I posted before about this topic. The responses I received were quite biased, however. They all were oriented around the fact that Christians and Jews in Arab countries were oppressed and pressured to leave.
Now I KNOW that this isn’t the case in all situations. What about the positives? Can anyone provide me with info or cites to positive outlooks of how Jews and Christians live in arabic countries peacefully and how they live as well as practice their religion openly with acceptance?
I found myself with a biased outlook and I really need the other side! I know there is acceptance out there during our time. steer me correctly away from just the oppressive outlook!
In Islamic societies, Christians and Jews are, at best, second-class citizens. Their status and rights are explicitly defined in Islamic law. In real life, the situation can be worse.
In a secular Arab state, the situation would be different. As far as I know, there are no truly secular Arab states.
Lebanon is about 50/50 Christian/Moslem, but I think it’s fair to call the Christians there “Arab Christians”, and to call that an Arab country. One could argue that the Christians there have unique priviledges, because the government is set up for roughly equal power sharing between the various religions, even though the Moslem population is growing faster than the Christian population. In fact, if you try to find the exact split, you won’t be able to. There hasn’t been an official census for decades, and many people would attribute this to an attempt keeping the 50/50 illusion alive (ie, not to rock the boat).
But Lebanon is unique. Egypt has a large Christian minority (6-10%), and the larger the minorty, the harder it is to supress, generally speaking. Outside those two countries, you’d be hard pressed to find anything approaching religious tolerance in a Middle Eastern Arab country. North Africa might be different, but I’m not very familiar with that region. I suppose that Iraq right now is tolerant of relilgious minorities, at least at an official level, but lets wait until that government stabilizes before we get too excited about that.
If you really want the stratigh dope, you need to get someone like **Tamerlane **in here.
‘Arabic’ and ‘Islamic’ are not the same. The majority of Muslim people are not Arabs. The largest countries with a predominantly Muslim population are not Arabic.
You’d really need to assess each seperate Arab nation to answer the OP’s question. Lebanon for example, has a sizeable and influential Christian population and is a parliamentary democracy. Its political and military divisions do not occur neatly across religious lines. Whereas Saudi Arabia is governed as a monarchy, notionally observes Sharia law and does not permit Jewish people within its national boundaries at all.
There’s a range between those two, I disagree with the view that Lebanon is exceptionally tolerant. Egypt, with the largest Arab population, is not hostile to its Christian minority. Morocco is similarly disposed to its Chrisitian minority. Christians are the largest minority in the Arab world and overall they do OK.
If you are looking for Jewish people specifically, then Tunisia and Morocco have the largest such population, but these are still very small minorities. Most Jewish people from Arabic nations have emigrated.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a secular government, with a significant Christian minority population. If you wish to claim that Christians sufferred particularly in secular Iraq, please supply evidence or argument.
Egyption Christians have been having some serious trouble recently, though, as Muslim fanatics have taken to using violence to stop them from doing things like building new churches. Not sure if this is spreading or just a localized story.
About 10% of the Tunisian population is Roman Catholic and doesn’t seem to have any particular problem.
I taught English in Qatar, where the Christian minority is almost all guestworkers; guestworkers make up about 2/3 of the country at any given time, and the majority of them are Muslims. Christians may have services in private so long as the churches don’t have any large visible Christian symbols outside. Prosletyzing is forbidden (can’t say that makes me terribly sad…) yet every year a few Americans get tossed for trying to bring in a suitcase full of Gideon-type Bibles. You’re allowed one or two per person for personal use. A housemate of mine attended Catholic mass a couple of times which an Indian national priest did in English and Malayalam.
There are likely about 5 Jews in Qatar (outside of western soldiers at Centcomm), working for the Israeli trade office, effectively an unofficial embassy. What they do to worship is anyone’s guess, but it certainly wouldn’t happen in the open.
The Assad family are Alawites, a religious minority in Syria, and we all know that Iraq is minority Sunni.
It’s a common tactic to for imperial governments to rely on religious or ethnic minorities. The minority is loyal because they know they’ll be in trouble if the larger ethnic group attains power, and they have no particular loyalty or family feeling with the groups they keep oppressed.
There are countless of examples of this. Most Middle Eastern and North African countries have large Christain populations. The vast majority of which are accepted and practice their religon openly. In fact one of the two co-founders of the Baath party was a Christian. Because of this the Christian population of Syria enjoys more power than their percentage of the population (around 10%) suggests.
The situation with Jews in the middle east for the last 80 years has obiviously complicated by the Arab-Israeli confict. The majority of middle eastern Jews have now moved to Israel or western countries, though many still remain and there are plenty of Sinagogues in Muslim countries. Prior that Jews in muslim countries faced FAR less opression than in Christain countries. The only occupied nation to refuse to hand over its jewish population to the Nazis was Morrocco. Going back further the reason for large Jewish populations in the Ottoman empire was that so many Jews fled their to escape persecution in Christian Europe.