Arab: Encyclopedia II - Arab - Religions

Arab - Religions

Before the coming of Islam, most Arabs followed a religion featuring the worship of a number of deities, including Hubal, Wadd, Al-Lat, Manat, and Uzza, while some tribes had converted to Christianity or Judaism, and a few individuals, the hanifs, had apparently rejected polytheism in favor of a vague monotheism. The most prominent Arab Christian kingdoms were the Ghassanid and Lakhmid kingdoms. With the expansion of Islam, the majority of Arabs rapidly became Muslim, and the pre-Islamic polytheistic traditions disappeared.

At present, most Arabs are Muslims. Sunni Islam dominates in most areas, overwhelmingly so in North Africa; Shia Islam is prevalent in Bahrain, southern Iraq and adjacent parts of Saudi Arabia, northern Yemen, and southern Lebanon, as well as parts of Syria. The tiny Druze community, belonging to a secretive offshoot of Islam, is usually considered Arab, but sometimes considered an ethnicity in its own right.

Reliable estimates of the number of Arab Christians, which in any case depends on the definition of "Arab" used, vary. According to Fargues 1998, "Today Christians only make up 9.2 per cent of the population of the Near East". In Lebanon they now number only about 40 per cent of the population, in Syria they make up about 10 to 15 per cent, in the Palestinian territories the figure is 3.8 per cent, and in Israel Arab Christians constitute 2.1 per cent. In Egypt, they constitute 5.9 per cent of the population, and in Iraq they presumably comprise 2.9 per cent of the populace. Most North and South American Arabs (about two-thirds) are Arab Christians, particularly from Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon.

Jews from Arab countries - mainly Mizrahi Jews and Yemenite Jews - are today usually not categorised as Arab. Sociologist Philip Mendes asserts that before the anti-Jewish actions of the 1930s and 1940s, overall Iraqi Jews "viewed themselves as Arabs of the Jewish faith, rather than as a separate race or nationality". [2] Prior to the emergence of the term Mizrahi, the term "Arab Jews" (Yehudim ‘Áravim, יהודים ערבים) was used to describe Jews of the Arab world. The term is rarely used today. The few remaining Jews in the Arab countries reside mostly in Morocco and Tunisia. Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, following the creation of the state of Israel, most these Jews left their countries of birth and are now mostly concentrated in Israel, but many also live in France, and a small number in the United States. (see Jewish exodus from Arab lands).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Religions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki