I had known that the medieval Arabs despised the white people of Europe with disgusted condescension far greater than that felt by the white people of Europe, including the brown Maltese, for Arabs today. Yet I was greatly amused to be reminded of just how inferior they considered white Europeans to be.

In 1068, a certain Said ibn Ahmad Qadi, of the Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, wrote a book in Arabic on the categories of nations. He divided the nations into two kinds: those that concerned themselves with science and learning, and those that did not. The Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Chaldees, Egyptians, Arabs and Jews he put in the first category. All others went into the second category, dismissed by him contemptuously as the northern and southern barbarians.

Of the former – the European peoples beyond Rome and Spain – he remarked: “They are more like beasts than men. For those of them who live furthest to the north…the excessive distance of the sun…makes their temperaments frigid, their humours raw, their bellies gross, their colour pale, their hair long and lank. Thus they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence and are overcome by ignorance and apathy, lack of discernment and stupidity…”

Some years before, in 956, the Arab geographer Masudi had written something similar: “As regards the people of the northern quadrant…the power of the sun is weakened among them, because of its distance from them: cold and damp prevail in their regions, and snow and ice follow one another in endless succession. The warm humour is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy. Their colour is so excessively white that they look blue; their skin is fine and their flesh is coarse. Their eyes, too, are blue, matching their colouring. Their hair is lank and reddish because of the damp mists. Their religious beliefs lack solidity, and this is because of the nature of cold and the lack of warmth. The farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross and brutish they are. These qualities increase in them as they go further northward. Those who dwell sixty odd miles beyond this latitude are Gog and Magog. They are in the sixth climate and are reckoned among the beasts.”

The tone and attitude are familiar because they are still used today, though despiser and despised are now in reverse order. The pieces I have quoted were written a thousand years ago, and so their authors may be forgiven for crass racism. Today, one millennium down the line, there’s really no excuse.

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Inspired to do so by the current anti-Arab frenzy, I pulled down from my shelves some books by the man who is commonly acknowledged to be the world’s foremost authority on Islamic history, Bernard Lewis, which I hadn’t looked at in years, and sat down to read them again. It occurred to me once more that his The Arabs in History and The Muslim Discovery of Europe, together with Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples, should be compulsory reading for Maltese people, because without the knowledge contained in them, we cannot view our own history in its proper perspective.

That a very much abbreviated and simplified version of the facts spelled out in The Arabs in History is not in our school syllabus is largely the reason for the poverty of knowledge that burdens a disproportionately large number of Maltese adults today. It is almost unbearable to me to hear men in their 40s and 50s – sad to say, the women often know even less – trot out in conversation the childish myths and legends that we were taught at school and put them forward as historical fact.

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Some weeks ago at dinner, I squirmed in embarrassment as I heard a Maltese man chant the numbers in Maltese, to an Algerian fellow guest, and then tell him: “Isn’t it amazing? They’re exactly the same as the numbers in Arabic.” When I was younger, I would have been a real antipatika and leant across the table to say: “They aren’t exactly the same as the numbers in Arabic. They are the numbers in Arabic.” Having grown older and wiser, I just kept my mouth shut, and filed the conversation away for future reference instead. On the drive home, I briefly wondered what that man imagined to have been the case: perhaps, that by some enormous coincidence, the people of Malta spontaneously developed the same words for their numerals as those used by speakers of Arabic.

The fairy-tales we are fed about our history and origins only serve to fuel delusion. There have been a couple of letters published in the newspapers, written by individuals who seem to all other intents and purposes literate, insisting that Maltese bears no relation to Arabic. One writer demanded our attention for his view that Maltese is not even a Semitic language; another claimed that it is derived from Phoenician.

The latter should be forgiven for believing that particular red herring. I have heard it so many times, coming out of the mouths of people with a fairly high standard of education, that I do not even bother getting into debates about it anymore. People cling fervently to their myths. At school, the history of Malta, together with its fables, is taught in complete isolation from the history of the rest of the Mediterranean basin – an absurdity that has served us ill. To prove their point, the Maltese-is-not-Arabic brigade will say: “Oh, but I can understand Lebanese people speak, and they can understand me. That means Maltese comes from Phoenician.” In despair, I am sometimes moved to remark that the very reason they can understand a Lebanese person is because Lebanese people speak Arabic, and not Lebanese, a language which doesn’t exist.

The easiest form of Arabic for a Maltese person to understand is actually not that spoken in Lebanon, but in Tunisia. This is not a coincidence, because the form of Arabic that we speak in Malta is derived from the Arabic spoken by Tunisian Arabs who settled in Sicily in medieval times.

Maltese is Arabic with a romance superstructure. This is a fascinating piece of our history that we deny, in our fervour to distance ourselves as far as possible from all that is Arab. The reality is that Arabic was the most commonly spoken language throughout Muslim Europe – Spain and Sicily, too – with the indigenous peoples adopting it instead of their own native tongues, in much the same way that English was adopted throughout the British Empire. The fact that it survives in formerly Muslim Europe, only in Malta as recognisable Arabic, rather than as a collection of Arabic words and expressions incorporated into a romance language, makes us a unique curiosity. This is something to be flaunted and paraded around, not denied and locked away in the attic of our mind, as though it were a hideous deformity.

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In my other life as the producer of a magazine about food, I spend a lot of time checking whether we use Arabic words for particular foods, in Maltese. This is important, because the word we use tells us a great deal about where we first got to know about that particular food. Most of the words we use for food and cooking are Arabic, the exceptions being mainly the words we use to describe foodstuffs that first came to our knowledge more recently in the historical context, that is, in terms of centuries rather than decades: oranges and salt cod, for which we use the Portuguese words, potatoes and tomatoes, which first arrived in Malta in the 19th and 18th centuries respectively, and ham, for which we use a corruption of the Italian prosciutto, it being unsurprising that we do not have an Arabic word for it.

You may ask how I do this, if I can not read Arabic script. The answer is an invaluable research tool: an English/Arabic dictionary written in the script that I do understand, and which sits alongside my other dictionaries, Aquilina’s Maltese/English/ Maltese and the Oxford English. It is perfectly possible to write in Arabic using the letters we use to write in English.

It is, after all, the very same thing we do with Maltese, with some different consonants to represent the particular sounds that are not present in English. On every page of that dictionary, which lists commonly used nouns, verbs and expressions, the majority of the words given in Arabic are the very ones we use in Maltese. All those who insist that Maltese is “Phoenician” (and who know no Phoenician at all) should get hold of one of these dictionaries and read it through.

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Riffling through that dictionary some days ago, I chanced upon the word miskin - miserable wretch - and was reminded of a conversation I had had some weeks earlier. An Englishwoman who has lived in Malta for many years was describing how enamoured she is with particular Maltese words, like miskin, which she thought to be so sweet and which she uses as often as possible. I explained that miskin is not “sweet” at all, and that the precise English translation is “miserable wretch” rather than “oh you poor thing”, a difference in meaning, tone and implication which is far from subtle. It is true that over the years miskin has come to be used to express pity rather than disparagement, but I still remember the adults around me when I was a child using the expression il- vera miskin (a fascinating combination of Italian and Arabic) to refer to people who had behaved contemptuously, while jahasra miskin (a Maltese expression formed from two pure Arabic words) was used to express pity and compassion.

Maltese is fascinating precisely because it is Arabic that has developed over the past 700 years in a Christian European context. Why not wear this mantle with pride, instead of fishing around for fables?