Arab Christians

All you want to know about Arab Christians

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Arab Christians and Arabic-speaking Christians
مسيحيون عرب ومسيحيون ناطقون بالعربية
Total population
Founder
Regions with significant populations
Egypt:
8,171,352 to 18,000,000[1][2]

Syria:
2,000,000 [3]
Lebanon:
1,600,000 [4]
Iraq:
  850,000[5]
Jordan:
370,000.[6]
Brazil:
12,000,000[citation needed]
Canada:
   200,000[7]
Australia:
   140,000[8][9]
Israel:
  117,000[10]
Religions
Christianity
Scriptures
The Bible
Languages
Arabic

The majority of Arab Christians (Arabic مسيحيون عرب) and Arabic-speaking Christians (Arabic مسيحيون ناطقون بالعربية) live in Southwest Asia and North Africa where significant religious minorities exist in a number of countries. People who speak Arabic as their first language may not necessarily identify as Arabs, but no statistics exist that show how many or which Arabic-speaking Christians identify as Arabs. The largest numbers of Arabic-speaking Christians are found in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel (as well as the Palestinian territories) and Jordan. Emigrant Arab communities throughout the Americas, especially among the Arab populations of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and the United States, are overwhelmingly Christian.

Contents

Identity

  • Not all Arabic-speaking Christians in Southwest Asia and North Africa consider themselves to be Arabs. They may, however, admit the word Arab differently, depending on which aspect of their identity they wish to emphasize (political, linguistic, ethnic, or genealogical). Egyptian Christians, also known as Copts, as well as many Muslim Egyptians do not self-identify as Arabs, although Copts who live in Egypt and other Arabic-speaking countries do speak Arabic. [11][12][13][14][15] Some Lebanese (mainly Maronite) are ethnic Arabs such as the Banu Al-Mashrouki clan of Kahlan; other groups emphasize Lebanon's link to the ancient Phoenicians, Arameans or Mardaites.[citation needed] The Maltese language is considered a descendant of Siculo-Arabic; however the population of Malta forms an independent ethnic group, predominantly characterised by their Roman Catholic faith.

Historically, a number of minority Christian sects that were persecuted as heretical under Byzantine rule (such as Miaphysites) actually began to enjoy more religious freedom under initial Arab Muslim occupation than they had under Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox Christian) rule[citation needed].

History

John of Damascus an Arab monk and presbyter, 7th century

The first Christian ruler in history was an Syriac called Abgar VIII of Edessa, who converted ca. 200 AD[16]. Throughout many eras of history, Arabic-speaking Christians have co-existed fairly peacefully with followers of the other religions of the Arab world (principally Islam and Judaism). Even after the rapid expansion of Islam from the 7th century AD onwards through the Islamic conquests (or Ghazwa), many Christians chose not to convert to Islam and instead maintain their pre-existing beliefs. As "People of the Book", Christians in the region are accorded certain rights by theoretical Islamic law (Shari'ah) to practice their religion free from interference or persecution; that was, however, strictly conditioned with first paying a special amount of money (tribute) obliged from non-Muslims called 'Jizyah' (pronounced Jiz-ya), in form of either cash or goods, usually a wealth of animals, in exchange for their safety and freedom of worship. The tax was not levied on slaves, women, children, monks, the old, the sick,[17][18] hermits, or the poor.[19]

Christian martyr Saint Abo, the patron saint of Tbilisi

Arabic-speaking Christians predate Arabic-speaking Muslims, as there were many Arab tribes which adhered to Christianity since the first century, including the Nabateans and the Ghassanids (who were of Qahtani origin and spoke Yemeni-Arabic as well as Greek), who protected the south-eastern frontiers of the Roman and Byzantine Empires in north Arabia. The tribes of Tayy, Abd Al-Qais, and Taghlib were also known to have included a large number of Christians prior to Islam. The Yemeni city of Najran was also a center of Arabic-speaking Christianity, and were made famous by virtue of their persecution by one of the kings of Yemen , Dhu Nawas, himself an enthusiastic convert to Judaism. The leader of the Arabs of Najran during the period of persection, Al-Harith, was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as St. Aretas.

Arabic-speaking Christians have made significant contributions to Arab civilization and still do. Some of Arab literature's finest poets were Arabic-speaking Christians, and some Arabic-speaking Christians were physicians, writers, government officials, men of letters, and held equally important cultural and scientific roles as their Muslim counterparts.

