www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Identity Among Middle East Christians

Identity Among Middle East Christians

By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi on 1.5.12
The American Spectator

What's accounts for clear examples of their strong loyalty to Islamic regimes?

More at http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/05/identity-among-middle-east-chr

I think this is only partially correct, and underestimates the kind of large-scale Stockholm Syndrome that habitual dhimmitude instills in subject peoples. When Arab nationalism (Pan-Arabism, Nasserism) arose in the 1960s, it was seen by a number of Middle Eastern Christians as a way out of the conundrum of being Christians in a Muslim world--secular Arab regimes would accept them, if they accepted Arab identity and assimilated into the new pan-Arab polity.

But this was flawed from two standpoints: first, pan-Arabism was an artificial construct that had no foundation in a world where the largest reliable political entity is the tribe or the clan; second, the Arabs knew full well that the Christians weren't Arabs, hence would never accept them as such. The Christians thus fell into the same trap as the Jews did in 19th century Germany and Austria: The Jews thought that by assimilating and abandoning various aspects of their culture and faith, they would be regarded as "good Germans". It worked up to a point--but, when push came to shove, nothing a Jew did could ever make him a "real" German. And nothing a Middle Eastern Christian can do will ever make him a "real" Arab.

Chilling to even consider, but the parallels are undeniable. We must pray for Christians in the Middle East, and assist them however possible. As history has shown, their survival may depend on it! Lest we forget also that not so long ago, our relatives and friends in Eastern Europe went through their own trials and tribulations under oppression ...

I'd second Stuart. Other things I might add:

- the regimes that have been overthrown in the past year are not islamist, but secularist in their ostensible ideology.

- many of these regimes (to include the Assad regime) intentionally lay the groundwork for, and sometimes stoke, sectarianism among minority groups, among rich/poor, elites/excluded, etc. because a nation rife with intercommunal tension is easier to control. It also allows you to buy off these groups, and say "if I lose power you will lose, so you'd better support me". This tactic is especially useful with a Catholic minority because this essentially forces Rome (and thereby some amount of westerners) to advocate for things that aid the regime's #1 priority, staying in power.

- as far as Syrian bishops, Catholic or Orthodox, supporting the regime, I think they basically have no choice. The case of the Ecumenical Patriarchate during the last two centuries of Ottoman rule is instructive: the Patriarchate was hostage to the regime. Its worldly interests were set with the regime, and even if that's ignored a revolt would only get the Church in trouble (often killed by the regime) and cause suffering/pogroms for the Orthodox still under Muslim rule. (moreover, the revolt in this case was based on anti-Christian ideologies).

So, the Patriarchate often, and I believe consistently, backed the Ottoman regime until the end, even if the Patriarch was sympathetic to the revolt. There was literally no other option.

And for all its efforts, the Patriarchate was still considered anti-Turkish fifth column for Greece by the Turkish masses, leading to its post-Ottoman troubles (which was far more disastrous for the Greeks under Republican Turkish rule than Ottoman rule ever was). I'm not saying that Ottoman rule was better, but simply that the Patriarchate's only option was the status quo.

Stuart, I do have Christian Arab background, from the Ghassanids' (or Jafanids') Yemenite beduinic tribe. They emmigrated to the Levant in the 3rd century and they were the first beduinics to convert to Christianism. It's also worth of note the Ghassanids (in Arabic Benu Ghassan), according to the article of our Patriarch Gregory III about the Patriarch of West, disposed from something very peculiar: they're under the jurisdiction of a mobile exarchate, called "ethnarchate", and of a mobile exarch, who followed them in their migratory movements. That fact in the article helped the Patriarch to proove his thesis about the "mobile jurisdiction": the jurisdiction is linked to its people and it will follows them wherever they go, even to the immigration.

More about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassanids

And list of families descending from Benu Ghassan:

Many families of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine trace their roots to the Ghassanid dynasty, including the families : ( Alphabatically ) Abla, Abou Haidar, Al Ashkar, Al-Khazen, Al-Zoghbi, Aranki, Atiyah, Ayoub, Ammari, Aridah, Azar, Babun, Batarseh, Barsa, Barakat, Baqaeen, Bayouth,Boutros, Chakar, Chalhoub,Daher, Dibh, Fares, Farah, Farhat, Farhoud,Frangieh, Gharios, Ghanem, Ghanma, Ghannoum, Gholmia, Ghulmiyyah, Habib, Hazboun, Hanna, Hamra, Howayek, Haddad, Hattar, Haddadin, Hbeish, Hellou, Hilweh, Ishaq, Jabara (Jebara or Gebara, Gibara), Jreisat, Kakish, Kandil, Karadsheh,Kawar , Khazens, Khoury, Lahd, Maalouf, Madi, Madanat, Makhlouf, Matar, Mebarak,Moghabghab, Mokdad,Nasir, Nawfal (of Tripoli), Nayfeh, Naber, Nimri, Obeid, Oweis, Rached, Rafeedie/Rafidi, Rahhal, Razook, Rebeiz/Rbeiz/Rubeiz, Rihani/Rayahin, Rukab, Saab, Saad,Saah, Salama, Saliba, Samara, Sawalha, Samawi, Sarkis,Sayegh,Saig, Shammas, Sheiks Chemor, Semaan (of Kaftoun), Sfeir, Shdid, Smeirat, Sweiss, Sweidan, Theeba, Tyan ,Qumsieh and Youssef.

