For at least one group of Middle-Easterners, the Arab Spring is
turning out to be a decidedly wintery affair. And if confirmation
was ever needed, just consider the escalation of naked violence
against Christians throughout the region. The recent instance of
Egyptian army vehicles crushing and killing Coptic Christians
protesting against a church burning was merely one of numerous
incidents that must make Middle-Eastern Christians wonder about
their future under the emerging new regimes.
Syrian Christians, for instance, are regularly taunted and
harassed because of their hesitations about joining the anti-Assad
uprising (as if the choice between Bashar al-Assad and the Muslim
Brotherhood is a simple one). Then there are the ongoing brutal
attacks on Iraqi Christians: so much so that two-thirds of Iraq’s
pre-2003 Christian population has fled the country.
More broadly, these trends appear to confirm that despite
all the current freedom-and-democracy talk, much of the Islamic
world continues to suffer from one particularly severe blind spot
when it comes to human liberty. And that concerns the acceptance
and protection of authentic religious freedom.
In 1900, about one in every five Middle-Easterners was
Christian. Over the past century, that figure has shrunk
dramatically. In 1948, for example, Bethlehem was 85 per cent
Christian. Today it’s less than 12 per cent. Since 1970, Jordan and
Syria’s Christian populations have halved.
In some cases, the shrinkage of Christians primarily
flowed from nationalist animus against particular ethnic groups.
This largely explains, for instance, the expulsion of Greek
Christians from post-World War I Turkey. Other Middle-East
Christians left because they realized the limited scope for their
seemingly genetically-ingrained entrepreneurial skills inside the
socialist-corporatist economies established by nationalist
caudillos such as Atatürk and Nasser.
Nonetheless, it’s also true that despite many
Middle-Eastern governments’ long-standing formal commitments to
religious liberty, their willingness to protect non-Muslims’
religious freedom has always been limited. This ranges from
acquiescing in the use of bureaucratic regulations to inhibit
2,000-year-old Christian communities from repairing their churches,
failures to stop Christian women from being cajoled into marrying
Muslims, ignoring cases of forced conversions, to a
barely-disguised reluctance to stop anti-Christian
violence.
One suspects this owes something to politicians seeking to
appease or co-opt hard-line Muslim sentiment within these
societies. But there’s surely no question that the general Islamic
view of religious liberty is part of the problem. Certainly there
are variations of Islamic thought about this issue. Nevertheless,
Islam has a long history of unreasonably restricting the religious
liberty of non-Muslims in Muslim-dominated societies.
Of course, other religions have imposed and enforced
analogous restrictions at different times. But Islam confronts two
specific dilemmas that raise questions about its ability to accept
a robust conception of religious liberty.
First, from its very beginning, Islam was intimately
associated with political power. That’s one reason why there is no
church-state distinction in Islam that limits (at least
theoretically) the state’s capacity to coerce religious belief or
unreasonably inhibit religious-shaped choices.
Second, since approximately the 13th century, the dominant
theological understanding of God’s nature within Islam has been one
of Voluntas (Divine Will) rather than Logos
(Divine Reason). And this matters because if you believe in a God
that can, on a mere whim, act unreasonably, then it isn’t so
problematic for such a Divinity’s adherents to engage in plainly
unreasonable practices such as killing apostates.
If, however, God is Logos, the case for religious
liberty is much easier to make insofar as a reasonable God would
never demand compulsion in religion. Why? Because as St. Augustine
wrote long ago, “If there is no assent, there is no faith, for
without assent one does not really believe.”
In recent years, we’ve seen some pious Muslims emerge who
understand that Islam must wrestle with these deeper theological
questions if it is accommodate itself to life in free societies.
That’s a central message of a new book,
Islam Without Extremes, authored by
the Turkish Muslim journalist Mustafa Akyol. The same message
underlies Akyol’s courageous
condemnation of the recent death sentence
meted out to Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani by an Iranian court because
of this ex-Muslim’s choice to embrace Christianity.
Akyol, incidentally, is no religious relativist or
covert-secularist. He firmly believes in Islam’s truth-claims. But
he also recognizes that the integrity of one’s faith depends upon
one’s free assent to that religion.
Unfortunately, Akyol is presently a minority voice within
Islam. But perhaps even more disturbing is how little much of the
West understands the importance of addressing such theological
matters if robust religious liberty protections are to be secured
in Islamic countries.
European religious figures such as
Benedict XVI and Patriarch
Kirill of Moscow have regularly condemned
anti-Christian violence throughout the Middle East. The comparative
silence, however, from most secular Western intellectuals and
governments is deafening and, frankly, disgraceful.
This may reflect the latent Christophobia often
encountered in these circles. But it’s probably more indicative of
that intellectually lazy, historically ignorant modern tendency to
treat all religions as the same, to regard all religious traditions
as infinitely adaptable sociological phenomena, and, in some cases,
to imagine that religion will just “go away” once the unenlightened
masses grasp that the universe just somehow spontaneously evolved
out of nothingness.
But in the end, non-Muslims can’t resolve Islam’s
religious liberty challenge. Only theologically educated,
historically informed and believing Muslims can do that. In the
meantime, those reading the Arab Spring as a uniformly-positive
event might like to consider that it appears to be doing little to
secure the freedom, if not the very existence, of ancient Christian
churches, many of which were founded by people who in all
likelihood knew Christ or his first disciples. The loss of such a
civilizational and religious heritage would be immeasurable — and
not just for Christianity, but for the future of liberty within the
Islamic world itself.
