Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam

by Robert Spencer

  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.18 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.19

  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.”20 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.21

  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.”22 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.”23

  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.24

  Two Afghans, Said Musa and Abdul Rahman, know all this well. Both were arrested for the crime of leaving Islam for Christianity.25 The Afghan Constitution stipulates that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”26 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.”27

  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.”28 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.29

  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:

  Then one night, my husband came home and told me that the padisha had sent word that we were to kill all the Christians in our village, and that we would have to kill our neighbours. I was very angry, and told him that I did not care who gave such orders, they were wrong. These neighbours had always been kind to us, and if he dared to kill them Allah would pay us out. I tried all I could to stop him, but he killed them—killed them with his own hand.30

  The Christian population in Turkey has declined from 15 percent in 1920 to 1 percent today. In Syria, it has declined from 33 percent to 10 percent in the same span. In Bethlehem, 85 percent of the population was Christian in 1948; today, 12 percent hold to the faith founded by the town’s most celebrated native son.31 The burden of the past lies heavy on the present for Christians in the Muslim world. Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a controversial pro-Osama Muslim leader who lived for years in Great Britain but is now barred from reentering that country, wrote in October 2002, “We cannot simply say that because we have no Khilafah [caliphate] we can just go ahead and kill any non-Muslim, rather, we must still fulfill their Dhimmah.”32

  The Dhimmah is the Islamic legal contract of protection for Jews, Christians, and some other inferiors under Islamic rule; those who accept this protection, and the concomitant deprivation of various rights, ar
e known as dhimmis. In 1999, Sheikh Yussef Salameh, the Palestinian Authority’s undersecretary for religious endowment, according to Jonathan Adelman and Agota Kuperman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, “praised the idea that Christians should become dhimmis under Muslim rule, and such suggestions have become more common since the second intifada began in October 2000.”33

  In a recent Friday sermon at a mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi spelled out the Sharia’s injunctions for dhimmis:

  If the infidels live among the Muslims, in accordance with the conditions set out by the Prophet—there is nothing wrong with it provided they pay Jizya to the Islamic treasury. Other conditions are . . . that they do not renovate a church or a monastery, do not rebuild ones that were destroyed, that they feed for three days any Muslim who passes by their homes . . . that they rise when a Muslim wishes to sit, that they do not imitate Muslims in dress and speech, nor ride horses, nor own swords, nor arm themselves with any kind of weapon; that they do not sell wine, do not show the cross, do not ring church bells, do not raise their voices during prayer, that they shave their hair in front so as to make them easily identifiable, do not incite anyone against the Muslims, and do not strike a Muslim. . . . If they violate these conditions, they have no protection.34

  These Sharia provisions have not been fully enforced since the mid-nineteenth century, but today’s jihadists want to restore these laws along with the rest of the Sharia. The idea that Christians must “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29) in Islamic lands is also very much alive. When the first Catholic Church in Qatar opened in March 2008, it sported no cross, no bell, no steeple, and no sign. “The idea,” explained the church’s pastor, Fr. Tom Veneracion, “is to be discreet because we don’t want to inflame any sensitivities.”35

  In the Philippines, the church in the nation’s one Islamic city, Marawi, has also done away with the cross. A Catholic priest, Fr. Teresito Soganub, explains: “To avoid arguments and to avoid further misunderstandings we just plant the cross deep in our hearts.” Fr. Soganub, according to Reuters, “doesn’t wear a crucifix or a clerical collar and sports a beard out of respect for his Muslim neighbors.” He celebrates few weddings, since roast pork is a staple of wedding receptions for Filipino Catholics.36

  It is easy to see the need for such discretion. Preaching in a mosque in Al-Damam, Saudi Arabia, the popular Saudi Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Al-Munajjid recommended hatred of Christians and Jews as a proper course: “Muslims must educate their children to Jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children to Jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels; educating the children to Jihad and to revival of the embers of Jihad in their souls. This is what is needed now.”37

  The silence of human rights groups

  What Justus Reid Weiner, an international human rights lawyer, stated in December 2007 about Christians in Palestinian areas applies to Christians in the Islamic world generally: “The systematic persecution of Christian Arabs living in Palestinian areas is being met with nearly total silence by the international community, human rights activists, the media and NGOs.” He said that if nothing were done, no Christians would be left there in fifteen years, for “Christian leaders are being forced to abandon their followers to the forces of radical Islam.”38

  The nearly total silence manifests itself in the curiously euphemistic manner in which human rights groups report on the plight of Christians, when they notice that plight at all. For example, Amnesty International’s 2007 report on the human rights situation in Egypt dismisses the suffering of Coptic Christians in a single sentence so filled with euphemism and moral equivalence and so lacking in context that it almost erases the crime it describes: “There were sporadic outbreaks of sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians. In April [2006], three days of religious violence in Alexandria resulted in at least three deaths and dozens of injuries.”39 In reality, the strife began when a Muslim stabbed a Christian to death inside a church, and when armed jihadists attacked three churches in Alexandria that same month.40

  The passive voice seems to be the rule of the day where jihad violence against Christians is concerned. The 2007 Amnesty International report on Indonesia includes this line: “Minority religious groups and church buildings continued to be attacked.” By whom? AI is silent. “In Sulawesi, sporadic religious violence occurred throughout the year.”41 Who is responsible for that violence? AI doesn’t say. Amnesty International seems more concerned about protecting Islam and Islamic groups from being implicated in human rights abuses than about protecting Christians from those abuses.