And by chance I read a digest of two speeches given by the Patriarch Gregory in 2005 and 06 about his conception of "Church of Arabs". It's not necessarily related to ethnics, although in the reality it is!


And in the conclusion, stressing the role of the Arab Christian:

The half of my family that no longer exists thought much the same thing about their relationship as Jews living in Germany. His Beatitude is quite right that there are numerous Muslims who are not Arabs; where it is possible to distinguish between those who are ethnically Arab Muslims and those who are non-Arab Muslims, the former uniformly treat the latter with contempt (ask the Muslims of Darfur, or the Druze of Syria, or the Kurds of Iraq whether their religion insulated them from Arab oppression). In cases where such distinctions are difficult to make, Arabs usually extend the benefit of the doubt (i.e., where there are no discernible physical, cultural or linguistic differences).

But His Beatitude overlooks one utterly inconvenient fact: The Arabs know full well that everyone who is an indigenous Christian is not an Arab. The Patriarch is also a day late and a dollar short: Pan-Arabism is a failed ideology, repudiated even by its supposed expositors, the Ba'athists of Syria and Iraq, and the Nasserists of Egypt, more than a generation ago (for one good reason: it could not deliver on the promises it made). Of the three three regimes that formed the United Arab Republics (the very name sounds quaint today), only that of Baby Assad remains. That the chancery of the Patriarchate is in Damascus must always be taken into account when reading statements from it pertaining to Christian-Arab relations.

Who are these Arabs you keep citing as your authorities? Confusion seems to overshadow them.

As was pointed out to you, many indigneous Christians are Arabs, and have been before the rise of Islam. Irfan Shahid has documented much on them from the 4-7th centuries in his series on their interrelations between them and New Rome ("Byzantium and the Arabs"). My prayer has the dedication from the Metropolitan of Beirut, to "the Christians who pronounce the Daad", i.e. real Arabs. Your comparison with the Jews in Germany overlooks one utterly inconvenient fact: the Jews were not, from origins/genetics/descent etc. German. The Jews wandered in Sinai, not in the Volkswanderung. They adopted German in only creating Yiddish. Arab Christians did not create our own language:we kept the one we spoke with the pagans and then the Muslims. In fact, Christian Arabs led the way in the modernization of Arabic and the creation of the Arab press.

There are Muslims who are ethnically Arab, but there is no such thing as a ethnically Muslim Arab, unless you are making a comparison with "ethnically (i.e. nominally) Jewish," in which case there are "ethnically Christian Arabs" as well (a priest at the local Antiochian parish used to call them "non-Muslims", which fit). Btw, the Druze come from the same gene pool that everyone else in Syria spilled out of. Only there religion sets them apart.

Since the constitutions of Syria, Iraq (and for the time being) Egypt define Syria, Iraq and Egypt as part of the Arab Nation, and dedicating their state to "complete unity" of that Nation, can you cite something official on this repudiation by Pan-Arabism's "supposed expositors"?
The Asad regime had no part in forming the United Arab Republic. In fact, daddy Asad, who had been posted to Egypt in the air force before the UAR (he shot down a plane in the British invasion of Suez), had been transferred to a rural area in Egypt for opposing the UAR concentration of power in Nasser, and Asad was imprisioned at the withdrawal of Syria from the UAR. The Ba'th came to power in 1963 after overthrowing the regime which pulled Syria out, and Asad wouldn't come to power until after a series of several coups until 1970, IOW almost a decade after Syria pulled out of the UAR.

Pan-Arabism delivered far more on its promises than the Islamists' will. "Islam is the solution." Let us see it solve something.

Have you read my post before the last, Stuart? I said my antecessors had, if not completely, a great part of Arab blood, as many Christians families in Middle East (as we can in the list I presented), specially in Syria, Galilee and Jordan.

Anyway, the concept "Church of Arabs", as I wanted to mean, according to His Beatitude, does not require necessarily that its integrants have Arab ethnics, as in the same way "Church of Islam" does not suppose the existence of something similar to "Muslim-Christians". But more than a possibly Pan-arabism, our Patriarch wants to invite us to rediscover our historical belonginess to those Holy Lands and our historical conviviality with Islam (see the last paragraph of the 2nd quote of H. Beatitude).

For what it's worth:

My son, a freshman at the University of Southern California, has a roommate from Lebanon and is Muslim. So when my son said, "Oh, you're Arab," he politely corrected him. No, said the roommate, "I'm Lebanese, Arabs are from Saudi Arabia or the UAE (United Arab Emirates). That I speak Arabic, doesn't make me any more Arab, than you're being English because you speak English."

