Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Quite a few Lebanese Christians have some Greek origins, though I wouldn't go as far as saying that overall they're "not Arab". There is a significant Arab admixture in the vast majority of them.
I know both Lebanese Christians and Muslims who look very "white", and lots of Christians are more brown and Arab-looking.
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It's not about being Greek, or "white" it's about not being Arab in the sense of not having an appreciable number of ancestors who came from Arabia.
Again, language shift happened independently of religious shift in the Middle East, with language shift generally happening first. Due to the way that Islam works as well (death penalty for apostasy, all children of Muslim men automatically being Muslim) there really wasn't much of a chance for any Muslims to assimilate into the Christian minority.
Prior to Islam, the Levant was Christian for centuries. Greek was held in high regard as the liturgical language, but the everyday language of speech was Aramaic, which became the lingua franca of the area back during the days of the Persian Empire (and it was the spoken language of Jesus). Aramaic was relatively closely related to Arabic, as both were Semitic languages, so the shift was relatively easy, which is why all the Christians in Lebanon and Syria (aside from a few villages) now speak Arabic, not Aramaic.
Aramaic is much more widely spoken these days by "Assyrians" - the Chaldeans and other related groups which were most heavily concentrated in Northern Iraq. Again, the Assyrians are not Arabs, but they are certainly middle easterners.
Or consider the Copts in Egypt. Copts kept their old language for religious purposes, but shifted to Arabic for everyday speech. Once again, the Copts are not Arab.
Anyway, not Arab does not equal "passing as white." It just means they're a non-Arabic group. Though by and large non-Arab minorities within the Middle East are a little lighter than their Muslim neighbors, due to to the dynamics I outlined above (decedents of black slaves assimilated into the Muslim Arab majority, not into religious minorities, and less frequently into minority ethnic groups like the Kurds, Berbers, etc.)