One must look elsewhere for the full picture. Fortunately there are a number of alternative media outlets and human rights organizations that report on the sufferings of Christians around the world. Most of these are little known. However, after following their work for years and becoming acquainted with several of their journalists around the Muslim world, I can testify that their work is first-rate. World Watch Monitor (formerly Compass Direct News), the media component of Open Doors, is one of the most authoritative sources on the sufferings of Christians, with reporters spread out around the world. So is International Christian Concern. There are also local news services that offer good coverage of certain regions. For the Near East, Egypt in particular, the Assyrian International News Agency is a good source for objective reports (most of which are easily verified by comparison with open Arabic sources). Readers are encouraged to follow the endnotes to the many anecdotes listed in this book for links to some of the most reliable English-language websites covering Christian persecution around the world.
Even so, a great many instances of persecution simply never make it onto any English-language media at all. There are just too many incidents to keep up with—not to mention that some nations are especially inhospitable to Western journalists. On top of that, many Western journalists are at best uninterested in Muslim persecution of Christians. Even some big stories widely reported in the Muslim world never make it into English. For example, it was left to me to first translate and disseminate the assertion by Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches” in the Arabian Peninsula.2
I routinely get my stories straight from the source. I follow the Arabic-language media and can often verify stories via my many contacts and colleagues in the Middle East. Many of the reports that appear in this book—including the entire section on the Maspero Massacre, which initially was woefully misreported by the Western media—were identified, verified, and translated by me directly from Arabic sources. In many cases I have augmented reports appearing in Western media with more information and details from Arabic media as well as providing fresh translations of some important doctrinal and historical texts.
The fact is that knowledge of Arabic opens a new world of information concerning such important and strategic nations as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Readers are encouraged to visit my website, RaymondIbrahim.com, where I regularly translate breaking news from the Arab world—not just on Christian persecution but on Islamic affairs in general—and put it in context. I also maintain a “Muslim Persecution of Christians” tab on my website and produce a monthly report by the same name, which offers the very latest news on the sufferings of Christians under Islam, most of it reported only in alternate and foreign media.
A final question remains to be addressed: Why focus on Muslim persecution of Christians? After all, Christians are being persecuted around the entire world—in North Korea, for example—and not just in the Islamic world. Why focus exclusively on the sufferings of Christians under Islam? The fact is, while it is true that Christians are also being persecuted in non-Muslim countries, the lion’s share of the persecution happens in Muslim countries. But there is another important point: Muslim persecution is much more existential and deeply rooted in Muslim societies. The persecution of Christians in other, mostly communist, nations is very real. It should never be minimized. But the overthrow of, say, the North Korean regime could well end the persecution of Christians there almost overnight—just as the fall of the Soviet Union saw Christians’ persecution come to a quick close in Russia. This is because the persecution of Christians in non-Muslim nations is almost always rooted in a secular ideology and tied to a particular political regime. On the other hand, Muslim persecution of Christians is perennial; it transcends any one regime. It is part and parcel of the Islamic religion and the civilization born of it—hence its tenacity. Thus the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world is not only a widespread phenomenon that has horrific effects on large numbers of human beings across the globe; it is also a discrete phenomenon, deserving of attention in its own right.
PART ONE
LOST HISTORY
At this moment, from one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are being persecuted. A January 2012 Reuters report cited an estimated “‘100 million Christians persecuted worldwide.’”1 A few years earlier the British Secret Service, M-16, had put the number of Christians being persecuted around the world at twice as high, 200 million.2 A human rights representative for the Organization for Security and Cooperation on Europe estimates that a Christian is killed for his faith “every five minutes.”3
The vast majority of those martyrs are being killed in the Islamic world. Eight of the top nine offending countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Maldives, Mali, Iran, and Yemen—have a majority of Muslims (the ninth, Eritrea, is roughly half-Muslim). Of the top fifty countries documented for their persecution of Christians, forty-two either are Muslim-majority nations or have a sizeable Muslim population that is attempting to subjugate or eliminate surrounding Christians (Nigeria being the primary example of the latter pattern).4 The pages to come will be filled with a small selection of the overwhelming evidence.
From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are suffering under the return of Sharia. Often translated as “Islamic law,” Sharia simply means the “Islamic way”5 of doing things. Accordingly, wherever and whenever Muslims are in power or getting more power, churches are outlawed, burned, and bombed, while Bibles and crucifixes are confiscated and destroyed. Freedom of speech—to speak positively of Christianity or critically of Islam—is denied, often on pain of death. Born Muslims who wish to convert to Christianity out of sincere religious conviction are denied this basic freedom, also on pain of death. Christians are deemed to be less than second-class citizens by many Muslim governments and Muslim populations. They cannot get justice against their Muslim oppressors. Christian women and children are routinely abducted, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. Increasingly, Christians are able to justify their very existence only by paying large amounts of ransom—money extorted in the name of “jihad,” Islam’s “holy war” to subjugate or eliminate non-Muslims.
