More than ninety-five percent of Jordan's population are Sunnite Muslims; Christians constitute most of the rest, of whom two-thirds adhere to the Rum, or Greek Orthodox Church.
Other Christian groups include the Greek Catholics, also called the Melchites, or Catholics of the Byzantine rite, who recognize the supremacy of the Roman pope; the Roman Catholic community, headed by a pope-appointed patriarch; and the small Syrian Orthodox, or Jacobite, church, whose members use Syriac in their liturgy.
Most non-Arab Christians are Armenians, and the majority belong to the Gregorian, or Armenian, Orthodox church, while the rest attend the Armenian Catholic church.
There are several Protestant denominations representing communities whose converts came almost entirely from other Christian sects.
About half of Jordan's population is Palestinian.
The influx of Palestinian refugees not only altered Jordan's demographic map but has also affected its political, social, and economic life.
Jordan's population in the late 1940s was between two hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand.
After the 1948/1949 Arab-Israeli War and the annexation of the West Bank, Jordanian citizenship was granted to some four hundred thousand Palestinians, who were residents of and remained in the West Bank, and to about half a million refugees from the new Israeli state.
Many of these refugees settled east of the Jordan River.
Between 1949 and 1967, Palestinians continued to move east in large numbers.
After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, an estimated three hundred and ten thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, sought refuge in Jordan; thereafter immigration from the West Bank continued at a lower rate.
In 1988, Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank, which had been under its rule from 1948 to 1967.
During the 1990/1991 Persian Gulf War, some three hundred thosusand additional Palestinians fled Kuwait (or were expelled) to Jordan.
Most Palestinians are employed and hold full Jordanian citizenship.
By the mid-1990s, approximately one million three hundred thousand Palestinians, representing about one-third of Jordan's population, were registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provided education, medical care, relief assistance, and social services.
About one-sixth of these refugees live in camps in Jordan.
Jordan's Hashemite dynasty, whose ancestors were the hereditary emirs of Mecca until the Saudi-Wahhabis conquered the Hejaz in the mid-1920s, have the support of the Bedouin, but have often be at odds with the majority of the populace who, like many in the more secularly oriented Arab lands, would prefer a constitutional republic to a hereditary autocracy, however enlightened or benevolent.
