49
Nowhere else is religious bigotry legitimated by holy writ, in this case the Quran, or by a
significant number of religious leaders, in this case imams. Nowhere else does religious
bigotry have such bloody consequences. Nowhere else does such religious bigotry take
place almost entirely without comment, let alone condemnation, from the human rights
community.
Christian persecution by Muslims has become a familiar narrative, repeated with
terrifying frequency in Muslim controlled areas throughout the world, but especially in the
Middle East.
Murdered Christian Clergy in Iraq
On April 5, 2008, Youssef Adel, an Assyrian Orthodox priest at St. Peter and Paul church
in Baghdad, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was opening the gate of his house.[4]
This attack came just weeks after the death of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of the
Chaldean Catholic Church, who was kidnapped in the Iraqi city of Mosul on February 29
while three Christians with him were also killed. On March 12, the kidnappers phoned a
church in Mosul to announce that Archbishop Rahho was dead, and indicate where the
body could be found.[5]
While mosques proliferate throughout the west, Christian clergymen have become an
endangered species in Iraq. In October 2006, a Syrian Orthodox priest, Fr. Boulos
Iskander, went shopping for auto parts in the Iraqi city of Mosul. He was never seen alive
again. A Muslim group kidnapped him and initially demanded $350,000 in ransom; they
eventually lowered this to $40,000, but added a new demand: Fr. Boulos’ parish had to
denounce the mildly critical remarks about Islam made the previous month by Pope
Benedict in an address in Regensburg, Germany, that had caused rioting all over the
Islamic world. The ransom was paid, and the church dutifully posted thirty large signs all
over Mosul
denouncing the Pope’s statements. All to no avail: when Fr. Boulos’ remains were
discovered, he had not only been murdered but dismembered.
Five hundred Christians attended the funeral. Looking at the crowd, another priest
commented: “Many more wanted to come to the funeral, but they were afraid. We are in
very bad circumstances now.”[6]
There is no doubt of that. The murders of these three clergymen took place against a
backdrop of increasing danger for Christians in Iraq. In March 2007, Islamic gangs
knocked on doors in Christian neighbourhoods in Baghdad, demanding payment of the
Jizya, the religion-based tax assessed by Islamic law against Christians, Jews, and other
non Muslim groups who live in Muslim lands.[7] Meanwhile, Christian women throughout
the country are threatened with kidnapping or death if they do not wear a headscarf. In
accord with traditional Islamic legal restrictions on Christians “openly displaying wine or
pork” (in the words of a legal manual endorsed by Cairo’s venerable Al-Azhar
University), liquor store owners in Iraq have likewise been threatened.[8] Many
businesses have been destroyed, and the owners have fled.
In fact, half of the nation’s prewar 700,000 Christians have fled the country since 2003.
The difference in the violence they face is one of degrees. Even in the relatively secular
Iraq of Saddam Hussein, where the notorious Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a
Chaldean Catholic Christian, the small Christian community faced random violenc from
the Muslim majority. Aside from outbreaks of actual persecution, including murder,
Christians were routinely pressured to renounce their religion and to marry Muslims.[9]
Iraqi Christians today are streaming into Syria, or, if they can, out of the Middle East
altogether. An Iraqi businessman now living in Syria lamented that “now at least 75% of
my Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq.”[10]
45
Coptic Christians victimised in Egypt
In Egypt, Coptic Christians have suffered discrimination and harassment for centuries.
