The Palestinians were the most educated people in the ME even before the Hebrews arrived in the peninsula.
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Arab Christians - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arab Christians (Arabic: العرب المسيحيين Al-'Arab Al-Masihiyin) are ethnic Arabs of Christian faith,[8] sometimes also including those, who are identified with Arab panethnicity. They are the remnants of ancient Arab Christian clans or Arabized Christians (Melchites). Many of the modern Arab Christians are descendants of pre-Islamic Christian Arabian tribes, namely the Kahlani Qahtani tribes of ancient Yemen (i.e. Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Banu Judham). During the 5th and 6th centuries the Ghassanids, who adopted Monophysite Christianity, formed one of the most powerful Arab confederations allied to Christian Byzantium, being a buffer against the pagan tribes of Arabia. The last king of the Lakhmids, Nu'man III, a client of the Sasanian (Persian) Empire in the late sixth century AD, also converted to Christianity (in this case, to the Nestorian sect).[9][verification needed] Arab Christians played important roles in Al-Nahda, and because Arab Christians formed the educated upper and bourgeois classes, they have had a significant impact in politics, business and culture, and most important figures of the Al-Nahda movement were Christian Arabs.[10] Today Arab Christians play important roles in the Arab world, and Christians are relatively wealthy, well educated, and politically moderate.[11]
Arab Christians, forming Greek Orthodox (including Arab Orthodox) and Latin Christian communities, are estimated to be 200,000 in Syria, a hundred thousand in Jordan and an equal number or more among the Palestinian Arab population and within the Arab-Israeli population,[3] with a sizeable community in Lebanon and marginal communities in Iraq and Egypt. Emigrants from Arab Christian communities make up a significant proportion of the Middle Eastern diaspora, with sizeable population concentrations across the Americas, most notably in Chile and the US. Arab Christians term is also generally applied to Arabized Melkite societies in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, who trace their roots to Greek and Aramaic-speaking Byzantine Christians.[citation needed] Some Arab Christians are a more recent end result of Evangelization.
Arab Christians are not the only Christian group in the Middle East, with significant non-Arab indigenous Christian communities of ethnic Assyrians, Armenians, Georgians, Greeks and others. Besides those, large ethno-religious Middle Eastern Christian groups such as Copts and Maronites are being argued with a great deal of controversy whether their ethnic identity is Arab or not. Even though sometimes classified as Arab Christians, the largest Middle Eastern Christian groups of Lebanese Maronites and Egyptian Copts often claim non-Arab ethnicity: significant proportion of the Maronites claim descent from ancient Phoenicians, while some Egyptian Copts also eschew an Arab identity, preferring an Ancient Egyptian one. However, both Maronites and Copts had lost their linguistic differentiation during the Ottoman period in favor of the Arabic language. The Syriac Christian groups, composed largely of Chaldo-Assyrians, form the majority of Christians in Iraq, north east Syria, south-east Turkey and north-west Iran. They are generally defined as non-Arab ethnic groups, including by the governments of Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Assyrians practice their own native dialects of Syriac-Aramaic language, in addition to also speaking local Arabic dialects. Despite their ancient pre-Arabic roots and distinct linguo-cultural identities,[12] Assyro-Chaldeans are sometimes incorrectly related by Western sources as "Christians of the Arab World" or "Arabic Christians", creating confusion about their identity.[13] Assyrians were also related as "Arab Christians" by pan-Arab movements and Arab-Islamic regimes against their will.[14][15]
