In the previous article, I went after the fantasy of Amazigh purity. Now comes the Arab version, louder and more common.

No one is denying the Arab element in Tunisia. What deserves denial is the obsession with “purity.” Tunisia was never a sealed jar. It was a crossroads. Yet some people talk about lineage as if they were purebred horses, proud of a purity that exists nowhere but in their own heads.

For most of history, “Arab” was not a race. It named a shared world shaped by language, religion, law, and learning. Think of figures like Ibn Sina or Ibn Khaldun, central to that world, yet not “Arab by blood.” In that older sense, being Arab was about participation, not pedigree.

The modern Arab purist replaces civilization with biology. A culture becomes a blood test. And because the religion is sacred, some begin to treat the blood as sacred too, as if piety were inherited along with ancestry.

This is where the two myths meet. The Amazigh purist hunts a pre-Islamic essence. The Arab purist hunts a sacred pedigree. Both rely on the same lie: that Tunisia can be explained through clean, separate boxes.

To believe in pure Arab ancestry in Tunisia, you have to imagine fourteen centuries of isolation in a region defined by movement. You have to believe your ancestors never traded, never married neighbors, never lived in cities. You have to treat the Mediterranean as a wall.

We are mixed. That is the baseline. The choice is simple: accept the richness of that reality, or keep running purity contests.

Humans have history; animals have pedigrees.