Although Muslim persecution of Christians is one of the most dramatic stories of our times, it is also one of the least known in the West. Such ignorance was not always the case. Ironically, much of the material in this book that will be new to Western readers would have been old news to their European ancestors of centuries past. The exact patterns we see today in the Muslim persecution of Christians were quite familiar to Christians who lived in contact with the Muslim world in past centuries. There is a reason, however, why Muslim persecution of Christians is, in certain respects, “new,” and why Westerners are unable to acknowledge it. We will be able to understand the reality of the situation only if we grapple with a widespread misreading of history, particularly the history of the colonial era.
Tragically, a misunderstanding of the past has both exacerbated Muslim persecution of Christians and blinded the West to its scope and real causes.
MIGHT MAKES RIGHT
From its very beginnings, Islam’s appeal was tied to its ability to offer its followers worldly success and prosperity. From Muslim prophet Muhammad’s first successful caravan raid at Badr to the centuries of jihad conquests that followed, Islam was synonymous with power and success. From the seventh century to the nineteenth, Muslims were accustomed to being the victors.6 Up until that time, they saw in Christian Europe just another part of the world that in due time would also be conquered and annexed to Islam.
In just the first few decades of its existence, Islam had already conquered half of the Christian world’s lands—including regions that were the backbone of early Christianity, such as Syria and Egypt—while Europe was continually besieged. In fact, Europe as we know it was forged in large measure by the Islamic conquests, which severed the Latin West from the Greek East, turnin
g the once highly trafficked Mediterranean into a “Muslim Lake”—so that, in the words of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, “the Christians could no longer float a plank upon the sea.”7 Thus, “the classic tradition was shattered,” writes historian Henri Pirenne, “because Islam had destroyed the ancient unity of the Mediterranean.”8
For centuries European Christians lived perpetually under threat of the Islamic conquest that had already forever changed the Mediterranean. Middle East historian Bernard Lewis writes,For more than a thousand years, Europe, that is to say Christendom, was under constant threat of Islamic attack and conquest. If the Muslims were repelled in one region, they appeared in greater strength in another. As far away as Iceland, Christians still prayed in their churches for God to save them from the “terror of the Turk.” These fears were not unfounded, since in 1627 Muslim corsairs from North Africa raided their coasts and carried off four hundred captives, for sale in the slave market of Algiers.9
Then the unthinkable happened. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, an infidel from Christendom, invaded and subjugated Egypt, the heart of the Islamic world, with barely a struggle. This crushing defeat was followed by any number of European powers conquering and colonizing much of the Muslim world. As a result, for the first time in history, Muslims questioned the superior strength of Islam and its power to fulfill their desires; for the first time in history, Muslims looked with awe and respect on the West.10 As a historian of the period put it, “Napoleon’s invasion introduced educated Egyptians to the ideas of the French Revolution,” which “generated a gnawing and uncomfortable feeling among them that the ‘umma’ [the Islamic community] was not as perfect or as strong as they had imagined. Such uncertainty was the basis of new ideas and conceptions.”11
It was one thing to hold unhesitatingly to Islam and Sharia when Islam was conquering and subjugating non-Muslims, as it had done for well over a millennium. It was quite another thing for Muslims to remain confident in the Islamic way when the despised Christian infidels were conquering and subjugating the lands of Islam with great ease—displaying their superior weapons and technology, not to mention all the other perks of Western civilization. In the oft-quoted words of Osama bin Laden, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”12
For the first time Muslims, who for over a millennium had operated under the belief that might makes right and that Islam was the embodiment of might, began to emulate the West in everything from politics and government to everyday dress and etiquette. The Islamic way, the Sharia, was the old, failed way. To be successful and prosperous, one had to follow the West and its victorious way. Thus during the colonial era and into the mid-twentieth century, all things distinctly Islamic—from Islam’s clerics to the woman’s “hijab,” or headscarf—were increasingly seen by Muslims as relics of a backward age, to be shunned. Most “Muslims” were Muslim in name only.
One need only turn to the history of Turkey to demonstrate the intensity of the wholesale emulation of the West. In the early twentieth century, Turkey abolished the Ottoman Empire, the final caliphate (or sultanate) of the Islamic world and disavowed its Islamic identity and heritage—even discarding the sacrosanct Arabic script for the Latin alphabet in order to be more European.13 Turkey went from being the standard-bearer of Islam and the epitome of Islamic supremacy and jihad for some five hundred years to being possibly the most Westernized Muslim nation in the world.
Turkey is known for modernization and Westernization under Mustafa Kemal Attatürk. But the same trends that were at work in Turkey were also at work throughout much of the Muslim world. All of the popular Arab nationalist movements that appeared in the twentieth century were distinctly secular and Westernized, certainly in comparison with the religious rhetoric that prevailed in earlier times. As late as 1953, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser poked fun at the hijab and the Muslim Brotherhood on Egyptian national television in front of a packed live audience—to wild applause and laughter. 14 In the 1950s, few Egyptian women wore the hijab.15 Today the majority of women in Egypt veil themselves. Those who do not wear the hijab—mostly Christians—are often harassed and even sexually assaulted in the streets.
