* Last year in Turkey five Islamic extremists bound, tortured,
and killed three Christian religious workers.
* In Malaysia the nation’s highest court ruled that a Christian
convert could not change her official religious affiliation without
a ruling of apostasy in Sharia court — punishable by death or
prison.
* Earlier this year Christian converts in Bangladesh were beaten
and expelled by Muslim villagers.
* Last year in Sudan demonstrators demanded death for a British
teacher — convicted and then deported — for allowing her students
to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.”
* In 2006 the Afghan government, which survives only because of
allied military forces, sentenced a Christian convert to death,
before allowing him to emigrate for reason of “mental illness.”
* In Nigeria last year a Muslim mob murdered ten Christians,
injured scores more, and destroyed nine churches in response to a
claim that a Christian student drew a cartoon of Mohammed on the
mosque wall at school.
* In Iraq in early March the body of kidnapped Chaldean
Archbishop Paulus Faraj Rahho was discovered. Up to half of the
prewar community of 1.2 or so million Iraqi Christians have fled
abroad.
So it goes throughout the Islamic world. Not every Muslim hates
Christians, Jews, and members of other faiths. And no, not every
Muslim country persecutes religious minorities.
But pick any persecuting nation at random. There is a good
chance that it will be Muslim, even if it is formally allied with
the U.S. government.
YOU WOULDN’T KNOW that from the Western reaction. Right now, talk
of interfaith dialogue and Muslim persecution is in the air.
Last November more than 300 Protestant leaders publicly asked
for forgiveness for Christian sins against “our Muslim neighbors.”
Vatican officials and Islamic leaders have been meeting to plan an
interfaith summit. President George W. Bush recently named a
special envoy to the 57-member Organization of the Islamic
Conference, which is dedicated to combating “Islamophobia.”
Fine. But the first item on every agenda should be the fact that
most Islamic nations persecute their religious minorities.
This matters because persecution is an affront to any faith
which claims to speak on behalf of a loving God. The hypocrisy of
Muslim regimes that complain about the treatment of their
co-religionists in the West while brutalizing members of minority
faiths at home is more rank than usual. Consider the predictable
protests in these very same Islamic nations against the online
release of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders’s film criticizing
Islam.
Pervasive hostility and violence towards Christians and Jews
provides a flourishing environment for Islamic fundamentalists and
terrorists. The fact that most Muslims may not share these
attitudes is irrelevant if they remain silent in the fact of
violent attacks on members of other faiths.
Westerners need to speak truth to Muslim power. “Islamic
aggression, hatred, and intolerance must be confronted, named and
shamed,” argues Jeff King, president of International Christian
Concern (ICC).
CHRISTIANITY HAS HAD its own ugly historical persecutions, of
course. But these days governments in “Christian” nations
increasingly refuse to acknowledge their religious heritage, let
alone persecute minority faiths.
That is almost never the case in Islamic countries — except,
ironically, under ugly secular dictatorships in Syria and,
formerly, Iraq. Even in Turkey Islamists are growing increasingly
active.
In some majority-Muslim nations, like Kuwait, the government
supports Islam but does not disturb other faiths. Christians
generally don’t proselytize, but are otherwise free. “We’ve never
had any serious interference at all,” Rev. Jerry Zandstra, a pastor
at the National Evangelical Church, told me.
More often, however, Islamic governments enforce Islam. Keith
Roderick of Christian Solidarity International speaks of “decades
of violence, hatred, discrimination, and disenfranchisement.”
Persecution is intense in many Islamic societies. Both the State
Department and the United States Commission on International
Religious Freedom (USCIRF) single out Muslim nations as among the
most serious persecutors.
International Christian Concern has created “The Hall of Shame,”
half of whose members are Muslim states. Even the less brutal
Islamic nations usually offer inhospitable terrain for Christians,
Jews, and other religious minorities.
Where to start? Saudi Arabia is essentially totalitarian. As ICC
explains, Riyadh “has a zero tolerance policy towards other
religions.”
The State Department is more diplomatic, but no less clear:
“There is no legal recognition of, or protection under the law for,
freedom of religion, and it is severely restricted in
practice.”
In theory, private worship in Saudi Arabia is okay, but “this
right was not always respected in practice and is not defined in
law.” Even if the monarchy is committed to modernizing Saudi
society, freedom of conscience is on no one’s agenda.
