Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians

by Raymond Ibrahim

  Even well-guarded churches are vulnerable to the jihad. In November 2012 an explosion at a church housed inside a police compound in Garissa killed a police officer, who also served as church pastor, and injured at least two dozen others.182

  Spotlight on Sudan

  Ever since South Sudan gained its independence from Sudan in June 2011—after suffering decades of genocide by the Islamist government in Khartoum, which had declared a jihad on the Christians and other non-Muslims of the south—the Khartoum government has made it even more unbearable for the Christians who remain under its authority in Sudan proper, especially those in the Nuba Mountains. Sudan represents the case of government-supported jihad, an Islamist state waging a war on Christian churches within its own borders. In fact in 1992 the Islamist government of Khartoum declared a formal jihad on all those in the South and the Nuba who rejected Sharia law. This declaration was justified by a fatwa issued by Sudan’s Islamic authorities, decreeing, “An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate; and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.”183

  In late 2011 President Bashir confirmed plans to adopt an entirely Islamic constitution to “strengthen Sharia law.” Soon thereafter, “emboldened” Muslims began attacking Christians trying to construct a church, “claiming that Christianity was no longer an accepted religion in the country,”184 and authorities began threatening to demolish church buildings “as part of a long-standing bid to rid Sudan of Christianity,” according to World Watch Monitor.185 Around the same time, at least ten church leaders in Khartoum received text messages saying things such as, “We want this country to be purely an Islamic state, so we must kill the infidels and destroy their churches all over Sudan.”186

  In April 2012, a Christian compound in Khartoum was stormed “by a throng of Muslim extremists armed with clubs, iron rods, a bulldozer and fire.” The day before, a Muslim leader had called on Muslims to destroy “the infidels’ church.” Shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and “No more Christianity from today on—no more church from today on,” the Muslims also stormed the Bible school bookstore, burning Bibles and threatening to kill anyone resisting them. “What happened could not be imagined—it was terrible,” said an eyewitness. “They burned all furniture of the school and the church as well.’” As usual, “‘Police at the compound stood back and did nothing to prevent the mob from vandalizing the compound.”187

  In March 2012, Sudanese aerial strikes were aimed at church buildings in various regions, especially the Nuba. Churches began to hold worship services very early in the morning and late in the evening to avoid the aerial bombardments intentionally targeting them. The Khartoum regime is “‘doing everything possible to make sure they get rid of Christianity from the Nuba Mountains—churches and church schools are the targets of both the Sudanese Armed Forces and its militias,’” said an aid worker.188 Likewise, in May 2012, without any reason, security officials closed down the regional offices of the Sudan Council of Churches and a much-needed church clinic for the poor. Staff members were arrested and taken to an undisclosed location. “Their families are living in agony due to the uncertainty of their fate.”189

  In June 2012, authorities bulldozed a Catholic and an Episcopalian church building to the ground and confiscated three Catholic schools, claiming that they are now unwelcome in Sudan in light of South Sudan’s independence. “‘The government wants to remove all churches from Khartoum,’ the source said ‘Tell churches, all churches, to stand on prayer for the church in Sudan.’” Another church building in the same area, in the possession of the Full Gospel Church, had been destroyed two months earlier.190

  The West

  Muslim attacks on churches are not limited to the Muslim world. They are occurring increasingly wherever Muslims have a large presence, particularly in Europe. France, the Western European country with the largest Muslim population, is also the Western nation to have witnessed the most attacks on Christian churches, religious symbols, and even cemeteries. For example, in early December 2012, the chapel in the military naval base of Toulon was desecrated. In the chapel, access to which is highly controlled, “three major symbols of the Catholic faith were overturned and destroyed: the tabernacle, the baptistry, and the ambo (the pulpit where the Bible, which was also trampled on, rests).”191