Rather than being mitigated by the growing tolerance and interconnection of the global
community, the jeopardy of Christians is increasing today, with mob attacks on churches
and on individual Christians becoming more frequent. In February 2007, rumours that a
Coptic Christian man was having an affair with a Muslim woman – a violation of Islamic
law – led to a rampage that resulted in the destruction of several Christian-owned shops
in southern Egypt.[11] And besides physical attacks, Christians have been restricted from
speaking freely. In August 2007, two Coptic rights activists were arrested for “publishing
articles and declarations that are damaging to Islam and insulting to Prophet Mohammed
on the United Copts web site.”[12]
Mistreatment of Christians in Egypt frequently meets with indifference – or worse yet,
complicity -- from Egyptian authorities. In June 2007, rioters in Alexandria vandalised
Christian shops, attacked and injured seven Christians, and damaged two Coptic
churches. Police allowed the mob to roam free in Alexandria’s Christian quarter for an
hour and a half before intervening. The Compass Direct News service, which tracks
incidents of Christian persecution, noted: “In
April 2006, Alexandria was the scene of three knife attacks on churches that killed one
Christian and left a dozen more injured. The government appeared unable or unwilling to
halt subsequent vandalism of Coptic-owned shops and churches...”[13]
The ordeal of Suhir Shihata Gouda exemplifies the experience of many Egyptian
Christians, and principally of Christian women, who are frequently victimised by Muslim
men.[14] According to the Jubilee Campaign, which records incidences of Christian
persecution:
[A Christian woman named Suhir] was kidnapped on February 25th [1999] by a group of
Muslims who forced her to marry a Muslim man, Saed Sadek Mahmoud. After Suhir failed
to return home from school, her distraught father rushed to Abu-Tisht police station to
report the incident, but instead of assisting him, a police officer began assaulting Suhir’s
father…beating and cursing him. Three days later, Suhir’s father and brother returned to the
police station to ask for help and they were subjected to the same abuse, as a result of
which the father had to be admitted to hospital for treatment.
Suhir herself managed to escape, but was recaptured “and beaten for running away and
is currently under heavy guard.” Her Muslim “husband” accompanied a mob to her
father’s house where they threatened to kill all the Christian
men in Suhir’s home village, and carry off all the women, if her family took legal action.
[15]
Bishop Wissa of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church painted a grim picture in an interview
with the Protestant organisation Prayer for the Persecuted Church in May 2000:
One man in his 20s was in the field working when he was approached by armed Muslims.
He was asked to renounce Christianity and to verbally say the two statements of faith that
would convert him to Islam. When he refused and did the sign of the cross, he was shot in
the head and killed. Another young man had a tattoo on his arm of St. George and the
Virgin Mary. They also asked him to renounce his faith. When he refused, they cut off his
arm that had the Christian tattoos and chopped it up. They finished him off with their
daggers and then burned his body.
48
A 17-year-old boy, who is a deacon at the church, was going to look for his sister in the
fields. He too was asked to renounce his faith, and when he refused, he was shot. After
they killed him, they asked the young girl to lay next to her brother and they killed her
right there.
The Egyptian government, caught between the demands of Sharia and its secular laws,
couldn’t entirely ignore these acts of murder. It compensated each of the families of
these victims, albeit in a manner that only underscored the relatively cheapness of a
Christian life: each family received eight hundred dollars. And this was only because of
the notoriety of the cases. The families of other victims,
however, get neither recompense nor justice. One man’s son was on his way to school
when Islamic militants stopped the school bus on which he was riding and ordered the
Christians to separate from the Muslims. They demanded that the boy renounce his faith.
When he refused, says Bishop Wissa, “they killed him with an axe, and then they drove
over his body with their car.” Authorities called the death a vehicular accident, and denied
the father compensation — just as they did previously when Muslim militants destroyed
his shop.[16]
Jihadist Aggression against Christians in Pakistan
In Pakistan the situation for Christians is no better. Fr. Emmanuel Asi, chairman of the
Theological Institute for Laity in Lahore and secretary of the Catholic Bible
Commission of Pakistan, said in August 2007 that Pakistani Christians are frequently
denied equality of rights with Muslims and subjected to various forms of discrimination.
