Talk:Arab Christians

The cultural appropriation through false identity assignations and "inclusivist non-nationalistic philosophies" (aka the new name for Arabism/Pan-Arabist agenda) that will be stopped here in Wikipedia

Let me specify some things here. I am not religious nor subscribe to any kind of nationalistic ideology, race supremacist ideology, religious community or institution nor any of that crap.

What I do despise is the cultural appropriation through bullshit propaganda such as "Arabism", "Pan-Arabism" and other "Inclusivist non-nationalistic philosophies" which is the latest trend here in Wikipedia in the articles related to Phoenician and Lebanese/Lebanese Christian history including their ancient and modern personalities as well as that of the Lebanese diaspora

Since certain Middle Eastern communities (mainly Arab and non-Arab Muslims, but also Syrian Orthodox Christians, Syrian Muslims and Lebanese Muslims also) seem to feel they have little achievements to show in the last 800 years including their diasporas of the 20th century (and I say seem to be, because that is what their behaviors show) and science and archeology is bringing out more and more truths about the history and legacy of the indigenous people of the Levant, they seem to feel insecure about it and, as they feel the need to improve their PR, they are choosing to just simply steal the history and legacy of other communities (aka the Lebanese Christians) by making a lot of personalities "Arab", or "identifies as Arab".

This "Arab identity assignment" to ancient and modern personalities not only serves great for Arabs and non-Arab muslims in their fake legacy PR campaign but is also being used as a perfect tool by users such as Onceinawhile to make non-Arab Christian people and their descendants look like they all identify as "Arabs" in order to pit non-Arab Christian communities in the Middle East and in the diaspora against other non-Arab Christian communities (aka state of Israel and jews). Onceinawhile has lately become a celebrity outside of Wikipedia for pushing his agenda and "political philosophies" here in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Onceinawhile#Have_you_seen_this?

The usual strategy of the past used to be (although still applied today) was just going around personalities of Lebanese descent in the diaspora and changing them to Syrian descent (and linking it to today's Syrians) or to "Arab descent". One example out of the many I have seen in the past is this user https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Aramerican.

With more editors becoming aware and banning this vandalism with cultural appropriation as its goal on diaspora personalities wikipages, another newer wave of disruptive editors (IP editors and registered ones) has resorted to stealing the legacy of the ancient personalities of Phoenician/Syro-Phoenician descent by adding "Arab", "ethnic Arab", "Nabatean", "Syrian (and linking it to todays Syrians which is not the same as Syro-Phoenicians) plus pushing the idea that certain personalities and the descendants of the diaspora "identify as Arabs".

JJNito197 is using this same cultural appropriation tool here in this page citing personalities in the diaspora as identifying as Arab as well as ancient personalities such as emperor Philip The Arab as someone who was an ethnic Arab or that "identified as Arab eventhough he was a Christian" which is incorrect and total speculation as I have proved and reported here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Philip_the_Arab#None_of_the_sources_cited_really_say_Philip_the_Arab_was_an_%22ethnic_arab%22_and_the_disruptive_edits_on_ancient_personalities_of_Syro-Phoenician_descent_will_be_reported

One example of JJNito197's unsourced additions of modern personalities of the diaspora that "identify as Arab" is Nassim Nicholas Taleb when Nicholas Taleb has himself proclaimed to be completely hardcore Anti-Arab and identifies with the Levantine-Phoenician pre-Arab identity as can be read here http://coevolutionist.com/muse/anti-arab-bigotry-ahistorical/. JJNito197 even added Nicholas Taleb to his little collage that he keeps reworking here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Christians#/media/File:Arab_Christians_alternative_collage.jpg again violating WP:OR

As I said, all disruptive users doing this here in Wikipedia are being reported as already mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Philip_the_Arab#None_of_the_sources_cited_really_say_Philip_the_Arab_was_an_%22ethnic_arab%22_and_the_disruptive_edits_on_ancient_personalities_of_Syro-Phoenician_descent_will_be_reported Chris O' Hare (talk) 21:44, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Chris O' Hare, it is impossible for this discussion to progress unless you can assume good faith and avoid personal attacks. Wikipedia is about collaborating with people with diverse viewpoints. Are you willing to collaborate? Onceinawhile (talk) 22:30, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