The roommate attended an English boarding school in Saudi Arabia, and he told my son that the Saudis look down their noses upon other non-Arab Muslims, and non-Arabs are those who are not ethnically Saudi nor UAE.

For Christians of the Middle East, I know of none who would consider themselves Arabs. I was corrected by a Melkite brother deacon, who also said that just because he converses in Arabic and has an Arabic name that does not make him a Christian Arab.

I read your posting, Philippe, but the Ghassanids constituted only a very small percentage of the overwhelmingly Christian population of the province Rome called Syria in the 7th century. Moreover, during the period between the migration in the 3rd century and the Muslim Conquest in the 7th, the Ghassanids intermarried with the Syro-Phoenician-Greek population and became assimilated into it. The genes don't lie, which is why most people hate genetic testing.

Interesting. What genetic testing would you suggest to test whether someone is American or not?

The Ghassanids were not the only Christian Arabs in Greater Syria, just the paramount tribe acting as foederati in the 7th century. Taghlib, Tanukh, Iyyad...there were plenty of others.

But back to the DNA: as the saying attributed to the Muslim Prophet says "The Arabism of anyone of you is not from your mother or father. It is no more than a tongue [i.e. language]. Whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab." He was wrong, in that those who speak Arabic but don't derive their identity from it are not Arabs, but he was correct on the genetic component. In fact, according to Arab explanations of our founding, the "Real Arabs" died out, and the rest of us are merely "Arabized." No one, for instance, claims that Abraham was Arab. How do you genetically test for language?

Sounds like he has some issues with the "Gulfies" (khawaalij):they can be as snobbish as some English looking down on the Britishness of the Scotsmen, although the Scotts are as Anglo-Saxon as the English. Purity of descent was/is valued, but as everyone knows that the caliphs on down intermarried, it is by no means a bar to "Arabness."

Many Arabs would would disagree with the roommate's assessment:Michel Aflaq, the Arab Orthodox founder of the Ba'th party would, as would the Muslim Sati' al-Husri, an founder of national education not only in Turkey (under the Ottomans) but in the Arab world (serving on the ministeries of education of several Arab states). Sati' al-Husri had been courted by the Turks to come on their side of the border (his mother tongue was Turkish, and he spoke Arabic with a thick Turkish accent), but he took it as a given that he was Arab (he was born in Yemen, to an Ottoman family from Aleppo, and grew up in Constantinople). He states he learned the power of drawing a national identity from language watching the competing Orthodox schools of the Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians, Romanians and Greeks in Macedonia (where he served in the Ottoman ministry of education), and singled out the re-establishment of the autocephaly of Patriarchate of Antioch as "the first victory of Arab nationalism." He also said, directly to the roommates contention:

"Every Arab-speaking people is an Arab people. Every individual belonging to one of these Arabic-speaking peoples is an Arab. And if he does not recognize this, and if he is not proud of his Arabism, then we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand. It may be an expression of ignorance; in that case we must teach him the truth. It may spring from an indifference or false consciousness; in that case we must enlighten him and lead him to the right path. It may result from extreme egoism; in that case we must limit his egoism. But under no circumstances, should we say: "As long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab." He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes. Whether ignorant, indifferent, undutiful, or disloyal, he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feeling, and perhaps even without conscience. "

I don't agree with his determinism, but he was able to put his views into the curriculum of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.


Besides Aflaq and myself, I know lots of Arab Christians/Christian Arabs. Met. George Khodr (who wrote the dedication of my prayer book to "the Christians Arabs"), the Christians who brought about the "Nahdah" Arab Renaissance.

Are there Arabic speaking Christians with Arabic names who deny this? Sure. Do they speak for all of us? No.

I remember one time being in the Middle Eastern Studies lounge at the U of C, when someone made the statement that the problems in the Middle East come from the fact that no one knows what they are. "No," I stated "we all know what we are with certainty. The problem comes that we do not agree on what we are."

Interesting posts Deacon John (about your son's roomate) and IAlmisry... What do you identify yourself as IAlmisry?

Arab Orthodox.

Shlomo Lkhoolkhoon,
What I have noticed is that we Christians from the Middle East and North African decent, are willing to call ourselves Arabs based on the distance from immigration from the thoses lands. I am a Maronite, but I have no problem calling myself an Arab. I am third generation, so the politics of idenity there is not my issue. Here in the West it is more the issue of race. I.am listed as "white" while I look African-American, whereas I know Egyptians that are listed as "black" even though they could pass for someone of European heritage.

Saying I am an Arab, Lebanese, or even Phoenican are almost all the same to me.

Fush BaShlomo Lkhoolkhoon,
Yuhannon

As I keep telling you, my German Jewish relatives made the same mistake. I hope you don't learn of your error the way they did.

I'm looking through all the locations of the respondents, and I'm at a loss, given that everyone is in the West, what "error" we're supposed to learn, and what mistake we are committing.