BRUTAL STATE REPRESSION also is evident in Iran, which targets
Jews, Baha’is, Sufi Muslims, and Zoroastrians as well as
Christians.
The ICC reports: “The 1990s [in Iran] were a time of severe
persecution. Spies infiltrated congregations, and church buildings
were seized or closed. Seven Christian leaders were martyred and
others have had to flee for their lives.”
Sudan’s decades of civil strife and war have killed well in
excess of a million people, many of them Christians, who are most
populous in the South. Christians suffer discrimination and
occasional persecution elsewhere in the country as well. Sharia is
enforced in the North. Islam must be studied, even in private
Christian schools, and conversion from Islam is punishable
by death.
Pakistan makes ICC’s Hall of Shame. Islamabad’s blasphemy law
criminalizes criticism of Islam and often penalizes Christians.
Christian women are vulnerable under the Hudood Ordinances, which
treat rape victims as adulteresses unless they can produce four
male Muslim witnesses stating the contrary.
Pakistani mob attacks on Christians and Christian churches are
rarely punished. Converts risk death, making foreign flight the
only escape for some families. A Methodist pastor, Rev. Emanuel S.
Khokha, told me that Muslims “blame us because Christians are
linked to America. They blame us for Israel and the problem with
the Palestinians. And they blame us because we are Christians.”
Indonesia traditionally leavened Islam with tolerance, but
recent government rules make it virtually impossible for Christians
to build churches in majority-Muslim areas, i.e., most of the
country. Three Sunday school teachers were convicted of the
“Christianization” of Muslim children in a trial highlighted by
mobs demanding the women’s death.
Churches and Bible schools have been bombed and torched. In
October 2005 a crowd beheaded three Christian school girls. The
wife of the pastor of an evangelical church on Java lost a leg in a
bombing in 2001, and a year later their home was burned down. As
one Indonesian minister told me, being a Christian “is difficult”
there.
Christians suffer in other Muslim lands — Brunei, for instance,
as well as Gaza and the West Bank, Turkmenistan, Egypt, and
Bangladesh. The amount of violence varies, but Islamic persecution
of Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities is
widespread.
Particularly shocking is persecution in both Afghanistan and
Iraq, which were supposed to have been liberated by allied forces.
Kabul’s threatened execution of Christian convert Abdul Rahman in
2006 gained worldwide attention. Discrimination and persecution are
increasingly evident. Acknowledges the State Department:
“Condemnations of conversions from Islam and censorship increased
concerns about citizens’ ability to freely practice minority
religions.”
In Iraq, the government does not actively persecute, though
Baha’is and Wahabbi Sunnis face some legal disabilities. But the
collapse of Iraqi civil society has left Christians particularly
vulnerable to criminal violence.
Even worse, Islamic extremists are consciously destroying the
historic Christian community. Carl Moeller of Open Doors USA
observes, “Christians are targeted specifically for being
Christians.”
There is occasional good news. A few years ago Indonesia’s
Moluccan Islands were aflame in a conflict that killed thousands
and displaced hundreds of thousands. The Crisis Centre Dioceses of
Ambonia celebrated the conflict’s end “based on mutual
understanding and readiness to forgive.”
BUT THE MOLUCCAN ISLANDS’ reconciliation was the outlier in the
otherwise tragic and intractable problem of peaceful religious
co-existence in Muslim lands.
There is no good foreign policy answer to religious persecution.
As bad as it is, persecution isn’t the same as terrorism when it
comes to justifying military intervention. And enthusiasm for
humanitarian warfare died in the rubble left by Iraqi IEDs and car
bombs.
Increased private dialogue might help. Before Pope Benedict XVI
visited Turkey, Ali Bardakoglu, head of Turkey’s Directorate of
Religious Affairs, warned would-be jihadis: “We Muslims condemn all
types of violence and terror, regardless of whoever commits it
against whosoever.”
His remarks should be repeated in mosques around the world.
Today a shocking number of Muslims choose violence and terror, and
even more choose acquiescence to violence and terror. Although
Christian persecution of Muslims belongs to history, “Muslim
persecution of Christians and other religious minorities remains a
present evil,” notes Jim Jacobson of Christian Freedom
International.
Only after suffering through significant sectarian injustices
did Christians of all stripes learn to tolerate those who believed
and thought differently. Millions of Muslims living in the West
have benefited from that transformation. Islamic lands should
similarly transform themselves.
