The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> A Christian Arab exposes it all

A Christian Arab exposes it all
Posted by AssyrianMuslim (Guest) - Tuesday, May 13 2008, 10:17:21 (CEST)
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By Raja Mattar

A few weeks ago I received by email an article by a Dr. Walid Phares titled “Arab Christians who are they?” Initially I brushed it off as rather inconsequential, but it subsequently came to my attention that Dr. Phares is promoting some rather bizarre ideas about Arab Christians on the lecture and TV circuit in the U.S., contesting their Arab ethnicity and claiming their persecution by Muslims. Being an Arab Christian myself, I would like to use some of the views of Dr. Phares as an entry point to highlight the falsities being promulgated by him and a few others under the guise of scholarly studies. Sadly, many of these anti-Arab activists fit the characterization of ‘self-hating Arabs’

Arab Christians have always existed in the Middle East, and long before the advent of Islam. In Lebanon today they number about 1.3 million (about one-third of the population) mainly of Maronite denomination. In Syria they number approximately two million (or about 10% of the population) which include a significant community of Maronites. In Egypt, Christians, mostly Copts, are about 4.5 million, or about 6% of the population. There are one million in Iraq of various denominations, or about 4% the population. The Christians of Palestine and Jordan may number 600,000, but so many population shifts had taken place that it is difficult to venture a reliable estimate.

The Christians of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine played a pioneering role in reviving Arab culture from the comatose state it was in under the Ottomans. The renaissance of Arab culture owes a great deal to the many Christian Arab scholars who were among the forerunners in shaping Arab national identity. The Maronites role, in particular, was of major cultural importance. In Lebanon they are the backbone of its cultural diversity. A Saudi friend once commented that if the Maronites did not exist we would have to invent them!

There have been occasional claims that the Maronites can trace their ancestry to Phoenicians. This is a myth intended to distance the Maronites from their Arab roots. The Maronites were inhabitants of Orontes (Al-Assi) valley in Syria. They are most probably descendants of some Arab tribes who never converted to Islam. The eminent Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi (incidentally, a Christian) in his ‘A House of Many Mansions’ [1988] states (ch. 6): “It is very possible that the Maronites, as a community of Arabian origin, were among the last Arabian Christian tribes to arrive in Syria before Islam…. Certainly, since the 9th Century, their language has been Arabic, which indicates that they must have originated as an Arab tribal community…. The fact that Syriac remains the language of their liturgy… is irrelevant. Syriac, which is the Christian literary form of Aramaic, was originally the liturgical language of all the Arab and Arameo-Arab Christian sects, in Arabia as well as in Syria and Iraq.” Salibi also notes (in ch. 4), that Patriarch Istifan Duwayhi, a Maronite historian of the 17th Century, points out that the Maronites “had to move their seat out of the valley of the Orontes to Mount Lebanon as a result of Byzantine, not Muslim persecution.” Salibi further goes on to say: “Between 969 and 1071… the Byzantines were in actual control of the Orontes valley…. They must have subjected the Maronites to enough persecution to force them to abandon the place and join their co-religionists in Mount Lebanon…. In Muslim Aleppo, however, the community survived, as it does to this day.” El Hassan Bin Talal (former Crown Prince of Jordan and a prominent scholar) in his “Christianity in the Arab World” [1994] (ch. 7), emphasizes: “It is possible that the Maronite Church would not have survived the Byzantine re-conquests in Syria between the 10th and 11th Centuries… had the Byzantines … succeeded in occupying the whole of Syria, leaving no parts under Muslim rule, where dissident Christian groups could find refuge from Byzantine persecution.”

