Since IIRC, 90% of arabs are muslim, I’m sure they’re very open about it. Can anyone give me info on Christianity and Judiaism in these countries.
How are they practiced differently than arabs of the muslim demographic?
Are they as open about their religion?
Is this accepted (More of an IMHO)
Any other info on Christianity and Judiasm is Arab countries? Please feel free!
Depends on the country. The US State Department’s Religious Freedom Report, a detailed country-by-country description, is a good resource for this type of subject.
Saudi Arabia, for example, does not permit the public practice of religions other than Islam:
Lebanon, on the other hand, with about equal proportions of Muslims and Christians, is officially more tolerant:
Here’s a brief article about Christianity in Iraq.
• The Jews of Egypt.
• Morocco’s Last Jews. A 2003 Associated Press article estimates 3,500 in the Jewish community.
• The Jews of Syria.
I find that pretty amazing about the number of jews in Morocco… that’s about 1 and 1/2 times the number of students in the high school I graduated from. Wow.
This is all great…! keep it coming!
I will try to phrase this as GQ as possible, saying only what I have heard from more than one person - and mostly from both Muslims and Christians from the Middle East. My sources include college professors and church members.
My official church membership is still in a Presbyterian mega-church back home in Michigan. Among my acquaintance at that church is an Egyptian-American family; the parents immigrated either before their kids were born, or when they were very small. And there’s a family from Syria, who immigrated to the U.S. about 12-13 years ago. Both families were from long lines of Christian believers; conversion to Christianity is not permitted in their ancestral lands.
Here’s a January news article about tolerance (or lack thereof) of the Christian faith in Egypt. I came across this through the blog of an Egyptian that I read now and then (and recommend): Big Pharaoh.
As for Syria, I worked for seven years in an office that had a Syrian professor, and one from Lebanon. I’m a naturally curious sort, so I asked both of them as many questions as I thought I could get away with - just like I ask any friends who are from anywhere else, or have lived abroad for a season. 
What freedom of religion exists in Syria is mostly because President Asad (and his father, the one who ran the country for 30+ years) is from a very small minority Muslim sect, the Alaouites, which neither Sunni (overwhelming majority in Syria) nor Shia recognize. [Think of it as kinda like being a Mennonite in 18th century Germany, where you were expected to be either Catholic or Lutheran, and tolerance was not in style. It’s just my opinion, but I think that U.S. pressure is going to bring down Asad, Jr.; he’s just not the iron man his father was - and when it happens, it will be open season on the Alaouites - and probably on the Christians as well. 
]
The Lebanese prof was raised Presbyterian - in case you hadn’t already guessed, the Presbyterian church is one of the largest, in terms of membership, of any Christian denomination in the Middle East, probably second only to Maronite Catholic. Of course, Coptic Christians outnumber other varieties in Egypt.
This Wikipedia article on the Coptic church synchs with reliable sources I looked at. Various estimates claim there are between 12 & 15 million Coptic Christians in Egypt (homeland of Coptic Christianity and the home of 1/4 of the religion’s current practitioners). At 5% of the population and with many very wealthy members they are a large enough minority to be a political and financial force and as such they are important in the whole framework of Arab Christians throughout the region, though even in Egypt they’ve been the victims of much persecution. An additional 2-3 million Coptic Christians are in Sudan, which is an Arabic speaking country though not predominantly Arab country (though Arabs are about 40% of its ethnic makeup). Most of them are in the south and a large number are relatively recent (last generation or two) converts.
A particularly odd case is that of the Donmeh, a Jewish sect in Turkey (which, I know, is not an Arab country, but I’ll include it anyway as an Islamic country and an interesting case). Jews were a welcome minority in Turkey/the Ottoman Empire for much of its history but major persecutions and reprisals after the Shabbetai Zevi revolt in the 17th century led to them being ordered to either leave the country or convert to Islam. There were huge numbers who did both, but then there was a minority who officially “converted” to Islam, but secretly they remained Jews and practiced their own religion in the home with shades drawn or other privacy mechanisms. The odd thing is that centuries later, there are still Turks who are devout Muslims in public but, like their parents and grandparents and great great great great great grandparents, are devout Jews in private. This has required lots of intermarriage between families and other considerations, and the number of them is not known for obvious reasons, though it is believed there are at least a few thousand of them. It would be very interesting to compare their version of Judaism as practiced to that of, say, an orthodox Jew in NYC or Israel to see how much of their religion has remained intact and how much has changed.
My understanding, perhaps flawed, has been that while Sunni authorities tend to regard Alawites as non-Muslims, most ( or at least some ) Shi’a grudgingly accept them as Shi’a ( which is how Alawites themselves tend to think of themselves ).
Partly this may be political ( Imams among the Lebanese Shi’a certainly have been among the voices raised in acceptance ), but when you consider the two additional pillars they add to the Muslim creed are Jihad and veneration of Ali, they don’t come off as all that incompatible with Shi’a beliefs. Unlike, say, the Druze, Baha’i, or the Farrakhanite branch of the nation of Islam, they are a lot closer to a very heterodox version of Islam than a seperate religion.
I’ve never been acquainted with an Alaouite (I’ve seen both spellings; I’d guess that anybody who decided to search should try both of them.), so I’m not in a position to argue it. However, it’s my understanding that they are mainly or only found in a small region of Syria. The point that most Murkans don’t understand is that most of Syria is Sunni, and that Wahhabi missionaries are working pretty hard on all of Saudi’s neighbors. What that forebodes is that nobody that’s not a Sunni is going to get much tolerance if/when Asad falls/abdicates, since the Wahhabi don’t regard Shia as Muslims, either.
I have known a Druze - or rather I should say a Christian whose family was Druze, and who came to the States. So Robert probably was not a good source of information on their religious practices. And he said that his folks basically didn’t seem to practice any religion. What I’ve read seems pretty far out, so I’m inclined to take the position that I just don’t know. Closest I come to knowing a Baha’i is the one here on SDMB. My skin’s too pale for me to be able to get close to any Black Muslims; having an NDN mother doesn’t help when the complexion is “wrong”.
A thought just struck me: I guess everybody knows that Harry Turtledove mined his Byzantine history Ph.D. for Videssos, but it never occurred to me before that he could be thinking about Syria/Iraq/Lebanon (the mountainous parts of all three) as the Erzerum Mountains. I always assumed (with the usual stricture about that word, now) that he was referring to eastern Anatolia. :smack:
AFAIK, both the UAE and Bahrain have freedom of religion, with small Christian communities there, and there’s at least one synagogue in Bahrain, though none in the UAE.
Little-known fact: Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s ex-second-in-command, is Christian.
Even though Turkey is theoretically secular, there are less than 5000 Greek Orthodox left (in what used to be the homeland of Greek Orthodoxy), and a few tens of thousands of Syriac and Armenian Orthodox. These numbers are declining all the time, as people leave for less repressive environments, church property is frequently seized by the government, and only Sunni Muslims are allowed to train clergy – all other religious schools and seminaries were closed decades ago.
The systematic elimination of Greek and Armenian culture in Turkey ranks as one of the most complete examples of ethnic cleansing in modern times.