In May 2012, a twenty-year-old Christian man, Sajid Inayat, was arrested and charged with “blasphemy” after vengeful Muslims accused him of burning a Koran after they lost a billiard game. The Muslims kept taunting and threatening him, and the Christian “dared them to do whatever they wanted and walked away.” Days later came the accusation and arrest, which caused Muslim riots, spreading “panic among Christians.” As a result, “several people left their houses anticipating violence.”121
In August 2012, a Pakistani flag—which has the name of “Allah” on it—flew from a Christian’s property to a Muslim’s, and the latter accused the former of deliberately trying to blaspheme the name of Allah. This accusation was publicized in local mosques, prompting enraged Muslims to threaten to burn the homes of the Christian families in the area.122
In December 2011, after a quarrel about the rent, a Muslim landlord accused his Christian tenant, twenty-five-year-old Khuram Masih, of desecrating the Koran. The accusation led crowds of Muslims to surround the Christian’s home, making threats and hurling anti-Christian slogans. Muslim leaders from several mosques made loud announcements calling for “severe punishment.” Accordingly, Khuram was arrested and charged under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.123
In September 2011, Faryal Tauseef Bhatti, a Christian student in eighth grade, was expelled from school because she misspelled an Urdu word in a way that apparently changed its meaning from praise to disparagement of Muhammad, “leading to accusations of ‘blasphemy.’” After the teacher severely beat her, the principal was notified and local Muslims demonstrated, “demanding registration of a criminal case against the eighth-grader and her eviction from the area.” As riots and violence were about to erupt, the military intervened: “They bundled the family in an ambulance and took them away.... ”124
In September 2011,“Javed Masih,” a Christian high school teacher, “suffered false accusations of blasphemy by a student and some Muslim professors, because of dislike, revenge and hatred towards Christians.” He was forced to leave his job; he appealed to court, but the judge simply suggested he “leave the country.” A married father of three, he has been uprooted and is in hiding. 125
Also in September 2011, Aslam Masih, a thirty-year-old Christian man who had been accused of blasphemy and subsequently imprisoned, died in his cell from “‘a treatable disease’ after officials denied him proper medical care.”126 While in prison, he and others “accused of blasphemy, were kept in solitary confinement without access to a toilet, water or electricity.” 127 The case against Aslam was at one point dropped because of a lack of evidence but reinstated as a result of pressure exerted by Islamic fanatics.
In March 2011, Qamar David, a Christian serving a life sentence on accusations that he had sent text messages blaspheming the prophet of Islam, died amid suspicions that he was murdered. The Christian had expressed fears for his life several times during the trial. “David did not die of a heart attack as the jail officials are claiming,” said his former lawyer. “He was being threatened ever since the trial began, and he had also submitted a written application with the jail authorities for provision of security, but no step was taken in this regard.” Conflicting versions of his death from jail officials have also raised doubts. 128
In May 2011, hundreds of Muslims “attacked Christians’ homes, a school and a Presbyterian church building after learning” that a Christian father and son who had earlier been accused of “blasphemy”—under the absurd allegation that they had disseminated a letter commanding Muslims to convert to Christianity—had been released from jail. (A handwriting expert concluded that they had not written the threatening note to Muslims.) Soon thereafter, mosques began blasting on the megaphones that the men had burned pages of the Koran, further exacerbating the riots and causing many Christians to flee the region.129
In February 2011, following a property dispute with Muslim neighbors, Agnes Nuggo, a fifty-year-old Christian woman, was accused by the same neighbors of insulting Islam and subsequently arrested. As in so many other cases, she insists that the accusations against her concerning insulting Islam are fabricated.130
In November 2010, twenty-two-year-old Latif Masih, a Christian, was shot dead by “two Muslim extremists” near his home after he was released on bail from jail, where he had served a five-month sentence for allegedly desecrating the Koran.131
In October 2012, a sixteen-year-old boy, Ryan Stanten, was arrested on “charges of blasphemy, terrorism, and cybercrimes,” because he forwarded text messages to his friends that were intercepted and deemed blasphemous by Muslims. A “furious Muslim mob” attacked the boy’s home, setting furniture on fire and shouting “Death to Blasphemer” and “Kill Christian Infidels.” Other Christians in the region fled.132
Spotlight on Egypt
If Pakistan is the Muslim nation par excellence when it comes to persecuting Christians in the context (or pretext) of blasphemy, Egypt has been rivaling its Asian counterpart since the “Arab Spring.” With the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis—many of whom were previously in Egypt’s jails, including President Morsi—Egypt’s Christians have been experiencing persecution unprecedented in modern times, including for “blasphemy.”
