Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (2 page)

Islamic jihadists for years called American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan “Crusaders” and claimed that they were there as part of a war being waged by Christians against Islam. Confirmation of this came from an unlikely source in January 2011, when the acclaimed journalist Seymour Hersh, speaking in Qatar, charged that retired General Stanley McChrystal and military personnel currently serving in special operations units were part of a secret cabal bent on waging a new Crusade against Muslims: “They do see what they’re doing—and this is not an atypical attitude among some military—it’s a crusade, literally,” Hersh asserted. “They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the thirteenth century. And this is their function.”
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If McChrystal and others really considered themselves to be “the protectors of the Christians” from Islamic jihad attacks, they were failing dismally at their task. There is, of course, no new Crusade, but Christians in Muslim lands are being victimized more relentlessly and brutally today than they have been for centuries.

Egyptian Catholic spokesman Fr. Rafic Greische told Vatican Radio in December 2010 that “Muslim fundamentalists
. . . want the Christians to evacuate from the Middle East and leave. And this is what is happening every day.”
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From Egypt to Nigeria, from Iraq to Pakistan, Christians in majority-Muslim countries face a grimmer present and a more uncertain future than ever as Islamic jihadists step up their efforts to Islamize them, to drive them out of their lands—or to kill them outright.

Still, the world generally continues to avert its eyes. Fearful of offending Muslim sensibilities, the international community has largely ignored this persecution, allowing it to continue under the cover of darkness. Thus unchallenged, Muslim persecution of Christians has become a drearily familiar narrative, repeated with increasingly terrifying frequency in Muslim-controlled areas throughout the world.

Moreover, this religious bigotry, hatred, and violence are legitimized by holy writ: the Qur’an and other Islamic texts and teachings. Nowhere else does religious bigotry have such bloody consequences. And yet, nowhere else does such religious bigotry take place almost entirely without comment, let alone condemnation, from the human rights community.

Emblematic of how the mainstream media, and in turn human rights organizations, gloss over the harsh reality of Christian persecution is a January 2011 Associated Press story. When machete-wielding Muslims brutally murdered six Christians in Nigeria in January 2011, AP’s headline was “6 dead in religion-torn central Nigerian region,” as if the cause of the problem was “sectarian strife” that was the equal responsibility of both sides. The lead paragraph read: “Authorities say machete-wielding attackers have killed six people in two attacks on Christian villages in central Nigeria.”
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Although the victims were identified, the attackers were not until later in the story, and then only in the context of their retaliating against an earlier attack upon Muslims by Christians. And indeed, Christians have fought back in Nigeria, but Islamic jihadists are the aggressors and created the conflict. One would never, however, get that idea from the Associated Press.

Human rights organizations give only perfunctory recognition to such outrages, and world leaders yawn. Christians are not fashionable or politically correct victims.

Before the Gulf War, some estimates held the number of Christians in Iraq to be approaching a million or more; but since 2003, over half of Iraq’s prewar Christians have fled the country. This is not to suggest that the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein was particularly hospitable to Iraqi Christians; even in the relatively secular Iraq of Saddam, where Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a Chaldean Catholic Christian, the small Christian community faced random violence from the Muslim majority. Aside from outbreaks of actual persecution, including murder, Christians were routinely pressured to renounce their religion and to marry Muslims.
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But now the situation has grown exponentially worse. Saddam did not enforce the fullness of Islamic law mandating the subjugation of Christians; now, numerous armed groups are determined to do so, or to punish those Christians who do not submit. Jihadists bombed forty Iraqi churches between 2004 and 2011—seven on a single day, Orthodox Christmas Eve 2007.
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The most notorious attack came on October 31, 2010, a Sunday, when jihadists stormed the crowded Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad and began murdering worshippers in cold blood. Sixty-eight people were killed.
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The situation of Christians in Egypt is no better. Late in 2010 Copts in Egypt experienced an unprecedented reign of terror. An Islamic suicide bomber murdered twenty-two people and wounded eighty more at the Coptic Christian Church of the Saints in Alexandria, Egypt on New Year’s Eve.
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Just days later in 2011, as Christmas (which Copts celebrate on January 7) approached, an Islamic website carried this ominous exhortation: “Blow up the churches while they are celebrating Christmas or any other time when the churches are packed.”
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Islamic authorities in Egypt are generally disinclined to discuss the plight of Christians there. When Pope Benedict XVI spoke out in January 2011 against the persecution of Christians in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the world’s most prestigious Sunni Muslim institution, reacted angrily, breaking off dialogue with the Vatican and accusing the Pope of interference in internal Egyptian affairs. In a statement, Al-Azhar denounced the pontiff’s “repeated negative references to Islam and his claims that Muslims persecute those living among them in the Middle East.”
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This was not the first time Al-Azhar had moved against those who decried the persecution of Christians in Egypt rather than against the persecutors: Just weeks before taking issue with the Pope’s statements, Al-Azhar demanded that Copts repudiate a U.S. report on Coptic persecution.
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The Mubarak government of Egypt, meanwhile, recalled its ambassador to the Vatican.
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In Pakistan, Christians are physically attacked and falsely accused under the nation’s blasphemy laws so frequently that a steady stream of Christians is converting to Islam simply in order to be safe from legal harassment and rampaging Islamist mobs.
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In 2010, blasphemy charges against a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, gained international attention and widespread criticism of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Yet, when the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, spoke out in favor of the repeal of such laws, he was assassinated by an Islamic supremacist who explained that he was acting in defense of the blasphemy laws.
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And just as Al-Azhar reacted angrily when the Pope spoke out against the persecution of Christians in Egypt, in Pakistan Islamic supremacist groups became enraged when the pontiff called for repeal of the nation’s blasphemy laws. Farid Paracha, the leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, the largest pro-Sharia party in Pakistan, fumed: “The Pope’s statement is an insult to Muslims across the world.”
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Islamic supremacist groups held rallies protesting the Pope’s statement as “part of a conspiracy to pit the world’s religions against each other,” in the words of Pakistani parliamentarian Sahibzada Fazal Karim.
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The punishment for exercising freedom of conscience: death