  Three months earlier a church in the town of Chassieu was vandalized with graffiti reading, “Islam is growing in power.” Although graffiti attacks on mosques attract wide attention from the national media and politicians, who vociferously condemn such intolerance, attacks on churches are hushed up—even as the overwhelming majority of places of worship desecrated in France are churches.192

  In other attacks, Muslims in France have thrown stones at Christians and disrupted church services:• In October 2011, stone-throwing Muslims attacked Christians during a Catholic festival, but the media largely ignored it.193

  • In May 2012, prior to the celebration of Mass, “four youths, aged fourteen to eighteen, broke into the Church of St. Joseph in Carcassone, before launching handfuls of pebbles at 150 faithful present at the service.” Though they were chased out, “the parishioners, many of whom are elderly, were greatly shocked by the disrespectful act of the youths of North African origin.”194

  • In September 2012, young Muslims threw stones and chestnuts at the patio and windows of the church Élisabeth de la Trinité in the city of Dijon. Mass was interrupted twice. There are fears that the church may face desecration or worse damage in the future, due to the high Muslim population in the area.195

  Nor is France the only European nation suffering such attacks. In Macedonia, for instance, a two-century-old Christian church famed for its valuable icons was set on fire in response to “a carnival in which Orthodox Christian men dressed as women in burkas and mocked the Koran.” Earlier, “perpetrators attacked a church in the nearby village of Labunista, destroying a cross standing outside” and “also defaced a Macedonian flag outside Struga’s municipal building, replacing it with a green flag representing Islam.”196 In September 2012 in Catalonia, Spain, to give an example from the other end of Europe, a Catholic church was attacked by Moroccan Muslims who were detained and charged with multiple assaults and robberies, including terrorizing and beating indigenous Spaniards with clubs and robbing them. 197

  The attacks on Christian churches have even reached North America. In Canada in late October 2012, a Molotov cocktail was hurled through the window of a Coptic church near Toronto—just as happens regularly in Egypt. Unlike in Egypt, however, firefighters came quickly. “Police,” it was reported, “have no suspects or motive in the incident.”198 Needless to say, Copts have been familiar with the suspects and motives of this kind of attack for centuries. As Egypt’s Christians flee their indigenous homeland seeking to worship in peace, the jihad on churches follows.

  MONASTERIES AND MUSLIM MARAUDERS

  Islamic law treats monasteries like churches—undesirable institutions that may at best be allowed to exist, but never built anew or repaired. The Conditions of Omar stipulates that Christians are “Not to build a church in our city—nor a monastery, convent, or monk’s cell in the surrounding areas—and not to repair those that fall in ruins or are in Muslim quarters,” and “Not to harbor in them [churches and monasteries] or our [Christians’] homes a spy, nor conceal any deceits from Muslims.”

  Accordingly, from the beginnings of the Islamic conquests, monasteries have been prey to the depredations of Muslim marauders, mostly Bedouins and other Muslim nomads, because of the remote locations of most monasteries. While they are interested in plundering the monasteries of whatever meager wealth they may contain, such raiders almost always justify their violence in Islamic terms, exhibiting hatred and contempt for Christianity.

  Just like attacks on churches, attacks on monasteries are as old as Islam’s initial invasions of Christian countries in the seventh century, when “
monasteries became the object of endlessly repeated plundering that caused them to resemble remote strongholds, entrenched behind high walls.”199 Writing in the tenth century, the Coptic chronicler Severus ibn al-Muqaffa records that “the Arabs in the land of Egypt had ruined the country.... They burnt the fortresses and pillaged the provinces, and killed a multitude of the saintly monks who were in them [monasteries] and they violated a multitude of the virgin nuns and killed some of them with the sword.”200

  Well over a thousand years after those words were written, little seems to have changed in Egypt .201 Consider the Abu Fana monastery raid. Abu Fana, also known as the Monastery of the Cross because its church was once decorated with many crosses, is situated in the western desert of Egypt, less than two hundred miles from Cairo. Its original foundation is ancient, and though it was laid to waste over the centuries by nomadic attacks, it was again occupied by Coptic monks in 1999.

