The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

by John L. Allen

  Most Afghan Christians come from a Muslim background, which means they are often seen as apostates. Converts and their families face severe social, political, and economic discrimination. There isn’t a single Christian church or school in the country left standing, and even gatherings for prayer and worship in private homes are fraught with danger. In the summer of 2010, a group of former Afghan Muslims who had been sentenced to death for converting to Christianity managed to escape to India and told their stories, pleading for greater international protection for religious minorities.

  In October 2011, local Taliban authorities issued a statement on a website vowing to purge all Christians from Afghanistan, whether local or foreign. They also promised to target foreign relief organizations, especially those of Christian inspiration, accusing them of being agents of the West and of proselytizing Afghan Muslims. These Taliban spokespeople claimed to have a “hit list” of two hundred foreign organizations and vowed to go after them one by one. That this wasn’t an idle threat was confirmed in August 2011, when two German development workers were kidnapped in the Parwan province, north of Kabul, and shot to death. Their bodies were discovered in early September. As international forces continue withdrawal, the situation for minority groups, and Christians in particular, is expected to become even more perilous.

  The following episodes illustrate the realities for Christians in Afghanistan.

  In February 2006, an Afghani citizen named Abdul Rahman was arrested by police and charged with apostasy after he revealed to friends and family that he had decided to convert to Christianity. After a brief criminal trial, Rahman was sentenced to death. Under heavy international pressure, Afghani officials announced that Rahman was suffering from what they described as a “mental disorder.” After being temporarily released on the basis of medical reasons, Rahman left Afghanistan and took refuge in Italy.

  In July 2007, twenty-three South Korean missionaries were kidnapped by the Taliban, and two of the hostages were executed before a deal to secure the release of the group could be worked out. The group, composed of sixteen women and seven men, was captured while traveling from Kandahar to Kabul by bus on a mission sponsored by the Saemmul Presbyterian Church. Two men, Bae Hyeong-gyu, a forty-two-year-old South Korean pastor of the church, and Shim Seong-min, twenty-nine, were executed on July 25 and July 30. The release of the remaining hostages was secured with a South Korean promise to withdraw its two hundred troops by the end of 2007.

  In September 2008, Islamic experts in the district of Jaghori arrested a religion teacher, Amin Mousavi, who was allegedly promoting Christianity. They sentenced the teacher to death, but later he was released and fled the country. One month later, a foreign aid worker named Gayle Williams, of joint British and South African nationality, was shot to death on her way to work in Kabul by two men on a motorbike. A Taliban spokesman later claimed Williams had been assassinated “because she was working for an organization which was preaching Christianity in Afghanistan.”

  In May 2010, news reports from Afghanistan indicated that a forty-five-year-old Christian named Saeid Mousa, who was physically disabled and wearing an artificial leg, had been arrested and sentenced to death. He was released in February 2011 and left the country. Later that same year, in October, another Afghan Christian named Shoaib Assadullah was imprisoned after he handed a Bible to someone who later reported him to authorities. Assadullah was able to obtain a passport in 2011 and also fled Afghanistan.

  In May 2010, a local Afghan TV station broadcast a documentary titled Afghan Christian Converts, with footage and photographs claiming to document a secret Christian offensive to proselytize the country. Riots and demonstrations followed, in which dozens of Christians were beaten and Christian-owned businesses and homes burned. One Afghan lawmaker publicly stated that it is “not a crime” to kill a Muslim who converts to Christianity. In June 2010, more than twenty Christians were arrested after political leaders called for the detention and execution of converts. Many remain behind bars.

  In August 2010, the Christian relief organization Assistance Mission suffered the greatest tragedy in its forty-four-year history when ten members of a medical team were massacred in a mountainous northern region. The team included seven men and three women—six Americans, one German, one Briton, and two Afghans—who had been on a mission offering free eye care. The Taliban claimed responsibility, asserting that the medical volunteers were foreign spies involved in a plot to convert Muslims to Christianity. According to an investigation by Afghan officials, Taliban gunmen with their beards dyed red marched the doctors, nurses, and technicians into a nearby forest, stood them in a line, and shot them one by one. According to the relief agency, the team had intended to found infant health and dental clinics in the area.

  A spokesperson for the organization insisted the medical volunteers were not covert Christian proselytizers. “That would be against the laws of this country and the rules of our organization,” said Dirk Frans, the group’s executive director. “Although we are a Christian-supported charity, we absolutely would not proselytize.”

  Frans also said the group would not abandon Afghanistan. “We have worked here under the king, under the Russians, under the Communists, and under the warlords and the Taliban,” he said. “Is it time to quit now?”

  EGYPT

  Egypt is the crucible of the Arab Spring, which many observers believe is fast turning into a Christian winter. By the middle of 2012, it seemed clear that the political initiative had been seized by a variety of hard-line Islamist groups, with many Christians forecasting a grim future. A spokesperson for the Catholic Church in Egypt said: “The Salafists look at Christians and even moderate Muslims as kuffars and say they want to implement shariah rigorously.… Their attitude to Christians is to say that they can get their passport to go to the USA, France, the U.K., or somewhere else in the West.”