Arabic-speaking Christians today

Egypt

Main article: Copts

Egypt has the largest number of Arabic-speaking Christians, also known as Copts. Copts, just like Muslim Egyptians, speak a dialect of Arabic known as Egyptian Arabic or Masri, which is heavily influenced by the indigenous Copto-Egyptian language of pre-Islamic Egypt,[20][21][22] and later by other languages such as Turkish, French and English.

The See of the Church of Alexandria is one of the four original Sees of Christianity, along with Rome, Antioch and Constantinople. The foundation of the Egyptian Church (later called the Coptic Church by the Arabs) dates back to Saint Mark the Apostle in 42 A.D.[23] Today, 95% Copts belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, an Orinetal Orthodox Church.[24] The remainder 5% belong to the Coptic Catholic Church, a uniate church, and to various Protestant churches. It is noteworthy to state that Copts do not self-identify as Arabs and that Copts in the diaspora, numbering about 2 millions,[25] do not speak Arabic. There are also a small number of Protestants because of British rule and a tiny number of Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics, most of them are Greek Egyptians and Italian Egyptians.

Lebanon

Lebanon was initially created by France for the Christians of the region[citation needed], which were the dominant religion thought to be around 80%[citation needed] of the total population, thus making Lebanon the only Arab nation to be dominated by Christians and not Muslims. Lebanon contains the largest number of Christians in proportion to its total population. It is known that they made up around 55% of Lebanon's population before the Lebanese Civil War, but their percentage may be as low as 40% now (2,200,000). They belong largely to the Maronite Church, with a sizable minority belonging to the Greek Orthodox, Melkite Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic Church (due to French rule) among others. There is, however, uncertainty about the exact numbers because an official census has not been taken in Lebanon since 1932.

Lebanon's president must always be a Maronite Catholic Christian.

Syria

In Syria, Christians formed just under 15% of the population (about 1.2 million people) under the 1960 census, but no newer census has been taken. Current estimates put them at about 10% of the population (2,100,000), due to lower rates of birth and higher rates of emigration than their Muslim compatriots.

Jordan

In Jordan, Christians constitute about 7% of the population (about 400,000 people), though the percentage dropped sharply from 18% in the early beginning of the twentieth century. This drop is largely due to influx of Muslim Arabs from Hijaz after the First World War, the low birth rates in comparison with Muslims and the large numbers of Palestians (85-90% Muslim)who fled to Jordan after 1948. Nearly 70 - 75% of Jordanian Christians belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, while the rest adhere to Catholicism with a small minority adhering to Protestantism. Christians are well integrated in the Jordanian society and have a high level of freedom. Nearly all Christians belong to the middle or upper classes. Moreover, Christians enjoy more economic and social opportunity in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan than elsewhere in Southwest Asia[citation needed]. Although they constitute less then ten per cent of the total population, they have disproportionately large representation in the Jordanian parliament (10% of the Parliament) and hold important government portfolios, ambassadorial appointments abroad, and positions of high military rank.

Jordanian Christians are allowed by the public and private sectors to leave their work to attend Divine Liturgy or Mass on Sundays. All Christian religious ceremonies are publicly celebrated in Jordan. Christians have established good relations with the royal family and the various Jordanian government officials and they have their own ecclesiastic courts for matters of personal status.

Palestinian territories

About 90,000 Palestinian Christians live in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,[26] with about 190,000 Arab Christians living in Israel and an estimated 400,000 Palestinian Christians living in the Palestinian diaspora. Both the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Habash, and the founder if its offshoot, the DFLP, Nayif Hawatmeh, were Christians, as is prominent Palestinian activist and former Palestinian Authority minister Hanan Ashrawi.in Chile 350000

North Africa

There are tiny communities of Roman Catholics in Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Morocco because of French rule for Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, Spanish rule for Morocco, and Italian rule for Libya. Most of the members in North Africa, however, are foreign missionaries or immigrant workers, while only a minority among them are converted Arabs (or their descendants) or descendants of converted Berbers, often brought to Christian (Catholic) belief during the modern era or under French colonialism. Charles de Foucauld was renowned for his missions in North Africa among Muslims, including African Arabs.

Many millions of Arabic-speaking Christians also live in a diaspora elsewhere in the world. These include such countries as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia,Venezuela, Cuba, Dominican Republic and the United States. The majority of self-identifying Arab Americans are Eastern Rite Catholic or Orthodox, according to the Arab American Institute. On the other hand, most American Muslims are black or of South Asian (Indian or Pakistani) origin. There are also many Arabic-speaking Christians in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and France (due to its historical connections with Lebanon).

Doctrine

Like Arab Muslims and Arab Jews, Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God as Allah, since this is the word in Arabic for "God". The use of the term Allah in Arabic-speaking Christian churches predates Islam by several centuries. In more recent times (especially since the mid 1800s), some Arabs from the Levant region have been converted from these native, traditional churches to more recent Protestant ones, most notably Baptist and Methodist churches. This is mostly due to an influx of Western, predominantly American Evangelical, missionaries.

See also

References

  1. ^ Official population counts put the number of Copts at around 6% of the population, while some Coptic voices claim figures as high as 15 to 20%. While some scholars defend the soundness of the official population census (cf. E.J.Chitham, The Coptic Community in Egypt. Spatial and Social Change, Durham 1986), most scholars and international observers assume that the Christian share of Egypt's population is higher than stated by the Egyptian government. Most independent estimates fall within range between 9% and 20%, for example the CIA World Factbook [1], or the Washington Institute [2]. For a projected 83,000,000+ Egyptians in 2008, this assumption yields the above figures.
  2. ^ CIA World Factbook. Egyptian people section
  3. ^ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sy.html (CIA: World Factbook)
  4. ^ CIA - The World Factbook - Lebanon
  5. ^ "Republic of Iraq". Operation World.
  6. ^ CIA - The World Factbook - Jordan
  7. ^ The Canadian Arab Federation & Arab Community Centre of Toronto (1999). "A Profile of Arabs in Canada". Virtual Library. Toronto Centre of Excellence.
  8. ^ "2001 Census: Ancestry - Detailed paper" (PDF). Australian Bureau of Statistics.
  9. ^ "Appendices to Isma". Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Publications Unit.
  10. ^ SOCIETY: Minority Communities, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  11. ^ Copts take it as an insult to be called Arabs
  12. ^ Washington post article stating Copts emphasize their Coptic roots and reject the Arab label
  13. ^ Magdi Khalil, the most renowned contemporary Coptic writer writes that Copts - and even the overwhelming majority of Egypt's Muslims - are Egyptians and do not want to be called Arabs
  14. ^ In 1931, following a visit to Egypt, Syrian Arab nationalist Sati' al-Husri remarked that "[Egyptians] did not possess an Arab nationalist sentiment; did not accept that Egypt was a part of the Arab lands, and would not acknowledge that the Egyptian people were part of the Arab nation". Quoted in Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press. 2003, p. 99
  15. ^ Historian H. S. Deighton writes: "The Egyptians are not Arabs, and both they and the Arabs are aware of this fact. They are Arabic-speaking, and they are Muslim —indeed religion plays a greater part in their lives than it does in those either of the Syrians or the Iraqi. But the Egyptian, during the first thirty years of the [twentieth] century, was not aware of any particular bond with the Arab East... Egypt sees in the Arab cause a worthy object of real and active sympathy and, at the same time, a great and proper opportunity for the exercise of leadership, as well as for the enjoyment of its fruits. But she is still Egyptian first and Arab only in consequence, and her main interests are still domestic". Quoted in Deighton, H. S. "The Arab Middle East and the Modern World", International Affairs, vol. xxii, no. 4 (October 1946), p. 519.
  16. ^ Shahid, Irfan (1984). Rome and The Arabs: A Prolegomenon To The Study Of Byzantium And The Arabs
  17. ^ Shahid Alam, Articulating Group Differences: A Variety of Autocentrisms, Journal of Science and Society, 2003
  18. ^ Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640, Cambridge University Press, Oct 27, 1995, pp. 79-80.
  19. ^ Ali, Abdullah Yusuf (1991). The Holy Quran. Medina: King Fahd Holy Qur-an Printing Complex.
  20. ^ Nishio, Tetsuo. "Word order and word order change of wh-questions in Egyptian Arabic: The Coptic substratum reconsidered". Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of L'Association Internationale pour la Dialectologie Arabe. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. 1996, pp. 171-179
  21. ^ Bishai, Wilson B. "Coptic grammatical influence on Egyptian Arabic". Journal of the American Oriental Society. No.82, pp. 285-289.
  22. ^ Youssef (2003), below.
  23. ^ Eusebius of Caesarea, the author of Ecclesiastical History in the fourth century, states that st. Mark came to Egypt in the first or third year of the reign of Emperor Claudius, i.e. 41 or 43 A.D. "Two Thousand years of Coptic Christianity" Otto F.A. Meinardus p28.
  24. ^ Encyclopedia of the Developing World By Thomas M. Leonard, p 395
  25. ^ [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2008/06/in-the-midst-of.html Los Angeles Times, EGYPT: Coptic diaspora spreads the word, June 24 2008
  26. ^ Don Wagner. "Palestinian Christians: An Historic Community at Risk?". Palestine Center.

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_Christians_and_Arabic-speaking_Christians"

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