Jihadist aggression, he said, can “at any time” bring “every imaginable kind of problem”
upon Pakistan’s Christians.[17]
As in Egypt, Christians in Pakistan have been subjected to mob violence and threats. In
August 2007, Christians (as well as Hindus) in Peshawar in northern Pakistan received
letters from a jihadist group ordering them to convert to Islam in a matter of days or
“your colony will be ruined.” The deadline passed, but according to Compass Direct, the
Christians continued “to live in fear, canceling church activities and skipping
services.”[18] They had good reason to be worried, since jihadists had made good their
promises to attack Pakistani churches in the past. In an attack in a Peshawar church on
October 28, 2001, for instance, eighteen Christians were murdered during the Sunday
morning worship service.[19] In another church attack on March 17, 2002, five Christians
were killed and forty wounded. The entire Pakistani Christian community lived under the
shadow of an al-Qaeda threat to kill “two Christians in retaliation for every Muslim killed
in the U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan.”[20]
In addition to group attacks, there is also individual harassment. Pakistani Christian
schoolteacher Cadherine Shaheen was “pressured to convert to Islam.” When she
resisted, she was finally told that if she did not capitulate she would face serious
consequences. Soon she was accused of blasphemy. All the area mosques posted copies
a poster bearing her name and picture. “This was a death sentence for me,” says
Shaheen. “It’s considered an honour for one of the Muslim men to kill a blasphemer. Just
before me, the Muslims murdered a school principal accused of blasphemy. I was next.”
Shaheen went underground, where upon Pakistani police arrested her father and
brothers. Her father, age 85, soon died. Cadherine made her way to the United States.
“It’s horrible for Christians in Pakistan,” she now says. “The Muslims take our land, rob
our homes, try to force us to accept Islam. Young girls are kidnapped and raped. Then
they’re told that if they want a husband who will accept them after that defilement, they
must become Muslim.”[21]
48
Religious Cleansing Elsewhere in the Islamic world
The same dispiriting story is repeated all over the Muslim world. In June 2007 Christians
in Gaza appealed to the international community for protection after jihadists destroyed a
church and a school.[22] In Sudan, the Khartoum regime has for years waged a bloody
jihad against the Christians in the southern part of the country, killing two million
Sudanese Christians and displacing five million
more.[23] In Spring 2003 jihadists burned to death a Sudanese Christian pastor and his
family while carrying out an unprovoked massacre of 59 villagers.[24]
In Nigeria, Muslim mobs have torched churches, enforced Sharia codes on Christians, and
even horse-whipped female Christian college students whom they deemed improperly
dressed.[25] Over 2,000 people were killed in 2001 in Muslim instigated riots in the city
of Jos. All over Nigeria, Islamic jihadists continue to try to impose the Sharia over the
whole country, despite its sizable Christian population. A report warned that in Jos, “the
conflict could recur, since Muslim militants are still bent on attacking Christians.”[26]
Even in Lebanon, traditionally the Middle East’s sole Christian land, Christians suffer
persecution -- marked most notably by an ongoing series of assassinations of Christian
political leaders, including the bombing in a Christian suburb of Beirut in September 2007
that killed Antoine Ghanem of the Christian Phalange party.[27] This has led to declining
numbers and declining influence – which in turn encourages yet more persecution.
Communities that date back almost two thousand years to the dawn of Christianity have
been steadily decreasing in numbers; now the faith is on the verge of disappearing from
the area altogether.
Muslim militants in Algeria have targeted that country’s small group of Catholics for
years. In 1994, they killed a priest, a nun, and four missionaries; in 1995, two nuns; in
1996, a bishop and fourteen monks. Many of those who were murdered were trying to
establish friendly relations with the Muslim community. Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran,
killed in 1996, “had dedicated his life to promoting dialogue between Islam and
Christianity; he was known as the ‘Bishop of the Muslims’ and had studied Islam in depth
— indeed to such an extent that...the Muslims themselves would consult him on the
subject.”[28]
In early 2002 in Malawi, according to Compass Direct, two local Christians “have been
stoned, threatened with machetes and warned by local Muslim leaders that they will be
sent back to their original villages as corpses if they continue to hold meetings in their
houses.”[29]
According to Aid to the Church in Need, in Bangladesh “on April 28 1998, a crowd —
instigated by the Islamists — ransacked and partly burnt down the Catholic girls’ college
of St. Francis Xavier, the churches of Santa Croce and St. Thomas in the capital, and the
Baptist church in Sadarghat. Some priests, nuns and even ordinary workers have been
threatened with death.”
