Christianophobia

The Persecution of Christians under Islam

Israeli

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498292016
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the present upheaval in the Islamic world, as chaos, war, and vengeance are overtaking order, security, and civil rights, Muslim radicals have been venting their frustrations among their minorities, most of whom are Christian: from ancient Chaldeans in Iraq to Orthodox denominations in Turkey; from Catholics in Indonesia and Malaysia to remote and isolated Christian communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Related to this vast and escalating phenomenon has been the violent activity of some within the Muslim minorities in the West, who have migrated there in the past few decades and now seek revenge against their former colonial masters. This is taking place in the context of fast-increasing numbers of Muslims in the West, the result both of high birthrates and of escalating legal and illegal immigration from Islamic lands.

Chapter One

Christian Minorities in the Arab World

Almost everywhere the Arab world has taken root, in the entire expanse of the Middle East and North Africa, from Morocco in the West to Iraq in the east, except for the Arabian Peninsula, had been wholly or partly the domain of ancient and medieval Christianity, until Islam invaded its territory, supplanted its culture, erased its faith and tradition, and committed millions of occupied people into slavery, death, destitution, and Islamization, for the most part forced, less frequently voluntary. While one has to recognize that this was the norm of those days in any occupied land, due to the lack of awareness of human rights for individuals and right of self-determination for nations, it is also necessary to point out the contradiction between what the Qur’an proclaims, and Muslims boast about, that “there no compulsion in religion,” and the reality of entire communities coerced to embrace Islam, or else to stay under their dhimmi status once they recognize, accept, and submit to Islamic superiority, sovereignty, and rule. That reality, which had compelled entire Jewish communities to convert to Islam under the Almoravid and Almohads in North Africa in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and elsewhere under Islam before and after, had been practiced more extensively vis-à-vis the Christian communities even before they became minorities, and has been pursued to our days in the domains of ISIS, in the Sudan, against the Copts by the Muslim Brothers, and in other remote areas in Africa and Asia, where mass communications do not quite reach, nor do the great champions of human rights who plead on behalf of the helpless.

Throughout the Arab world, concurrent with the revival of Islam in the past few decades, an expression of discontent with the non-Muslim communities in general, and Christians in particular, has been in evidence, for the revival of the Islamic vocabulary by Muslim radicals also means that tools for diminishing the “others” (from the perspective of Islam) and for mistreating Christians and other non-believers have been forged and drilled into the common people’s minds, so as to win the hearts of their constituencies. All too often, when those revivalist tendencies were not openly supported by the governments in place, the latter latently encouraged them, especially on Islamic festivals such as Ramadan, or the Night of the Hijra, so as to make the lives of the Christian minorities more and more unbearable, and compel them to emigrate from their lands which had been invaded and taken over by the conquering Muslims more than a millennium earlier.

In August 2005, for example, when the Christian leader John Garang died, an incited violent Muslim crowd attacked Christian neighborhoods in Khartum, killing thirty-six of them, and robbed their properties. The authorities did not demonstrate much eagerness to restore order, and even forbade UN personnel from being interviewed by the media on those events.

It was British reporter Edward Melnick who defined that state of affairs as “Christianophobia,”49 typical of oppressive regimes, who fear their Christian minorities might encourage the rise of Western ideas that might threaten their regimes. To his mind, in twelve Muslim countries that he surveyed, there was a real danger that Christians would become a “threatened species,” on the verge of being extirpated from its “biblical roots” and becoming extinct. If ISIS and other Muslim radicals, like Ansar Beit-al-Maqdas in the Sinai and others in Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and Mali, have their way, they may achieve that goal as they expand their conquests. Even when there is a government to stand against those destructive and murderous elements, like in Egypt and Nigeria or Afghanistan, it looks more and more helpless as its coercive ability diminishes and the radical Muslims’ terrorizing effect surges.

Now that Christians in these countries are suspected of their alliance with America, which has itself become unpopular due to its deal with Iran, the persecution of Christians and the xenophobic attitudes towards them, are bound to sore. In the World Watch List of countries published by Open Door USA, indicating where Christian persecution is worst, seventeen Arab countries are counted out of a total of fifty countries across the world. The worst are: Iraq (86/100), Syria (83/100), Sudan (80/100), Saudi Arabia (77/100), Libya (76/100), Yemen (76/100), Qatar (64/100), and the Palestinian territories (56/100). Egypt, which comes only in 23rd place in the general count (61/100), after Qatar and India, is nonetheless prominent in the Middle Eastern statistics due to its large population of Copts, amounting to around 10 percent of the population or something like nine million people. Conversely, Lebanon, whose Christian population is largely threatened, does not figure in the list because nominally Lebanon is a Christian-dominated country,50 though for all intents and purposes it is Shi’ite Hizbullah that calls the shots.

