Do you have any links you show us about these Arab Christians who want Sharia for their countries? I find that very suspect, and would not be surprised if there is more to the story than even what you have read. In my (admittedly limited) experience with Arab Christians, I can’t imagine any one of them actually advocating this, let alone being members of hardline Islamist parties (perhaps some religious parties, which would probably be Islamic due to the makeup of the Middle East).
There is, of course, a long tradition of Christian supporters of what could be seen as “Islamic” goals, to the extent that the pan-Arabism advocated by the likes of Michel Aflaq in Iraq or Hakim George Habash in Palestine has often been far more conciliatory to Islamist goals than the average Arab Christian would, given the reality that Islam has been made as the religion of the Arabs, the religion that gives them worth and awakens and strengthens their specific national and international ambitions (don’t get mad at me here - these are the sorts of things that Michel Aflaq would write about Arabs and Islam, and he was a Christian!). It is the language of power for the Arabs, so pan-Arabist Christians would like it, of course.
The other model of the explicitly political Christian in the Middle East, it should be noted, is in reaction to these pan-Arabist positions. I am thinking of the virulent anti-Arabist and anti-Palestinian positions of the likes of Abu Arz and some others involved in the fight to free Lebanon from the Palestinians and their allies during the civil war. Similar anti-Arab/anti-Islam sentiments certainly also exist among even the “Muslim” minorities in the Middle East, such as the Berbers (Kabyle musician-activists like Matoub Lounes, Moh Alileche, etc.), to say nothing of elsewhere (Somalis and other African Muslims who often hate the Arab culture outside of their common religion).
In short, this sort of thing cuts both ways, and some Christians, like other people from areas where Islam is the dominant philosophy, are so brainwashed by Arabism that they will join anybody who writes from right to left.* I’m not trying to knock them, of course, because any political religion sucks (not just Islam; Christians who argue for a theocracy in America also drive me nuts), but I am sad that they would advocate for the same laws that their ancestors going back generations fought against and suffered under.
- I bring up writing from right to left because a friend of mine once sent me an article on Chechen Islamic terrorist Shamil Basaev in which he tried to threaten the Russians in Chechnya by saying that his brave Islamic movement would “slaughter all those who write left to right”…apparently Mr. Basaev was so filled with rage that he temporarily forgot that his own Chechen language is written from left to right, as it had been since years before his statement. Oops!
Before joining these forums I didn’t know much about Islam other than knowing it was false - a knowledge which has been confirmed 100 fold now that I have actually learned about the faith.