  But on May 31, 2008, sixty to seventy Muslim Bedouins armed with machine guns raided the monastery. In the process they destroyed altars, broke crosses, and burned Bibles, all while cursing Christians and Christianity. When a monk reached for the cross as they were ransacking the monastery, one of the assailants mocked, “Ha! Let’s see if the cross will save you!” Three monks were kidnapped for ransom.

  According to court testimony, the kidnapped monks were tortured over the course of twelve hours:One of the monks had his arm and legs broken. The other two were tied together with ropes, suspended from a tree, and severely beaten with hoses and sticks. Afterwards, they were placed—upside down and still tied together—on the back of a donkey and shoved off. The monks were further commanded to spit on the cross and proclaim the shehada [the profession of Muslim faith that “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet,” which, when uttered in the presence of Muslims, converts the speaker into a Muslim]—beaten every time they refused, and even threatened with death.

  A video disseminated soon after the attack showed numerous monks bruised, burnt, and bloodied, with broken bones and puncture wounds. One monk had been severely beaten on the head, another stabbed in the neck. A broadcaster called parts of the video “too disturbing” to air. When the Coptic pope visited one of the critically wounded monks in the Mina hospital, the monk told him: “Sir, the situation is constantly getting worse.” In fact, although it has only been reoccupied by Christian monks since 1999, this was the seventeenth time this particular monastery was attacked.

  As is typical, Egyptian police took a full three hours to arrive—even though the police station is less than two miles from the monastery and was contacted immediately once the raid commenced. Despite the egregious anti-Christian hostility evident in the assault, Egyptian State TV blamed it on a “land dispute.”202

  If the Abu Fana Monastery attack was initiated by lawless Bedouins, the Egyptian military itself was responsible for two more monastery attacks—ironically prompted by the fact that the monasteries had built walls to protect themselves from such Bedouin raids, in light of the chaos that prevailed in late January 2011 during the mass protests to oust Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

  When the Anba Bishoy Monastery, seventy miles north of Cairo, tried to create fortifications soon after the revolts began, the Egyptian military stormed the fifth-century monastery with five tanks, armored vehicles, and a bulldozer to demolish the fence. Live ammunition was fired, wounding two monks and six monastery workers. Monks were arrested. According to Father Hemanot Ava Bishoy, “The army was shocked to see the monks standing there praying ‘Lord have mercy’ without running away. This is what really upset them,” he said. “As the soldiers were demolishing the gate and the fence they were chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Victory, Victory.’”203

  The army also attacked the Monastery of St. Makarios of Alexandria in Wady al-Rayan, Fayoum, some sixty miles from Cairo, for the same reason: the monks had dared to erect a fence to protect the monastery—in light of the lawlessness of late January 2011, and because the monastery had already been attacked by armed marauders who injured six monks, hospitalizing one in critical condition. The military stormed the monastery, firing live ammunition at the monks, and beat them with batons. It proceeded to demolish the newly erected fence and one room of the actual monastery.204

  Just as Muslim leaders incite violence against churches, they also incite violence against monasteries. For example, in September 2010, Dr. Muhammad Salim al-Awwa, a leading Islamic figure who ran in Egypt’s presidential elections, appeared on Al Jazeera and, in a wild tirade, accused the Copts of “stocking arms and ammunitions in their churches and monasteries”—imported from Israel, no less, since “Israel is in the heart of the Coptic Cause”—and “preparing to wage war against Muslims.” He warned that if nothing is done, the “country will burn,” inciting Muslims to “counteract the strength of the [Coptic] Church.” Awwa further charged that Egypt’s security forces cannot enter the monasteries to investigate for weapons—an amazing assertion, considering the above military attacks on Egypt’s monasteries.205