I hope we can put to rest the myth of the Maronites as descendants of the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians lived mainly on the coasts of Lebanon and Syria. If one wants to belabour the subject their descendants are obviously the coast dwellers, mainly the Sunnis. In any case, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote in the 5th Century BC, that the Phoenicians themselves were Arab tribes from the Arabian shores of the Red Sea

Dr. Phares in his article mentions “pogroms of the Copts in Egypt”. This a serious and misleading accusation. The term pogrom means organized and systematic killing of an ethnic group usually sanctioned by the government. There may have been occasional sectarian clashes, but I have yet to come across a historical record to the effect that the Copts, or any other Arab Christian group for that matter, having been the target of pogroms. (The only recorded massacre of Christians was in 1860 in Mount Lebanon, and the origin of that unfortunate event was a social rebellion by Maronite serfs against their Druze overlords). Pogroms were an invention of Christian rulers in Europe, mostly directed against Jews - for which Palestinian Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, have been paying dearly as the Christian West tries to atone for its sins at their expense. This Western guilt complex, nurtured continuously by Zionist propaganda, has resulted in a tomblike silence over the atrocities perpetrated by Israel over the past 60 years.

It is often mentioned that the Copts of Egypt are descendants of the Pharaohs. But so much history had elapsed between the disappearance of the Pharaohs and the arrival of Islam, that this claim appears questionable, and in any case the Muslims of Egypt have every bit as much right to it, if indeed that claim is anything more than intellectual hair-splitting

The article in question also claims that the Christians remaining in Palestine “are experiencing one of their most severe choices: surrender to Islamization, or join the pan-Middle East Christian boat….” This is a flagrant a distortion of reality. Palestinian Christians are not suffering at the hands of the Muslims, but at the hands of the Israelis, and the bullet-scarred statue of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is a poignant testimony to this fact. We are witnessing before our very eyes the gradual de-Christianization and de-Islamization of Arab Jerusalem due to persistent Israeli measures aimed at deliberately destroying the Arab character of the City, while the Western world, spearheaded by successive U.S. Administrations, displays utter insensitivity, if not outright acquiescence, to this demographic crime.

Dr. Phares talks about the Muslims “demonizing those who have formed their national state, Israel.” He seems to believe, along with many others, that the Jews of Palestine were a large community dispersed by the Romans and now entitled to return to their ‘homeland’. According to Israel Finkelstein, an Israeli Archaeologist, in his monumental work ‘The Bible Unearthed’ [2001], the Hebrews were never a large community, never had a substantial kingdom, never were in Egypt (the exodus from Egypt is just a myth). The number of Jews dispersed by the Romans from Palestine was minimal; most Jews remained in Palestine, some gradually became Christians, and, some further on, Muslims.

The Arabian Desert and the area around it gave birth to a number of tribes and civilizations - Phoenicians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Hebrews, Canaanites, Nabateans, etc. These tribes continuously drifted out of the desert into the fertile areas of the Levant and the Nile valley. Their languages were very similar, one could even call them dialects of the same language. Even present-day Hebrew shares remarkable similarities with Arabic. These tribes had different religions. At one time most were pagan, some were Jewish. With the advent of Christianity some became Christian. Thus Christianity was not an ethnic denomination but a religion adopted by many of these tribes. Many of the great Arab poets of pre-Islamic times were Christian, (Imru’-al-Qays, Amr ibn-Kulthum, Tarafa ibn al-Abed, among others.

The language prevalent in the Arab world today is called Arabic, but it is no more than the dialect of one major Arab tribe, Qureish, which became the language of the Qur'an. That language spread like wildfire in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and northern Egypt because the people in these areas were effectively already speaking dialects of the same language.

What used to be known as Bilad Al Sham (Greater Syria, if you will) was Arabized long before Islam. To quote Salibi again (ch. 5): “Since pre-Islamic times, Mount Lebanon appears to have been densely populated by Arab tribes.…” In ch. 7: “To maintain that the Syrians came to be Arabized after the conquest of their Country by the Muslim Arabs was simply not correct, because Syria was already largely inhabited by Arabs – in fact, Christian Arabs – long before Islam.”