Long ago, Muslim radicals had released their popular slogan that “after the people of Saturday [the Jews] will come the people of Sunday [the Christians] of the Middle East.” But having encountered some difficulties in realizing that scheme, mainly because of Israel’s refusal to disappear, they have reversed the order, which they find slightly more feasible. Thus, they started with the Christians of Lebanon, with the civil war of the 1970s, followed by cruel and relentless rampages against the Christian minorities in the rest of the Arab world, and are now busying themselves with either domestic tribal civil wars (as in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya); or aligning with either of the two major rival camps that are struggling for the soul of revolutionary Islam: the Sunna, which comprises close to 90 percent of all Muslims and the Shi’ia, which predominates in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

The tensions, much less the violence against Christians in the Middle East, are rarely reported in the Arab media, due to the self-indicting nature of the Muslim oppression against their minorities. The Arab Christians, as a minority, fear that an open confrontation with the majority can only worsen their situation. On their part, the Muslims, save for the most radical among them, who do not usually shoulder state responsibility and care little for questions of public relations and reputation, wish to avoid open hostility with world Christianity for intimidating their minorities. For example, during the Nazareth crisis over the Basilica (see below), when the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Vatican Custodian in Jerusalem threatened to close all the churches in the Holy Land in protest of the Muslim seizure of Christian land, the Arab media could not avoid jumping into the fray and candidly, if reluctantly, reporting about the controversy. For example, when Sheikh Yussef Salameh, the under-secretary of Awqaf (holy endowments) of the Palestinian Authority participated in the Inter-cultural Conference in Tehran in May 1999, he praised the seventh-century system of dhimmitude under which monotheistic non-Muslims were inferior to Muslims, as the proper paradigm for relations between Muslims and Christians today. He also said in the same breath that “Islam [always] respected people of other religions and did not hurt them.51 One wishes he knew better the history of his faith.

Christianophobia in Morocco

Even at the edge of the Islamic world, Morocco, where French colonization and the close relationship the Kingdom maintains with the West have had an attenuating effect, anti-Christian attitudes linger, though they do not get much publicity. Thus, although Morocco has been ruled for a millennium and a half by the Malekite School of Law, the second most radical and puritanical School after the strict Hanbalites of Arabia, which had extirpated Christianity from the land where it had been implanted since Roman times, the Kingdom has preserved an image of tolerance and openness. A report from March 2010, however, recounted the story of Christian aid workers who were deported by the authorities from the five major cities of the realm,52 raising the question whether or not this was an act of modern Christianophobia (since it was in this case directed to foreign visitors, not to indigenous Christians, as is the case in other Muslim lands), or a lingering vestige of the ancient radical Islam vis-à-vis Infidels, as in Saudi Arabia. Jack Wald, who had spent ten years as a pastor in Rabat’s International Church, a Protestant congregation in the capital, viewed the deportation as a change in the government policy, which had previously been a party to an unspoken truce with Christian missionaries, that was going to affect the entire ambience for Christians in the country.53

That incident was triggered in an orphanage for thirty-three abandoned children in the Middle Atlas, when Moroccan police showed up in the village Ain Leuh, 50 miles south of Fez, and separated orphans form their adoptive parents, and accusing the volunteers of spreading Christianity, a major crime in the world of Islam. In any event, anguished Dutch, British, Kiwi, and American volunteers were evacuating their households and hugging for the last time their weeping adopted Moroccan children, whose loud wailing shook up all present. That scene, which is known to have repeated itself in many Muslim countries, dramatized the tension between the role Christian aid groups played in needy Muslim lands, and the local anxieties that the generous aid efforts were nothing but a façade for covert missionary work.

Moroccan officials claimed they were merely targeting isolated cases of law-breaking, and their act had nothing to do with Christianophobia, though for the victims, it was the sudden eruption of a coordinated campaign that reversed an unwritten understanding, for indeed the orphanage manager confirmed that his personnel was not proselytizing. But in fact, many evangelical workers have been quietly doing their job for years in this puritanically Muslim country, where identity has been focused for its 98 percent Muslim inhabitants on the triangle: Allah, the Motherland, the King. Jean-Luc Blanc, the Head of the Casablanca Evangelical Church, said that while previously Morocco would deport annually one or two token missionaries, who had crossed the red line of proselytizing, the mass expulsion of 2010, interestingly just prior to the eruption of the Arab “Spring” upheaval in all North Africa (Christmas of that year, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt and Libya), was quite startling, compared with the liberal policy of King Mohammed VI.54

In this instance, Christians were expell...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Islam and Christianity in Perspective
• Chapter One: Christian Minorities in the Arab World
• Chapter Two: Christian Minorities under African Islam
• Chapter Three: Christian Minorities under Asian Islam
• Chapter Four: Christian Minorities in the Holy Land
• Chapter Five: Muslim Minorities under Western Christianity
• Summary and Prospects
• Bibliography