THE CHRISTIAN GOLDEN AGE
One natural byproduct of Muslims Westernizing was that, for the first time in history, the Christians of the Islamic world were by and large no longer oppressed—certainly not by the standards of their previous history under Islam. Two causes account for this Christian Golden Age in the Muslim world. In the first place the European powers, which in the nineteenth century still largely identified with Christianity, directly intervened in the Muslim world to liberate and protect Christians.16 Second and even more important was the fact that many Muslims emulated Western ways, naturally sloughing off their Islamic identity and mentality and the contempt for “infidels” that, as we shall see, is an integral part of that mentality. As a missionary to the Muslim world wrote in the early twentieth century, “tolerance toward converts from Islam seems often to be in direct proportion to the proximity of foreign government and their influence, and the impact of Western civilization in breaking down fanaticism.”17
Thus the discriminatory Sharia laws governing “dhimmis”—that is, non-Muslims living in conditions of subjugation and humiliation under Islamic hegemony—were all abolished during this era. The most obvious example was the abolition of the “jizya”—the monetary tribute Christians had to pay to safeguard their lives in an Islamic state. In 1856, the Ottoman Empire, under pressure from European powers, especially England and France, issued the Hatt-i Humayun decree as part of its overall reforms (or “tanzimat”): for the first time in Islam’s 1,200 years of existence (at the time), non-Muslim subjects were to be treated as equal to Muslims, and their right to religious freedom and worship was to be guaranteed. It is often forgotten, but a great many Christian churches still in existence today in the Islamic world were built precisely during this era of colonial intervention, Muslim emulation of the West, and unprecedented tolerance.
One historian writes about Egyptian Christianity under Islam through the centuries, “There can scarcely be any argument, however, about whether the Coptic Church was significantly stronger in 1882 than it was in 1798, by almost any measure.” (Recall that 1798 was the year of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt.) An Egyptian Christian chronicler writing around the turn of the twentieth century summarizes the Golden Age for Christians thus: “In a word we say that the Egyptian State [1874–1894] was at the highest degree of justice and good order and arrangement. And it removed religious fanaticism, and almost established equality between its subjects, Christian and Islam, and it eliminated most of the injustice, and it realized much in the way of beneficial works for the benefit of all the inhabitants.”18
Of course, one should not oversimplify the situation. There were still pious Muslims and oppressed Christians even during this period. The point is that, overall, acceptance of Christians reached unprecedented levels during this era—hence it is rightfully referred to as the Golden Age.
Christians, for their part, came to champion yet another Western innovation—nationalism—that helped identify them no longer as members of a religious minority but as fellow members of the nation-state. Membership in “the Arabic Nation” was open to everyone who spoke Arabic, which obviously included Christians. It was a subtle but important shift from the predecessor idea of the umma, the distinctly Muslim nation. In the 1920s and 1930s, Egyptian intellectuals traced their lineage to and identified with Pharaonic and Hellenistic Egypt—not the Arab past. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Middle East’s Christians were widely seen, particularly by the educated elites and those in power, as no different from their Muslim counterparts. Thanks to nationalism, they were now all citizens of the state: “An inferior religious minority had become an integrated and equal part of Egyptian society.”19 Indeed, because Muslims identified Christianity with Western civilization, which was widely acknowledged f
or its superiority, Christians were sometimes respected precisely because they were Christian. (Muslims still conflate Christianity with the West; today, however, this confusion only leads to more persecution of Christians, as we shall see.)
It is this historical fact—that the colonial and post-colonial era, roughly 1850–1950, was the Golden Age for Christians in the Muslim world—that has created chronological confusions and intellectual pitfalls for Westerners on the subject of the return of Christians’ persecution. This hundred-year lull in persecution is taken as the norm by recent generations of Westerners who see events closer to their time as more representative of reality. Thus many Westerners see the contemporary persecution of Christians by Muslims as the historical aberration, and they seek vainly to explain that violence away without recourse to Islam, remembering the relatively non-violent Islam of just a few decades ago. They fail to comprehend that the Golden Age was the historical aberration—an exception to the rule, not the rule.
To put it in slightly different terms, the era when Christians lived in relative safety in the Muslim world is so much closer to us in time than the “storybook” centuries of persecution that many in the West cannot help but filter current events through this Golden Age paradigm—though this paradigm fits the facts less and less with each passing day. After all, in the collective consciousness of recent generations, Christians under Islam had it pretty good. How can what we are hearing now—that they are being subjected to horrific and bloody persecution simply for being Christian—be real? Don’t such stories belong in the distant and unenlightened past? There must be some reason—maybe poverty, or resentment of the “occupation” of Palestine or of Iraq or against the hegemony of the West in general—that explains why previously peaceful Muslims are now violently persecuting Christians. Surely it is a matter of economics or politics, an aberration that is destined to rectify itself?
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Page 2