I would expect two cultures that can be traced more or less continuously, back to Mesopotamia, to share a lot of linguistic links. Both cultures seem to have sucessfully resisted 'contamination' by Roman influence, for instance. This demonstrates a very strong sense of identity, something sorely lacking in Western cultures.

Our entire modern technological list of achievemnts can be traced back to Arab mathematicians. Without the introduction of such concepts as assigning orders of magnitude to numerical position, and using '0' as a place-holder, we'd still be using knotted strings to count our livestock.

A strange irony is that a sick, twisted, genius like Saddam Hussein now rules in what history tells us was "The Cradle of Civilisation".

I digress...frequently...