AHC: Syrian Muslims identified themselves as Mhallamis (and speaking Syriac)

Here's a little background about these people:

Wikipedia said:

The Mhallami, or Mhalmites, (Arabic: محلّمى‎, Mḥallamī; Syriac: ܡܚܠܡܝ̈ܐ, Mḥallmāye/Mḥallmoye; Turkish: Mıhellemi) are a Semitic people originating from the Assyrian/Syriac people.

"A small minority of the Syriacs, around 1%, has converted to Islam, but remain Syriac in culture and language... The flag of the Muslim Syriac minority is a vertical tricolor of violet, yellow and green, bearing a white crescent moon and five-pointed star on the upper hoist." Sir Mark Sykes, in his book 'The Caliph’s Last Heritage', p. 578 says that 'the Mahallemi' became Muslim to be able to eat meat during a Lenten famine. He writes, 'They speak a bastard Arabic, and their women wear red clothes and do not veil."

Click to expand...

As we know, these people lived in Lebanon and Turkey. But what if the Aramaic-speaking population of present-day Syria retained their identity after their conversion to Islam following the conquest, calling themselves as Mhallami. How it will affect the history of the country in general?

Minimum extent: Present-day Syria north of Homs and west of the Euphrates River area (Al-Haskalah and Deir ez-Zor)
Maximum extent: Almost all of the present Syrian territory.

Thanks!

Bumping...

Very interesting, had never heard of the group but there's precedent in the later years of Islamic expansion in civilizations more centralized, i.e. Persia and beyond the Indus. But the early civilizations: Aramaic Syrian and Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Berbers, etc. were all Arabized creating contemporary Arab culture. Perhaps a POD creating a more literate and centralized Aramaic polity in the Levant or a delayed Arab conquest?

Someone get Leo, he'll know the answer

These sound a lot like the Hemshen-Armenian converts to Islam who continued to speak a dialect of Armenian and retained some cultural practices like baptism.

Most of these, as the Wiki page indicates, are relatively recent converts to Islam. The Mhallamīye are properly those (in most cases,formerly) Central Neo-Aramaic speakers in the region of Mardin who converted to Islam sometime in the 19th century, but there's a global diaspora of them just as there is with most "Turks." Ethnic consciousness, with all of its attendant tokens such as flags, communal associations, and so forth, would have come fairly late and is likely a result of the secularized society in places like Turkey, Lebanon, and the West. Handwave that away and in a few generations they become indistinguishable from their neighbors, who converted from Islam in generations past.

What would be genuinely interesting, to me at least, is the survival of a "Nabati" ethno-linguistic identity in al-Jazira and Iraq al-Arabi. The problem is, unfortunately, virtually the same as that which we encounter with these more recent converts. By the advent of Islam, they are surrounded by sedentary Arabs who have already been living there for centuries and speaking a kind of contact language that shades into Arabic (on one end of the spectrum) and Aramaic (on the other). Once you've crossed the religious boundary in that region, it's all too easy to cross the linguistic one as well. That's not true for Persians or Turks, for example, or even Copts, which is why Coptic survived so much longer in Egypt than Nabati did in Iraq. It's the sort of thing that you might see with a surviving Sassanian empire, though, or a "No-Islam" timeline (obviously).