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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 Moslems. 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 reconquests 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 belabor 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 Moslem, 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 Moslems of Egypt have every bit as much right to it,
if indeed that claim is anything more than intellectual
hair-splitting.
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 Quran. 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.”
Is there such a
thing as an Arab ethnicity at present? I think not.
There is no group of people in the world that can claim
pure ethnicity, except perhaps in some remote islands.
Let me take as an example France, which is proud of its
cultural, historic, and moral heritage. Most of Southern
France is Italian in its ethnic origins; farther west it
is Basque; up north, it is Breton and Norman. Paris was
a haven for refugees throughout its history. Even
Napoleon, to whom the French pay homage, was from Italo-French
Corsica. Can one claim that there is such a thing as,
ethnically, a French race?
There is, however, such a
thing as an Arab culture. Apart from the obvious racial
minorities (Christians and animists in Southern Sudan,
Kurds in Syria and Iraq, Berbers in North Africa, and a
few others), the rest of the population is culturally
Arab. Culture is the language they speak, the poetry
they recite, the songs they sing, the foods they eat,
the music they dance to, and the history they share.
Arabs - Moslems and Christians - have their hands full
right
now
trying to field the onslaught of Zionist and
neo-conservative propaganda spewing out of the West,
without having to contend with a contingent of
self-hating Arabs
in their midst.
In this charged political atmosphere of demonization of
Arabs and Islam, we should reclaim our role as
defenders, interpreters, interlocutors, spokespersons of
our geographical hinterland, of our Arab
depth.
We have helped the nascent Arab empire in its early
years gain access to the Greek classics, we have helped
reawaken Arab identity from its Ottoman stupor. Let us
not allow Western and/or
Israeli fundamentalists to cast a pall over it again.
When the crusaders entered Jerusalem in 1099, we, Arab
Christians, were massacred along with the Moslems. The
brutality in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan clearly
demonstrates that the morality of the new crusaders is
no better than the morality of those who came here
centuries ago.
Raja G. Mattar is a former Middle East regional manager
of a multinational company and is currently a business
consultant living in Beirut. He can be contacted at
ranimar@cyberia.net.lb |
