Iranian Arabs
ethnic group in Iran
Iranian Arabs (Arabic: عرب إيران ʿArabu Īrān; Persian: عربهای ايران Arabhā-ye Irān) are the citizens of Iran who are ethnically Arab. As of August 2026, their population stands at an estimated 4 million people. They are primarily concentrated in the Khuzestan province.
Overview
The presence of Arabs in Iran dates back to the 7th-8th centuries AD, where under the Sasanian Empire, Mesopotamian Arabs were an important segment of the empire's population along and west of the lower Euphrates river in southern Iraq and between the Tigris and Euphrates in northern Iraq. This stretch included Arvand Rud, which meets at the current Iran–Iraq border, down to its mouth, where it discharges into the Persian Gulf. The Arabs of the Sasanian empire included nomads, semi-nomads, peasants, and townsmen. Some Arabs followed polytheistic religions, and a few adopted Judaism, but most appear to be Christians.
Additionally, Arabs have had a continuous presence in Iran since ancient times, long before the 7th century AD.
The historian and Iranologist Elton L. Daniel explains that for centuries, Iranian rulers maintained contacts with Arabs outside their borders, dealt with Arab subjects and client states such as those of the Lakhmids and Himyarites, and settled Arab tribesmen in various parts of the Iranian Plateau. The Arab expedition to Iran began before the Muslim conquests and continued with joint exertions of the civilized Arabs (ahl al-madar) and desert Arabs (ahl al-wabar).
According to the Minorities at Risk Project 2001, about 40 percent of Arabs are unskilled workers living in urban areas.
The public source identifies “Iranian Arabs” as ethnic group in Iran. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Iranian, Arabs and ethnic.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2859361. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2026 and 2001.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iranian Arabs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.