  While Awwa’s accusations that Egypt’s downtrodden Christian minorities are out to conquer the nation are baseless and absurd, they naturally resonate with Muslims who are, after all, constantly arming and stockpiling weapons, including in mosques.206 Indeed, in May 2012, during a clash between Egypt’s Islamist parties and the military, jihadis sheltering in the Nour Mosque opened fire on the military from the windows of the minaret. (When the military stormed the mosque, apprehending the snipers, all the Muslim Brotherhood had to say was, “We also condemn the aggression [from the military] against the house of God [Nour Mosque] and the arrest of people from within”—without bothering to denounce the terror such people were committing from within “the house of God.”)207

  But there is another reason that Awwa’s paranoid charges that Coptic churches and monasteries are harboring weapons resonates with the Muslim mindset—a suspicion of churches and monasteries that can, again, be traced back centuries to The Conditions of Omar, which command Christians “not to harbor in them [churches or monasteries] or our homes a spy, nor conceal any deceits from Muslims.”

  Now that the “Arab Spring” has reached Syria—another stronghold of early Christianity that today is almost entirely Islamic—the attacks on monasteries there demonstrate the continuity between the original jihad and the jihad we know in the twenty-first century. Monasteries were prey to raids by Muslim raiders motivated by greed and plunder in the early centuries of Islam, and they are treated the same way now by Islamic jihadis seeking to enrich and empower themselves.

  In February 2012, in a repeat of early Islamic history, some thirty armed and masked jihadis attacked the fourth-century Catholic monastery of Mar Musa demanding money. This kind of attack was unprecedented in Syria’s modern history. “According to the Catholic Archbishop of Damascus, maronite Samir Nassar, the situation in the country is spiraling out of control as the armed opposition spreads its influence to different regions of the state.”208 The monastery was attacked twice again, in April and August. In the latter attack, “‘gunmen stole everything they could steal,’ including tractors and other agricultural and farming tools. ”209

  Not all anti-monastery activities under Islam are replete with fire and destruction. There are also more subtle attacks. Consider the plight of Turkey’s fifth-century Mor Gabriel Monastery near the Syrian border, inhabited today by only a few dozen Christians dedicated to learning the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Jesus. Its existence is at risk after a July 2012 ruling by Turkey’s highest appeals court. Neighboring Muslims, with the support of an MP from the Islamic Justice and Development Party, filed a lawsuit accusing the Christians of practicing “‘anti-Turkish activities’ [code for anti-Islamic activities] . . . and of illegally occupying land which belongs to the neighboring villages.” The highest appeals court in Ankara ruled in favor of the Muslim villagers, saying the land that has been part of the monastery for sixteen hundred years is not its property, e
ven declaring that the monastery was built over the ruins of a mosque—though in fact Muhammad and Islam were born 170 years after the monastery was built.210

  ISLAM’S WAR ON THE CROSS

  Christians do not congregate—and die—around crosses as they often do in churches, where they are attacked and slaughtered like sitting ducks. Attacks on the cross, while frequent, are therefore less bloody and dramatic.

  Still the Christian cross is the quintessential symbol of Christianity—for all denominations, even including most forms of otherwise iconoclastic Protestantism. Accordingly it is no surprise that, from the beginning, the Cross has been a despised symbol in Islam, regularly cursed and attacked.

  Many reasons account for Muslim hatred of the cross. Islam generally forbids anything deemed “idolatrous,” any object of worship besides Allah. Thus pictures and images are banned in Islam. (And thus Egypt’s great pyramids and other pharaonic antiquities are again under threat, just as they were in former times, soon after the Islamic invasion, when any number of Muslim leaders tried to destroy and deface them. The only difference, as Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs” put it in July 2012 while congratulating the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian presidency victory, is that thanks to modern technology, Egypt’s Islamists can now “‘destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what Amr bin al-As [Egypt’s original Muslim conqueror] could not.”)211