverse background.
I know that Malta was at one time colonized by the Arabs, I know that our language is, at least in part, derived from Arabic, and I know that my Maltese relatives are all dark, with curly hair and "Arab" looking features. But in my eyes, I am still confused. Because of my British heritage I am fair, with vaguely Arab features and thick, light hair. I do not know if the history of my Maltese heritage warrants me to say that I am Arab.
To you this might be a simple question, but I feel as though an important part of my identity is on the line! I am proud of being Maltese, and I want to know if that means that I am, by extension, an Arab.
What do the historians think?
It's a complicated Answer. In short I would say that there have been enough time and genetic variation from the Arabs controlling Malta to warrant it being it's own ethnicity. The question is probably best answered by Genetics rather than by Historians. And a Genetic study that I came across essentially says that certain genetic markers show more correlation with Italian ethnicities such as Sicilian and Calabrian then it does with North African or Arab. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16626331
I don't think it's really fair to call Malta an Arab Nation really or the Maltese an Arab people simply because it's a very diverse history and genetics indicate otherwise.
At this point, probably not. The most I would say is a distant cousin.
The Normans conquered Malta from the Arabs in 1090, and expelled remaining Muslims in the 1200s, so there's been no primary Arab cultural influence since then. As a comparison, Somalia was admitted to the Arab League in the '70s because of its longstanding commercial and religious links to the Arab world.
The Maltese language is the biggest evidence of the link, but one can see the distance when you dig a little. When the Arabs conquered Malta in 870, they brought the Arabic language with them, and it stuck. It was so prevalent that the Normans continued its use when they arrived. However, the source for new words switched to Sicilian and Italian then due to the new cultural orientation.
The base language remains, so a speaker of Maltese should be able to talk about simple concepts easily with other Arabic speakers. However, a Maltese speaker will have a much better time talking about more abstract concepts with Europeans. Wikipedia gives me these two Maltese sentences to demonstrate this: Ir-raġel qiegħed fid-dar, but Ġeografikament, l-Ewropa hi parti tas-superkontinent ta' l-Ewrasja.