The occasion for this violence seems to have been a dispute over land: “The reason for
the conflict was a plot of land belonging to the church which the adjacent mosque wanted
for itself. Seven thousand people, incited via a loud-hailer with claims that the mosque
had been invaded by Christians and Jews, broke into the St Francis Xavier College,
burning books, smashing crucifixes and statues of the Virgin, breaking down doors,
windows and ransacking the dormitories.”[30]
Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi is likewise intolerant of Christians. Aid to the
Church in Need reports that in Libya, “The majority of the Christian churches were closed
following the revolution of 1969, despite the fact that the words of the Constitution
48
guarantee the liberty of religion. After expelling the Italian and Maltese Catholics, Qaddafi
turned the cathedral in the capital into a mosque.”[31]
Since the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus in 1974, churches have been despoiled
of icons, which have flooded the black market in Greece. The Turks have taken over
many churches for secular uses, and even tried to convert
the fourth century monastery of San Makar into a hotel. Christian Cypriots are forbidden
to come near the building, much less enter it.[32]
Muslim militants seem determined to drive all Christians out of the country. In Tur-Abdin
in southwest Turkey in 1960, there were 150,000 Christians; today there are just over
two thousand. Terrorism is employed where subtler means of
persuasion fail: according to Aid to the Church in Need, “on December 3, 1997, a bomb
exploded in the headquarters of the Ecumenical Patriarch, injuring a deacon and
damaging the church.”[33] The Turkish government, meanwhile, has
closed the last remaining Orthodox seminary, and with its requirement that the Patriarch
of Constantinople be a Turkish citizen, seems intent upon destroying the patriarchate.
In Indonesia, the massacres of Christians by Laskar Jihad in 2002 described above were
not the beginning or the end of the plight of Christians there. In Java in 1996, Muslims
destroyed thirteen churches. Thirteen more churches were torched in Djakarta in 1998
by mobs shouting, “We are Muslim gentlemen and they are Christian pigs” and,
paraphrasing the Qur’an, “Kill all the pagans!” One Muslim shouted at an army officer
who was trying to protect some Christians to “stand aside and allow Islamic justice to
take its course.”[34]
Human rights organisations report that Indonesian jihadists, often abetted by local
government officials, have forced the closing of 110 churches in Indonesia between 2004
and 2007.[35] Because of the violence, incidents of commonplace Christian charity have
been transformed into homilies on what appear to be the perdurable differences between
Islam and Christianity: Aid to the Church in Need tells of “eight Sisters of the Little Child
Jesus, on arriving in Cileduk, a suburb of Java, were attacked by stone-throwing
Muslims; they responded by building a care centre for children, an old people’s home and
a school.”
And in the most horrific instance of Muslim persecution of Christians in Indonesia, in
October 2005, three Islamic jihadists beheaded three Christian girls and severely
wounded a fourth as they walked to school near the city of Poso.[36] For this ghastly
triple murder, an Indonesian court sentenced the organiser of the attack to twenty years
in prison; his two accomplices both got fourteen years.[37]
Christians who have converted from Islam suffer special hatred. But those born to the
faith don’t have it much easier. Saudi Arabia, the holy land of Islam, has been especially
harsh on religious minorities. Even foreigners must submit to draconian Saudi religious
laws:
In 1979, when the Muslims requested the intervention of a special French unit into the
Kaaba, against a group of Islamic fundamentalists who were opposed to the government,
the soldiers of the intervention force of the French national police (GIGN — Groupe
d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale) were obliged to undergo a rapid ceremony of
conversion to Islam. Even the Red Cross was obliged, during the course of the Gulf war, to
drive around without the symbol of the Cross and not to display its banner.[38]
Adds former U. S. Foreign Service Officer Tim Hunter, who served in Saudi Arabia from
1993 to 1995, “On occasion they beat, even tortured, Americans in Jeddah for as little as
possessing a photograph with a Star of David in
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
