Endogamy and consanguineous marriage in Arab populations

Abstract

Arabs are a Semitic people basically defined as individuals speaking Arabic as their native tongue, although with many different dialects, who self-identify as being of Arab ancestry. The Arab world extends from Iraq and the Gulf States in the east to Morocco and Mauritania on the Atlantic coast of North Africa in the west, and through time it has incorporated many populations with ancestral origins outside the Arabian Peninsula. Large Arab communities are now permanent residents in Western Europe, North and South America, and Australia, and so the global Arab population is estimated to number 300-350 million (Hamamy and Bittles 2009).