Freedom of Religion in Syria - Religious and Ethnic Landscape

Religious and Ethnic Landscape

Syria’s eighteen million population is a mosaic of ethnically, culturally, and religiously distinct communities. In the cradle of civilizations, ninety percent of the population is Arab in ethnicity; another roughly nine percent is Kurdish, with Armenians, Circassians, and Turkomans filling out the mix. It is estimated that Sunni Muslims make up seventy-four percent of Syria’s overall population. As such, Sunnis provide the central symbolic and cultural orientation. Of these, a minority are of the Yazidi faith, reducing the core Sunni Arab majority to roughly two-thirds of the populace. Approximately another sixteen percent of the population, while Arab in ethnicity, consists of a few Twelver Shi`a, and various offshoots of Shi‘a Islam – ‘Alawis, Druze, and Isma'ilis. The ‘Alawis are by far the largest community in the category of non-Sunni Muslims. Their number is estimated at eleven percent of the overall population. Christians, of various Orthodox and Uniate traditions and the Latin Rite, along with a smattering of Protestants, make up ten percent of the population. Syria’s Arab Jewish community has to a great extent disappeared as a result of emigration in the early 1990s.