  It appears that Christianity—even indigenous Egyptian Christianity, which of course predates the advent of Islam in that country—is too closely identified with the United States and the West for the multiculturalist tastes of the human rights elite. The situation is dire. Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III, who lives in Damascus, declared in April 2006 that “after 11 September, there is a plot to eliminate all the Christian minorities from the Arabic world. . . . Our simple existence ruins the equations whereby Arabs can’t be other than Moslems, and Christians but be Westerners. . . . If the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Orthodox, the Latin Catholics leave, if the Middle East is cleansed of all the Arabic Christians, the Moslem Arab world and a so-called Christian Western world will be left face to face. It will be easier to provoke a clash and justify it with religion.”42 Several years later, Gregory III himself showed he felt the pressure to please the Muslims—or else—when he publicly blamed the Muslim persecution of Christians not on Islamic supremacists but on that ever-present bogey of Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, the Zionists.43

  Yet some American Catholics and non-Christians are surprised to discover that there are ancient communities of Christians in Islamic lands at all and that those communities are being persecuted. Others are indifferent because of the growing movement of fashionable atheism, which sees all religions as equally repugnant and liable to lead to violence, whatever the differences in their actual teachings. And many Westerners, particularly those in the human rights elite, are wedded to a worldview in which only non-Western non-Christians can possibly fit into the human rights groups’ victim paradigm: Middle Eastern Christians are identified with white Western oppressors and could not be victims. Some Westerners even indulge in a certain schadenfreude at the persecution of Christians worldwide, seeing in it a comeuppance for a church and a belief system for which they have long harbored hatred or self-loathing guilt. That Christians in Muslim lands are generally poor, disenfranchised, and worlds away from the oppressive force that is the Christianity of Leftist myth doesn’t seem to enter their minds.

  And so Islamic jihadists and Sharia supremacists, with ever increasing confidence and brutality, and virtually no protest from the West, continue to prey on the Christians in their midst. These embattled communities are now on the verge of extinction, with no one to speak up for them. Their continued existence and safety would require nothing short of a miracle.

  Cognitive dissonance

  In light of all this (and much more) evidence of an escalating global Islamic jihad against Christians, Peter Kreeft’s assertion—that “an ‘ecumenical jihad’ is possible and is called for, for the simple and strong reason that Muslims and Christians preach and practice the same First Commandment: islam, total surrender, submission of the human will to the divine will”—seems ironic. At the very least, the impulse to wage a new war of all religions united against secularism is coming largely from Christians, without significant interest from the Muslim side. There is much more evidence of Muslim hatred and contempt for Christians, as evidenced by the global violence against them, than there is of Muslim interest in a common front with Catholics or any other Christians. To be sure, several years ago a large group of Islamic scholars did write to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, inviting them to dialogue (an initiative we’ll examine in depth later on), but they have not mana
ged to restrain their bloody-minded coreligionists.

  The reasons for this may be many and elusive, but the reality of the escalating Muslim persecution of Christians and the comparatively small number of Muslims who have shown interest in anything like the common front that Kreeft advocates highlight the danger that, in their haste to gain an advantage in the culture wars, Western Catholics may be papering over vast and substantial differences between Catholicism and Islam solely in the hope of gaining an ally. And that way lies danger, for an ally gained by such means will hardly be dependable, and the ways in which that lack of dependability may manifest itself could have consequences nothing short of catastrophic.

  Saladin: myth versus reality

  Kreeft, and others like him, envision Muslims as devout, God-fearing, moral people who would naturally align themselves with others, such as Catholics, who share their concerns about galloping secularism and the erosion of moral values in society. In his book The Enemy at Home, conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza advocates a common front between conservative Americans of all faiths and conservative Muslims, portraying these Muslims, whom he does not identify by name, as honorable, pious, humble, and appalled by contemporary Western popular culture. No doubt these qualities describe many Muslims. They certainly recall one particular Muslim: the semi-legendary sultan of the Crusader era, Saladin.

  In the twelfth century, Saladin dealt decisive blows to the Crusader enterprise; but did it, according to prevailing historical myth, in a magnanimous and noble manner. Today Saladin is generally regarded as an exponent of the best aspects of Islam and proof that it need not be a religion of terrorism and intransigence. The Arab historian Amin Maalouf sums this up in his description of Saladin: “He was always affable with visitors, insisting that they stay to eat, treating them with full honours, even if they were infidels, and satisfying all their requests. He could not bear to let someone who had come to him depart disappointed, and there were those who did not hesitate to take advantage of this quality. One day, during a truce with the Franj [Franks], the ‘Brins,’ lord of Antioch, arrived unexpectedly at Saladin’s tent and asked him to return a district that the sultan had taken four years earlier. And he agreed!”44