page_title: Arab Christians
section_title: Syria
hierarchical_section_title: Arab Christians / Demographics / West Asia / Syria
caption_attribution_description: Mosaic depiction of Mary ordering Justinian not to kill her but to build a church on the rock in the background, after having first appeared to him as a gazelle (Convent of Our Lady, Greek Orthodox Church, Sednaya, Syria). The scroll she holds reads: لا لن تقتلني يا جوستنيان ولكنك ستشيد لي كنيسة هنا على هذا الصخر ("No, thou shalt not kill me, Justinian, but thou shalt build a church for me, here, on this rock").
context_page_description: Arab Christians are Arabs of the Christian faith. Some are descended from ancient Arab Christian clans that did not convert to Islam, such as the Sabaean tribes of Yemen who settled in Transjordan and Syria, as well as Arabized Christians, such as Melkites and Antiochian Greek Christians. Arab Christians are estimated to number 520,000–1,650,000 within Syria, 1,050,000–1,650,000 in Lebanon, 221,000 in Jordan, 8–9,000,000 in Egypt, 134,130 in Israel and 50,000 in Palestine. There are also significant communities in Iraq and Turkey.
  Emigrants from Arab and Arabized Christian communities make up a significant proportion of the Middle Eastern diaspora, with sizable population concentrations across the Americas, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and the US, however those emigrants in the Americas, especially from the first wave of emigration, have not passed the Arabic language nor the Arab identity to their descendants.
  The first Arab tribes to adopt Christianity were likely Nabataeans and Ghassanids.
context_section_description: In Syria, according to the 1960 census which recorded just over 4.5 million inhabitants, Christians formed just under 15% of the population (or 675,000). This represents a decline from 20% in 1937 when the population was 335,000. The combined population of Syrian and Lebanon in 1910 was estimated at 30% in a population of 3.5 million. Since 1960 the population of Syria has increased five-fold, but the Christian population only 3.5 times. Due to political reasons, no newer census has been taken since. Most recent estimates prior to the Syrian civil war suggested that overall Christians comprised about 10% of the overall population of Syrian 23 million citizens, due to having lower birth rates and higher emigration rates than their Muslim compatriots. Today, a sizeable share of Syrian Christians hold on to their ethnic Antiochian Greek, Assyrians (particularly in the northeast), and Armenian origins, with a major recent influx of Assyrian Iraqi Christian refugees into these communities after massacres in Turkey and Iraq during and after WWI and then post-2003. Due to the Syrian civil war, a large number of Christians fled the country to Lebanon, Jordan, and Europe, though the major share of the population still resides in Syria (some being internally displaced).
  The Arab Christians of Syria are Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic (Melkites) as well as some Latin Rite Roman Catholics. Non-Arab Syrian Christians include Assyrians (mainly in the northeast), Syriac-Arameans, Greeks and Armenians. The largest Christian denomination in Syria is the Greek Orthodox church, some of whom are Arab Christians, followed in second place by the Syrian Orthodox, many of whose followers espouse an Aramean or Assyrian identity.  The appellation "Greek" refers to the liturgy they use, sometimes used to refer to the ancestry and ethnicity of the members, however not all members are of Greek ancestry; in fact, the Arabic word used is "Rum", which means "Byzantines", or Eastern Romans. Overall, the term is generally used to refer mostly to the Greek liturgy, and the Greek Orthodox denomination in Syria. Arabic is now its main liturgical language. Melkite Church is another major religious denomination of Arabized Christians in Syria. Melkites, the followers of the Greek Catholic Church form another major group.
  Though religious freedom is allowed in the Syrian Arab Republic, all citizens of Syria including Christians, are subject to the Shari'a-based personal status laws regulating child custody, inheritance, and adoption. For example, in the case of divorce, a woman loses the right to custody of her sons when they reach the age of thirteen and her daughters when they reach the age of fifteen, regardless of religion.
caption: Mosaic depicting Mary holding an Arabic text, Our Lady of Saidnaya Monastery, a Greek Orthodox Church in Sednaya, Syria
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