The Christians of the Levant from the Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Maronite Catholic denominations are ethnic Arabs--they are native Arabic-speakers who are genetically a mix different elements (as are all the other Arabs), in which the Arabic element is the one most prominent--there is no such thing as a pure Arab; these denominations stemmed from the same stock, a stock different from that of the Eastern Syriac Churches (Syriac/Assyrian/Chaldean). Unlike European colonists, the Arabian conquerors weren't colonialists who simply assimilated indigenous populations, instead the Arab tribes, Christians (in the Levant) and Muslims (all over what would later become the Arab world), mixed with the closely-realted Syro-Arabian/Semitic and Afro-Asiatic indigenous populations; the Arabs, relatively-speaking, didn't mix as much with Iranians or the Turks, as they were not that close culturally or linguistically to them as the aforementioned peoples. Phoenicia (a bunch of city-states that weren't even united) is a civilization lost to time; claiming a Phoenician (who by their own account with Herodotus stated they were originally from Arabia) identity is as absurd as an Iraqi claiming to a Sumerian or an Akkadian, or a Tunisian claiming to be a Carthaginian. From your username I think you might be Irish, and I understand the Irish have had their struggles with the English/British, but you can't just spill these sentiments of yours over to other peoples and claim, for example, that the Arabs were like the English/British in how they dealt with other people--they weren't.

A well-known rebellious Maronite Catholic personality revered by many, Yusuf Bey Karam, clearly stated in his correspondence with Emir Abdul-Qadir Al-Jaza'iri that they, the "Arab race" as he himself puts it, should try and break free from Ottoman rule; the Arabs are not a race, but the point is that he identified as an Arab.

I'm not saying any of this just to espouse as sense of Arab nationalism; being an Arab doesn't make you an Arabist, something many subconsciously mix up. Abe-S. Mosley (talk) 01:49, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

"Arab" is not a race but an ethnicity. Maronites are a pre-Arab ethnoreligious group.

Based on this and their native history in the region, Maronites (and other arabic-speaking minorities like Copts) identify as "arabic-speaking" but not ethnically Arab. Are all English speakers ethnically English or from England?

There's a term for arabic-speaking: arabophone. There is also anglophone, francophone, and other denominators for invasive languages and the communities they've reached over the centuries.

Maronites identify as arabophone. They do identify as arabic-speaking Christians, but not ethnic Arabs. Given European history of colonialism and pillaging, it logically follows that European-Americans struggle with respecting indigenous minority groups and their identifications. Given this, ethnicity and language are separate but related categories and can overlap in certain ways. However, those ways are primarily to be defined by the native groups in question.

Maronites have a right to identify as non-Arab, especially based on their contentious history with Arabs categorized by mostly hostility and incursions into their territories, and the pan-arabist national policies solidified into the institution of the Lebanese state against the will of Maronites post-civil war.

It's not up to Europeans to perpetuate nomenclature and social policies consistent with global and worldwide ethnic cleansing. Wikipedia should not reflect that history of colonialism, especially when knowledge in social sciences has evolved to recognize several non-binary categories in gender, ethnicity, and social groups. Ethnoreligious groups exist. Notyourashta (talk) 23:55, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Ethnicity does necessarily carry any kind of implication that populations have co-mingled at all. As our article on ethnicity makes clear, ethnicity is simply about shared atttributes that "can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, race, language, history, society, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area." In the context of the Arab world, the shared "traditions, language, history, society" are legion regardless of any ancestry or religious components of people's identities. 'Arab' in the context of the wider 'Arab world' does not explicitly mean "out of Arabia", though some people may identify in that way; the far broader meaning in the Arab world is simply 'Arabized' in the sense of the region having adopted Arabic language and culture for nigh on a millenia and a half at this point. Iskandar323 (talk) 07:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Some Maronites being so adamant about identifying as non-Arabs has truly become a meme in and of its own; some even made the pathetic claim of having Frankish blood from the time of the Crusades that the non-Catholics around them don't have, even though their genetics and phenotypes are not really different from the other religious sects around them--their desperation to identify as Ajam is quite clear. This just goes to show what sectarianism and the desire of clinging to autonomy can lead people to say. As for the Copts, their situation is different from that of the Maronites, and I was only talking about the Maronites in my response.

“Given European history of colonialism and pillaging, it logically follows that European-Americans struggle with respecting indigenous minority groups and their identifications.” I’m not a European-American if that’s what you’re trying to insinuate, nor am I ”perpetuating nomenclature and social policies consistent with global and worldwide ethnic cleansing?!”

Your religious bias is quite clear from what I'm reading. You sound like someone who sees himself as a victim of the Arabian conquests and their "colonialism", one who thinks too highly of himself to be associated with some 'uncivilized desert-dwellers', right? If so, know then that you've allowed orientalist thought to penetrate deep within your psyche.

“There is also anglophone, francophone, and other denominators for invasive languages and the communities they've reached over the centuries.” Arabic is an invasive language now?! Wow.

"Maronites are a pre-Arab ethnoreligious group.", sorry to break your bubble, they're not.

There are many definitions of what an Arab is and many possible etymologies; in a broad and simplified sense, they are an ethnolinguistic group that speak Arabic as their native tongue. If we want to talk about origins, however, the definition of Arabs as the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, or the Arab East in a broader sense, is the one that comes to mind. Based on the latter definition and the assumption made by many Maronites that they are the descendants of Phoenicians, then the Maronites are most definitely Arabs; what heresy, how?! I was just watching the most recent Sarde episode "Makram Rabah: Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, The Maronites & Collective Memory" (Sarde being the most popular Lebanese podcast out there in case you don't know them), and when the guest historian Makrahm Rabah of AUB started to talk about about the origins of the Druze and the Maronites, he said "The Druze came to this area in the 9th century based on the orders of the Abbasid Caliph for military function, they are Arab tribes which were brought from the Arabian Peninsula. As for the Maronites, and this is something some of them don't like, they're also Arab tribes. What's funny about this is when someone says they're Phoenician, they do it to say they're not Arab, while the truth is that Phoenicians are from the Arabian Peninsula; they were called date-eaters, the Greeks used to call them date-eaters, and even the Phoenix bird itself the Arabs used to call it the Date Bird."

The famous historian Herodotus, dubbed The Father of History, mentions in his book The Histories that upon meeting the Phoenicians they told him that they called themselves Canaanites, and that they were originally from the shores of the Erythrean/Red Sea; Sinus Erythraeus in Greek or Mare Erythraeum in Latin is where the modern country of Eritrea on the African and Southern tip of the Red Sea gets its name from.

I can go on and on… Abe-S. Mosley (talk) 09:19, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

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Arab Christian diaspora

Should the article also include some information in the "Demographics" section about Arab Christians in the diaspora? Granted, I don't think Arab Christians are a significant minority group outside of the Arab world, but it is interesting and maybe even of note that in some countries like the United States and Australia, most of the Arabs living there are Christians. PanagiotisZois (talk) 19:42, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

There is an important diaspora in Brazil, mostly of Lebanese ancestry. The vast majority of Lebanese-Brazilians are Christians, although not all of them might identify as Arab. Chaotic Enby (talk) 13:40, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

According to this source, based on the 2011 Canadian census, about 1/3 of all Arab Canadians are Christians. --PanagiotisZois (talk) 11:09, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Would anyone object to updating the "regions with significant populations" sidebar to include diaspora populations (US, Canada, UK, Brazil, Australia, etc)? Right now, it's confusing because the listed populations sum to only ~3 million, even though the total population is listed as 10-15 million. Acone (talk) 20:03, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Absolutely include Arab Christians living outside of North Africa and the Middle East. Listed population is for MENA ONLY and there are 3.5m Arabs in the USA, 60% are Christian. It may make sense to have a separate display separated by continent, but IMHO, this article should discuss all Arab Christians and failing to do so, makes this a weaker, incomplete page. Also that 10-15m number is probably just nonsense. 104.158.222.11 (talk) 18:16, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Youssef Bey Karam

@JJNito197: just checking if you intended to delete the text I just added re Yousset Bey Karam? Onceinawhile (talk) 01:19, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

No way! I'm trying to reformat the article for readability relating to the Islamic era section that was recently improved. I think there are issues relating to the Maronite identity that is resurfacing with vying opinions, hence the recent back and forth(s). JJNito197 (talk) 01:38, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Should WikiProject religion also be included here?

There seems to project tag belonging to WikiProject Religion. Should it come here? Sylvester Millner (talk) 01:34, 3 March 2023 (UTC)