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Ah, it is not this. Essentially because we write in Arabic, you can’t just go to the West and have your legal name as like “ شارة خليل الخوري”, you need to write it in the Latin alphabet, and well sometimes you have the opportunity to choose. So if your name is Mkhayel in the most pure transliteration but you’re going to the UK, you might want to use the English version of that same name, “Michael.” Or to France, “Michel.” But we have a bit of a tradition here that parents will give their kids a French first name anyway, so you see many Syrians, mostly Christian but not all, and I swear half of Lebanon that have a French first name and Arabic last name. My last name is used in many different countries and pronounced very similarly, so I just chose the version that was French because my name is hard to pronounce if you directly transliterate it.
I think the reason why people alter their names, is mostly because of, well, things like this. For whom is it easier to get a job, Georgette Yakoub or Georgette Jacobs? There is that pressure to fit in, so that don’t have to deal with as much trouble. I mean, when I see someone with the last name “el Khoury,” I know this is a Christian because it means “The [Christian] priest,” but obviously people in the West don’t know this and they see the el and it is just as well as if your name was “al Islam.” People try to distance themselves from this as much as they can. But I blame my brother, he was the first one to extremely French ours haha
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