Yeah, they are a conquered people. The Umayyad were overthrown by the Abbasids, a Persian-backed Arab coup, who were eventually destroyed by the Mongols, who converted to Islam and ruled the region for a while. Meanwhile, in the west the last remnants of the Umayyad fled to Iberia and established a kingdom-in-exile when overthrown. The western part of the former Caliphate fractured, but largely fell under Shia Arab rule. Then a Kurdish dynasty ruled, then a slave revolt of largely white slaves ruled and fended off the Mongols. Then the whole Middle East was conquered by Turks. Arabs at the point of the partition of the Middle East had ethnically been a conquered people for centuries even as their religion marched to the farthest ends of the earth, subject to foreign rule. Their big dream was to rebuild their civilization back to its glory days, that's why they allied with the British to revolt against the ailing Ottoman Empire, and that's what Ba'athism and the Hashemite princes were both trying to accomplish. Instead the Middle East was divvyed up into an international chessboard, one of the hearts of the former Arab empire was taken over by a bunch of Eastern European Jews, and when the Hashemites took issue with that the British basically forced them out of Arabia by funding a bunch of lunatics in the deep desert (the House of Saud). Funded by their vast oil wealth, the Islam of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda (Salafism/Wahhabism), which had previously been restricted to the backwater of Najd, spread throughout the entire Middle East through their patronage. The result has been endless barbarism, bloodshed, and civilizational backsliding. But that's geopolitics. It's happened to countless formerly great empires, cultures, and peoples. Strong powers divide the weak and set them against one another, forming buffers to protect their regional interests.
