ISLAM-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE

26 the Islamic religion. But even in Italy, with the immigration of Muslim bachelors, with no family afterwards, soon mixed mar- riages may be a source of unexpected problems for the Western spouse, even if they do not practice the Christian fai- th. For this reason it is strongly advised to inquire about the laws in force, both in Italy and in the country where the Muslim immigrant comes from, since the law of his country is always on the side of the Muslim citizen, compared to the non-Mu- slim, in his relations with the state, with his marriage and towards his children. Naturally the legal position of the spouse improves after her conversion version to Islam and the abandonment of her religion at birth... When a Christian woman decides to contract a marriage with a Muslim in a Muslim country she puts herself in a posi- tion where it becomes extremely difficult to continue to profess her faith in the particu- lar area in which she is called to live. As stated by P. Samir Khalil, a Jesuit, in a study published in French by the ma- gazine Solidarité-Orient February 1984. n. 149. the prejudice that the Arab is sy- nonymous with the Muslim is widespre- ad. There would therefore be no Arab Christians. This prejudice is becoming in- creasingly false. Valuable contribution Out of about 150 million Arabs, Christians are no less than 12 million, just as "Arabs" as their Muslim fellow citizens. Arabity is not a race or a religion, but constitutes a "nation" with all the elements that this word includes: geographical, linguistic, cultural, political, historical, economic, etc. In this context, Christians declare themselves an integral part of the Arab world. Muslims are not "more Arabs" than Christians, and Christians are not "less Arabs" than Muslims. Arab and Islamic civilization is indebted both to Christians and to other local mi- norities, such as Jews, as well as to Asian culture, since it has spiritual roots that re- fer to the Eastern experience. Historically, in the cultural field, Arab Chri- stians contributed greatly to the develop- ment of literature and sciences in the Arab world. Historians are well aware that, for some centuries before the birth of Islam, there were Arab Christian tribes, and that the Arabic script, in particular, derives lar- gely from those Christian living in that part of the world preceding the advent of Islam. After the advent of Islam, the Christian communities of the Middle East, and in part also of Spain, quickly became Ara- bized, thus introducing their ancient Chri- stian traditions into Arabic culture: Greek, Syriac, Coptic and even Latin. Far from being extraneous to Arab culture, the Christian authors of the different Eastern confessions have largely contributed to its formation. Some of these Christian authors are well known to the educated public in Europe or the Americas. Thus Hu-nayn Ibn Ishaq (the greatest translator from Greek and Syriac to Arabic, who died in 873), Bar Hebraeus (author of the Chronicon, who died in 1286), or Gibran Khalil Gibran (author of the Prophet, who died in 1931. Alongside these illustrious figures there is a lar- ge number of Christian authors who are reco- gnized in the firmament of Arab culture (doc- tors, astronomers, philosophers, theologians, historians, jurists, poets, men of letters, etc.). It was after the Arab-Islamic conquest that Christians of all denominations began to translate the literary and scientific works of their predecessors from the Greek and the Syriac into Arabic. They were the ones who introduced to the desert nomadic tri- be invaders the Eastern disciplines (philo- sophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and geography, thus provoking a renais- sance that lasted throughout the Middle Ages, when the Western world was still immersed in darkness. In this regard it is good to remember that Charlemagne sta- red with amazement at the gifts sent to him by Haroun el Rashid. During the Middle Age a new wave of Christians, from the Near East seeking re-