When Islam expanded out of Arabia into what is now called the Middle East, most oriental Christians (Monophysites, Maronites, Nestorians) were in deep political and theological conflict with Byzantium. Many gradually converted to Islam, including the largest Arab tribe, the Taghlebs, who converted sometimes in the 10th Century. These Christian Arab tribes may have found in Islam with its insistence on the indivisibility of God (“La Ilah Illa Allah” meaning ‘There is no God, but God’) a simplified version of their faith. The process involved no coercion. The only battles that took place were with the Byzantines. Most Christian Arabs - in fact all, except the Melchites who were allied theologically with the Byzantine Church) - cooperated actively with the Muslims, with many actually fighting alongside the Muslims (folklore has it that the Arab saying: “My brother and I against my cousin, and my cousin and I against the foreigner” dates from this period).

Numerous small, dissident Christian sects – among them the Copts and the Maronites - survived and even prospered under Islamic rule, while their equivalents in Christian Europe disappeared under official persecution. Many researchers going through the tax records (the Zakat paid by the Muslims as compared to the tribute, called the Jizya, paid by non-Muslims, mostly Christian) of the early Islamic rule of Syria and Egypt came to the conclusion that as late as the 12th Century, i.e. six centuries after the rise of Islam, the majority of the population of Syria and Egypt was Christian, hardly indicative of any Islamic coercion to convert.

A quote from the eminent Bertrand Russell, a Nobel Prize winner, may be in order at this point:

I have always been told throughout my youth of the fanaticism of the Mohammedans, and especially that story of the destruction of the library at Alexandria. Well, I believed all these stories, but when I came to look into the history of the times concerned, I had a great many shocks. In the first place, I discovered that the library of Alexandria was destroyed a great many times, and the first time was by Julius Caesar. But the last time was supposed to have been by the Mohammedans, and for this I found no justification whatsoever. Nor did I find that the Mohammedans were fanatical. The contests between Catholics, Nestorians, and Monophysites were bitter and persecuting to the last degree. But the Mohammedans, when they conquered Christian countries, allowed the Christians to be perfectly free, provided they pay a tribute. The only penalty for being a Christian was that you had to pay a tribute that Mohammedans did not have to pay. This proved completely successful, and the immense majority of the population became Mohammedans, but not through any fanaticism on the part of the Mohammedans. On the contrary they, in the earlier centuries of their power, represented free thought and tolerance to a degree that the Christians did not emulate until quite recent times. Bertrand Russell (Eng. philosopher, 1872-1970): "Reading History As It Is Never Written" [1959].


I think it be fair to say that nazis like Jumblat get all their lies from their bigot priests and not from reliable sources. Here is an Arab Christian who has nothing invested in defending Muslims but is honest enough to accept the real picture. There are some Christian Arabs just like these Syriac Christians who like to paint a false image that they are persecuted and terrorized by Islam but their claims always prove false when investigated. Here is a free and open forum and not one of them has been able to even provide one piece of evidence where Muslims killed others just for their faith or forcefully convert Christians to Islam. Just like their claims that Christians in Iraq are victims of Islamic terrorism and are frequently pressured into converting to Islam, all these claims are lies and unsupported. It's not like Muslims are that desperate to forcefully convert a few thousand Christians to Islam against their own will. As if they didn't have enough time and power to have forcefully converted every freaking Syriac Christian to Islam that they suddenly want to do it during this war.

I guess 1,400 years of power was not enough time to convert and kill every Syriac Nestorian, Chaldean and whatever else so Muslims are now desperately trying to forcefully convert all Christians in Iraq to Islam. Such a thing is completely unacceptable and Muslims are not that stupid as Jumbo Gumbo like to pretend that they would force someone to convert knowing that his/her heart is unwilling. What would be the point in that? That is known by Christianity since that is a system with which people are kept down, enslaved and controlled by the church and governments. I think the lies need to be put to rest because they are not going anywhere.



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