  During the Mubarak years, Christians were tolerated as a permanent body of second-class citizens, facing social and economic discrimination and frozen out of the most prestigious positions in political life and in the military. They were subject to occasional bouts of violence, usually without any legal consequences. According to statistics maintained by the Coptic Church, eighteen hundred Christians were murdered in Egypt during Mubarak’s rule and two hundred acts of vandalism were perpetrated, with few arrests and convictions.

  Well before the Arab Spring, the rising influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and various Salafist factions spelled trouble. In April and May 2009, at the height of the swine flu pandemic, the Mubarak government ordered the slaughter of all of the country’s roughly three hundred thousand pigs. The decision was condemned by the World Health Organization, which said that the virus was spread exclusively through humans, and in any event there had not been a single documented case of the pandemic inside Egypt. Because of Muslim sensitivities, the vast majority of pig farmers in Egypt are Christians, and most observers felt the pandemic was a pretext for Mubarak to placate critics by taking a shot at Christians.

  In June 2009, radical Muslims attacked Coptic residents in the village of Ezbet Bouchra-East, destroying their homes and harvests. According to reports, the attack was motivated by the arrival of twenty-five Christians from Cairo in the area to visit a local priest. Local Muslims interpreted the visit as a prelude to proselytism. Nineteen Christians were arrested, although they were released. In September 2009, a Coptic man was beheaded in the village of Bagour, part of a spurt of anti-Christian violence that left two other Christians dead in neighboring villages.

  In January 2010, extremists disrupted an Orthodox Coptic Christmas midnight Mass outside Mar Girgis (St. George) Church in Nag Hammadi, in a shooting spree that left nine people dead. Another dozen people were seriously wounded, including two Muslim bystanders. Observers interpreted the attack as a form of retaliation for the alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Coptic man in a nearby village in November 2009. When those charges first circulated, local Muslims looted and set f
ire to Christian shops, with about 80 percent being destroyed, and also abducted seven Christian women.

  In March 2010, a court in Assiut acquitted four Muslims accused of killing a Christian in October 2009. The decision set off shock waves, as there had been multiple witnesses to the slaying. The victim, Atallas Farouk, was shot in the head multiple times before being beheaded, after which his assailants reportedly dragged his body through the streets shouting “Victory!” A lawyer acting on behalf of the victim’s family told reporters, “This verdict sends out a message that a Copt’s blood is extremely cheap.”

  In March 2010, twenty-five Christians were wounded when a mob estimated in excess of three thousand people disrupted a Coptic service in Mersa Matrouh, a coastal town west of Alexandria. More than four hundred Copts had gathered at the site of a proposed nursing home when a group of Salafists started hurling stones at both the building and the worshippers. One Christian said he had been seized and asked to convert to Islam, and when he refused, he was stabbed in the leg. According to reports, the mob had formed after a local imam called on Muslims to fight against their “enemies,” saying, “We do not tolerate the Christian presence in our area.”

  In November 2010, two Copts were killed and roughly fifty injured when security forces surrounded a new church that was being erected with government permission near the pyramids, demanding that construction come to a halt. Thousands of Copts turned out to protest the interference, and violence followed when security agents began beating the Coptic demonstrators. A local human rights organizer said the security agents had given in to the demands of Muslim fundamentalists, generating excuses to prevent the completion of the church. Naguib Ghobrial, president of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights, said: “By this behavior, the chief of the local authority is encouraging Islamists to fight with Christians.”

  In retrospect, those pre-Arab Spring episodes now seem like tremors of a looming anti-Christian earthquake.

  Open Doors reports a substantial increase in the numbers of Christians killed and injured since the transition in Egypt, as well as in the number of assaults on churches, schools, and Christian-owned shops and homes. Salafi Muslims have made a habit out of blocking the entrances to churches, demanding that the churches be moved to other locations, and refusing to allow repairs to be made. There are also increasing reports of Coptic girls being abducted and forced into Islamic marriages. In rural areas, Christians say, police and security forces turn a blind eye. Although national law guarantees religious freedom, courts enforce the rulings of religious authorities, and conversion from Islam is de facto treated as a crime.

  In January 2011, more than twenty Christians were killed and at least seventy wounded when a car bomb went off outside the Orthodox Church of All Saints in the Sidi Bechr district of Alexandria. Almost a thousand people had turned out to celebrate a Mass marking the Orthodox New Year. The violence had a pretext, in this case rumors that local Copts were holding two women against their will who had converted to Islam. The charges were widely dismissed as false, but they continued to stir anger. Not long after the attack on the church, an off-duty policeman shot dead a seventy-one-year-old Christian, his wife, and four other Christians during a train ride to Cairo.