Converts from Islam to Christianity are often hunted in the Muslim world, where virtually all religious authorities agree that such individuals deserve death. Muhammad himself commanded this: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”
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This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, although there is some disagreement over whether the law applies only to men or to women also.

At Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious and influential institution in the Islamic world, an Islamic manual certified as a reliable guide to Sunni Muslim orthodoxy, states: “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.” Although the right to kill an apostate is reserved in Islamic law to the leader of the community and theoretically other Muslims can be punished for taking this duty upon themselves, in practice a Muslim who kills an apostate needs to pay no indemnity and perform no expiatory acts (as he must in other kinds of murder cases under classic Islamic law). This accommodation is made because killing an apostate “is killing someone who deserves to die.”
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IslamOnline, a website manned by a team of Islam scholars headed by the internationally influential Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, explains, “If a sane person who has reached puberty voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be punished. In such a case, it is obligatory for the caliph (or his representative) to ask him to repent and return to Islam.

If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he refuses, he is immediately killed.” And what if someone doesn’t wait for a caliph to appear and takes matters into his own hands? Although the killer is to be “disciplined” for “arrogating the caliph’s prerogative and encroaching upon his rights,” there is “no blood money for killing an apostate (or any expiation)”—in other words, no significant punishment for the killer.
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Two Afghans, Said Musa and Abdul Rahman, know all this well. Both were arrested for the crime of leaving Islam for Christianity.
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The Afghan Constitution stipulates that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”
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Even after Abdul Rahman’s arrest, which took place in 2006, Western analysts seem to have had trouble grasping the import of this provision. A “human rights expert” quoted by the
Times of London
summed up confusion widespread in Western countries: “The constitution says Islam is the religion of Afghanistan, yet it also mentions the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 18 specifically forbids this kind of recourse. It really highlights the problem the judiciary faces.”
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But, in fact, there was no contradiction. The constitution may declare its “respect” for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it also says that no law can contradict Islamic law. The Constitution’s definition of religious freedom is explicit: “The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites
within the limits of the provisions of law
” (emphasis added).

The death penalty for apostasy is deeply ingrained in Islamic culture—which is one reason why it was Abdul Rahman’s own family that went to police to file a complaint about his conversion. Whatever triggered their action in 2006, they could be confident that the police would receive such a complaint with the utmost seriousness. After an international outcry, Abdul Rahman was eventually spirited out of Afghanistan to relative safety in Italy. Despite the publicity, his case was hardly unique, as other nearly identical cases—that of Said Musa in February 2011 and that of Youcef Nadarkhani in early 2012—attest. And yet, while international indignation rained down upon the Afghan government for the arrest and trial of Abdul Rahman, the world community showed hardly any interest at all in Said Musa. Perhaps the intervening years had inured the world’s opinion makers to Islamic atrocities against Christians, although Nadarkhani’s capital trial in Iran did call new international attention to the plight of ex-Muslims in Muslim countries.

Meanwhile, in Egypt in August 2007, Mohammed Hegazy, a convert from Islam to Christianity, was forced to go into hiding after a death sentence was pronounced against him by Islamic clerics. He refused to flee Egypt, declaring, “I know there are fatwas to shed my blood, but I will not give up and I will not leave the country.”
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Early in 2008, his father told Egyptian newspapers: “I am going to try to talk to my son and convince him to return to Islam. If he refuses, I am going to kill him with my own hands.” Hegazy remains in hiding in Egypt.
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A tradition of persecution

The prophet of Islam set the pattern for all of this, for he himself made war against Christians. Muhammad’s last military expedition was against the Christian forces of the Byzantine Empire in the northern Arabian garrison of Tabuk; and shortly after their prophet’s death, Islamic jihadists conquered and Islamized the Christian lands of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. The jihad then pointed toward Christian Europe and continued for centuries, the high-water mark coming in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople. After September 1683, when the Ottoman siege of Vienna was broken, the Islamic tide in Europe began to recede. But the doctrines that fueled the jihad against Christians were never reformed or rejected by any Islamic sect.

Consequently, with the renewal of jihadist sentiments among Muslims in the twentieth century came renewed persecution of Christians. This chilling story told by a woman who lived during the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century captures the moment of that renewal in one household: