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Arab flags

WWI Arab Revolt flag against Turks, by roy stilling 13-DEC-1995

Muhammad is said to have had a white banner and a black banner. The Ummayads settled on white; the Abbasids on black. The Fatimids opted for green, claiming it was the Prophet's favorite colour. Gulf emirates for some reason picked red. (In fact until the 19th century the monochrome red flags were undifferentiated, but then they added white borders, hoists, stripes, script, etc.) These four colours are considered "pan-Arab", but not necessarily representing Arab Nationalism such as the Egyptian, Ba'ath, etc. Modern states have added their own symbolic meanings to these colours.
The flag of Sharif Husain of Hejaz, which became the popular flag of the Arab Revolt, was black, green, white stripes with a red triangle in the hoist. This was a conscious union of the old Islamic dynasties, plus the red of Sharifian clan. The red also came to symbolise revolt against the Turks. Husain's 3 sons became kings of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, hence the minor differentiations in the Sharifian flag. Husain's original intent was for his flag to be identical in those 3 countries with the addition of one star for Jordan-Palestine, two stars for Iraq, and three stars for Syria. The Jordanian one is the only that has survived, and the Palestinians use the same flag without the star as a tie to their original territorial integrity. (Palestine and Transjordan were split in 1923 to clarify that a Jewish homeland did not apply to the latter.) In 1961 Kuwait switched from its red Gulf flag to a Sharifian variant.
The Egyptian revolution of 1953 gave birth to the "Arab Liberation Flag" wherein the pan-Arab red-white-black tricolour took on new meaning. Black stands for the past history of foreign oppression, white stands for the bright future, and red stands for the bloody sacrifice required to get from the black to the white. Radical states (e.g. Ba'athists) have adopted variants while preserving the basic symbolism.
The stars that serve to differentiate most of these flags have practical meanings. The Sharifian flags have seven-pointed stars symbolising the seven fundamental verses of the first Surah of the Q'ran. The Arab Liberation flags have five-pointed stars: The UAR flag of 1958 had two stars (in green to restore the missing pan-Arab colour) representing Egypt and Syria. In 1962 the Yemen Arab Republic (North) adopted a one-star version (representing unity and independence). In 1967 the People's Democratic Republic of South Yemen adopted a version with one red star on a light blue triangle (the star being the National Liberation Front leading the blue people). United Yemen's flag in 1990 is a plain tricolour with no stars. In 1963 Syria and Iraq switched to 3 stars to represent pan-Arab (Ba'athist) solidarity (and Iraq alone has that flag today). In 1972 Egypt, Syria and Libya formed the Federation of Arab Republics incorporating the hawk (not eagle) of the Quraish, which represents the tribe of Muhammad, instead of stars. The Federation did not last long, and Syria in 1980 reverted back to the two-star UAR flag, and Libya in 1977 switched to a plain green flag (representing the "green revolution".)
Obviously there's more (like fluctuation in the order of the Sharifian stripes), but those are the main threads and patterns to Arab flag history.
t.f. mills