I thought the character was Punjabi, or maybe Baluchi or Sindhi. They were never terribly clear what ethnicity Bashir was. Hell, they didn't know--right before filming, he was named Julian Amoros, which is a pretty goofy name that I hope to God they wouldn't have stooped so low as to use for a pun.
Even the actors of the Bashir family make it unclear--Siddig's English-Arab, his father was portrayed by an Israeli with an Indian background, and his mom was an Egyptian.
It's kinda cool, since Sisko is unequivocally black American, O'Brien unequivocally Irish, Keiko unequivocally Japanese, Kira's probably unequivocally the ethnicity that occupies whatever hyperborean wasteland Bajor's analogues of Europeans come from, and Bashir's this big melting pot of ethnicities spanning five thousand miles.
I was rereading Imperial Earth the other night, and it occurred to me that Clarke's Earth of the 26th century in that novel really went for the Roddenberrian imperative, a miscegenationist wonderland that had deracinated itself through the power of lots of sex. It's too bad that production and hiring realities on a TV show don't really permit a depiction of that kind of demographically null society, since of course our society is not that society.
