But why a white woman? Why not, say, a black woman/ east asian woman/ etc?

Some people-of-colour are so eager to intermarry with white folks. It’s pathetic, and I’m embarrassed to be associated with these POC. Shame on you! Have some self-respect for goodness sake.

i don’t want you to over-read my point there was a sense of turkish, persian, and arabness before the modern era. and in the first 1.5 centuries of islam the ethnic-racial supremacism of arabs vs. all muslims was pretty extreme (in fact, some of the early texts make it clear that christian arabs were superior in status to converted persians!). some later islamic scholars term the ummayyads the ‘arab kingdom’ in reference to their racial autocratic nature, in contrast to the abbassids who were more explicitly islamic and cosmopolitan. and during the ottoman era arabs were to some extent looked down upon by the turks. e.g., there was a prominent arab general in the ottoman armies who was always under suspicion because there was a sense that arabs lacked the martial spirit of turks, albanians, and slavs. so it isn’t as if arab was made out of nothing. but a sense of arab nationalism analogous to french or german nationalism is relatively new, so some non-muslim peoples dissent from it even if they speak arabic. and some non-arabic speakers adhere to it strangely. i think last i checked somalia is part of the arab league….

really? i guess i’m so kala that that doesn’t matter though seriously, that’s kind of a dumb comment it seems. is there a vast swath of empirical data that i’m missing out on?

just to be clear, most of the bin laden family are like most elite saudis. they live it up in the west. osama was an oddity. he was also the only one of his siblings (legitimate at least) without a saudi mother. since his father was from yemen and his mother from syria he was outside of the saudi tribal system in totality. that gave him some advantage (he was seen as ‘neutral’), but it also made him an outsider.

also, al qaeda early on was dominated by egyptians because ayman al-zawahiri brought his own people. most of the operates came out of egyptian militancy against the late regime of mubarak et al., and bin laden helped reorient them toward transnational salafism. this is pretty well known as an organizational history.

If Egypt is the biggest arab country, and egyptians can’t pass as white, it seems weird to claim that arabs can pass as white, without adding a lot of qualifications.

this is complicated, and i don’t necessarily want to get into it…but the idea of arabnness outside of arabia is kind of problematic before the modern period, because the identity of these arabic speaking people was as muslims first and foremost. the emergence of an arab national consciousness as we see it today is a modern construction explicitly modeled on the european project of the nation-state, and christian arab speakers were instrumental in it because it allowed them to be full participants in the national project as arab nationalism was not explicitly religious. obviously the tribes of arabia were arab. and some groups outside of arabia had identities which were tribally rooted in various arab groups which came out of arabia (there was a mass migration of arab tribes to parts of north africa for instance). but the arabness of many regions of the arab world in a self-conscious manner was very inchoate. for example, the mamlukes of egypt were mostly drawn from circassians. this elite persisted after the ottoman turkish conquest to the 19th century. if egypt had an arab national consciousness, it didn’t show it over the centuries, as arabic speaking groups were ruled by non-arabs. the founder of ‘modern egypt,’ muhammad ali, was an albanian who reputedly couldn’t even speak arabic (he could speak turkish i think, as he was originally an ottoman soldier).

p.s. a lot of the stuff about arabs also applies to the turks. turkish nationalism is very much a modern project. i think as a contrast in the middle east one has to look at the persians, whose national self-consciousness predates islam and can be encapsulated early on in the shahnameh. though i have made the argument elsewhere that what we understand as iranian national identity really is rooted in the safavid conquest (and the safavids were predominantly turkic, though there were greek and armenian strands ancestrally in the leadership) and the forced conversion of the area that is today persia to the shia religion in totality (only the baloch and kurds escaped this).

I second that.