  The infamous “Maspero Massacre” in October 2011 seemed to mark a turning of the waters, a transition toward an even more volatile and lethal situation. A peaceful protest led mostly by Copts in the Cairo neighborhood of Maspero, and designed to promote secular democracy, turned into a riot when Islamist thugs attacked. The army then opened fire, leaving twenty-seven people dead and more than three hundred injured, most of the victims Copts. The carnage was perceived by many Christians as their Kristallnacht, heralding the beginning of the end. Estimates are that ninety-three thousand Coptic Christians fled the country in the aftermath of the massacre.

  In January 2013, a mob estimated at roughly five thousand Muslims shouting “Allahu Akbar” armed with hammers and other instruments destroyed a Christian social service center in the village of Fanous, located in the Tamia district eighty miles southwest of Cairo. The facility housed a welcome center and a kindergarten, but rumors in local mosques apparently held that the Copts were planning to turn it into a church. According to media reports, loudspeakers outside mosques in surrounding villages called upon Muslims to help their brothers in Fanous beat back the effort to build a church. Nader Shukry, who leads a group called the Maspero Coptic Youth Organization, named for the anti-Christian massacre, charged that local security forces were aware of the violence but arrived only after the facility had been utterly destroyed. Shukry also said that no one was immediately arrested, not even the local imam, although according to Shukry he should have been charged under Egyptian laws banning “incitement to violence.”

  Also in January 2013, a criminal court in the central Egyptian city of Beni Suef sentenced a woman and her seven children to fifteen years in prison for converting to Christianity. Nadia Mohamed Ali, raised a Christian, had converted to Islam when she married Mohamed Abdel-Wahhab Mustafa, a Muslim, twenty-three years ago. When he died, Nadia planned to convert her family back to Christianity in order to obtain an inheritance from her family. She sought the help of others in the registration office to process new identity cards between 2004 and 2006. When the conversion came to light, Nadia, her children, and even the clerks who processed the identity cards were all arrested and tried for criminal offenses.

  Samuel Tadros, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, has described Egypt’s new shariah-based constitution as “a real disaster in terms of religious freedom.” On January 25, 2013, representatives of Coptic Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical churches announced their withdrawal from a “national dialogue” convened by then president Mohamed Morsi to discuss objections to the constitution. Spokespeople for the churches described the initiative as a sham, given statements by senior officials to the effect that its decisions are nonbinding. It remains to be seen whether the deposition of Morsi by the army in early July 2013 will result in a legal order that respects minority rights, though most Christian leaders in the country backed the military intervention.

  ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

  In Christian argot, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan are known as the “Holy Land,” meaning the territory where Christ lived, died, and rose again, and where early Christianity took shape. By now, the threat facing Christianity in its birthplace has become depressingly clear. Christians represented 30 percent of British Mandate Palestine in 1948, while today their share is estimated at 1.25 percent. The risk, as the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, put it in July 2011, is that the Holy Land could become a “spiritual Disneyland”—full of glittering attractions, but empty of its indigenous Christian population.

  By all accounts, Christians in the Holy Land face difficulties on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian divide. In Israel, the headaches are often related to state security policies and a generalized impression of second-class citizenship for non-Jewish minorities. In Palestine, the rising influence of militant Islamic currents poses an obvious menace, coupled with the general climate of political and economic chaos. In both settings, Christians are often perceived as suspect. Israelis often see them primarily as Arabs and thus pro-Palestinian; Palestinians sometimes see them as Christians and thus potentially not Arab enough, perhaps too close to the West.

  On the Israeli side, officials like to say that theirs is the region’s only democracy, and point to a growing Christian population as proof that Israel does a creditable job of protecting minority rights. Some fifty thousand Christians have recently settled in Israel from the former territories of the Soviet Union, and adding to those numbers are other émigrés from the Balkans and from Asia, especially the Philippines. There’s certainly truth to the argument that Christians enjoy greater physical safety and freedom of action in Israel than most other places in the Middle East. For instance, the northern region of Gal
ilee is home to a relatively stable Christian presence. In Nazareth, the three-term mayor is a Greek Orthodox Christian even though the city is about two-thirds Muslim.

  Yet most Arab Christians living in Israel do not describe their situation in glowing terms. Samer Makhlouf, a Catholic and executive director of One Voice, a grassroots movement in Palestine that brings together young Palestinians and Israelis to promote peace, says that of the four problems facing Christians in the Holy Land, the first three are “occupation, occupation, occupation.” Makhlouf described Israeli military and security policy as “the father of all the problems in the region.” That perception seems widespread. A 2006 poll by Zogby International found that in the city of Bethlehem, 78 percent of Christians said that Christians were leaving the city because of Israeli occupation, while only 3.2 percent attributed the Christian exodus to the rise of Islamic movements.

  One frequently cited difficulty involves access to Christian holy sites. Palestinians living in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem hold different residency cards, and they cannot move from one place to the other without special permits. It can be virtually impossible for a Christian in Bethlehem to travel to Jerusalem to worship in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. That’s true even if a permit is granted, since Easter coincides with the Jewish festival of Pesach, when a security lockdown is imposed.

  As Raphaela Fischer Mourra, born and raised in Bethlehem as the daughter of a German father and a Palestinian mother, put it, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a Palestinian to go to Jerusalem.”