A Few Arabic/Islamic Factoids

posted on: Nov 22, 2019

SOURCE: PATHEOS

BY: DAN PETERSON

Here are some factoids – by the way, what is a “factoid,” as opposed to a “fact”? how are they to be distinguished from each other? – that may may surprise and/or interest one or two people out there:

The majority of the Arabs living in the United States are Christians.  Approximately 42 percent of Arab Americans are Catholic, while 23 percent are Eastern Orthodox Christians of one kind or another, 23 percent are Muslim, and 12 percent are Protestant.

Today, however, although they obviously remain a minority, Arab Muslims represent the fastest growing part of the Arab American community.

There are somewhere between 160,000 and 200,000 Arab Americans currently living in New York City.  One-third of all Arab Americans live in California, Michigan and New York.  Another third of them reside in Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

Religious practices that direct personal behavior — including the regular prayers, performed five times daily and involving a series of prostrations and other obvious physical gestures;  the month-long fast at Ramadan; the beards for men and the wearing of the hijab (headcover) for women — make Muslims more visible than most American religious minorities and thus both more “foreign” and more exposed to potential bigotry.

Although most Arabs are Muslim, only about 12 percent of Muslims worldwide are Arabs. In fact, there are more Muslims in the nation of Indonesia than in all of the Arab countries combined.

The proper name for the religion professed by Muslims is Islam.  (Fortunately, Muhammadanism seems to be dying out; Muslims often object to being called Muhammadans because, on the analogy of Christians, it suggests that they worship the Prophet Muhammad, which they emphatically do not.)  Islam should be pronounced with a hissing s, not with a z sound, and with the emphasis on the second syllable.  It means “submission” – that is, “submission to God” – and it is a verbal noun from the Form IV Arabic verb aslama, “to surrender,” “to submit.”  The masculine active participle of aslama is muslim (“submitter,” “one who submits”), from which comes the proper noun Muslim.  This is sometimes spelled Moslem in English, but Muslim better represents the sound of the Arabic word, which should be pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable and, again, with a hissing s rather than with a z.  Moreover, the first syllable should be pronounced neither as muss (nor rhyming with cuss or truss) nor as moose, but, rather, as rhyming with wuss or puss.