Article 98(f) of Egypt’s current penal code states,Confinement for a period of not less than six months and not exceeding five years . . . shall be the penalty inflicted on whoever makes use of religion in propagating, either by words, in writing, or in any other means, extreme ideas for the purpose of inciting strife, ridiculing or insulting a heavenly religion or a sect following it, or damaging national unity.133
If this law were interpreted equitably, it would penalize Egypt’s many Muslim clerics and preachers who regularly use religion to incite violence against the nation’s Christian minority, thus damaging national unity. But just as in Pakistan, it is almost exclusively Christians who are targeted for prosecution. Under the new constitution introduced by the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Egypt, Christians are likely to suffer even more draconian punishments for insulting Muhammad. The following incidents are all from the period since the “January 25 Revolution.”134
In November 2012 an Egyptian court decreed that eight Christians living in America—seven native Egyptians, and one American, Pastor Terry Jones—be sent to Egypt to be executed in connection with the sixteen-minute You Tube video about Muhammad, “Innocence of Muslims.” The prosecution offered no real evidence against the Christians, most of whom deny any involvement with the video, but instead relied on inciting Muslims against the accused by playing the video in the courtroom.
In September 2012 twenty-seven-year-old Christian Albert Saber was accused of posting clips of the Muhammad movie—which he had downloaded from a Muslim site, not You Tube. Muslims attacked and evicted him and his mother from their home. Later Albert was arrested; he is currently incarcerated awaiting a likely multi-year sentence.
In March 2012, Makram Diab, a 49-year-old Christian man, was sentenced to six years in prison for “insulting Muhammad.” He had gotten into a religious argument with a Muslim colleague, who went on to protest that Diab had offended Muhammad. The Christian was subsequently arrested and sentenced to six years in a ten-minute mockery of a trial where Diab was not even allowed proper representation. Though “defamation of religion” is currently a misdemeanor under Egyptian law, punishable by a prison sentence of one month to three years, the judge doubled the sentence to appease protesting Muslims—including an angry mob, 2,500 strong, which had surrounded the courtroom Diab was in, demanding his death.135
In August 2012, Bishoy Kamil, a Christian in his twenties who worked as a teacher, was arrested and given six years in prison for posting cartoons deemed insulting to Islam and its prophet on Facebook. He admitted to managing the page in question, but said it had been hacked. Like Makram Diab, he was given more than double the maximum penalty to appease a mob calling for his death.136
In April
2012, Gamal Abdu Massud, a teenage Christian student, was sentenced to three years on accusations that he had posted a Muhammad cartoon on his Facebook account, which had only some 135 friends. Apparently the wrong “friend” saw it, for it was not long before local Muslims rioted, burning the Christian teenager’s house as well as the homes of five other Christians. Massud was subsequently arrested and tried and is currently serving his sentence.
In June 2011, Naima Wahib Habil, newly hired as director of a junior high school for girls, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on the accusation that she had torn a copy of the Koran in front of her students. The story had inspired mob riots and calls for her death.137
In July 2011, Muslims rioted demanding the death of Coptic business tycoon Naguib Sawiris because he had posted a picture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse dressed in Salafi attire on his Facebook account. Due to his high profile, he was acquitted in an Egyptian court—but not after Islamic media stations had thoroughly demonized him to the point that he has since left Egypt for Europe.
Magdi Khalil of Coptic Solidarity, an organization devoted to helping Egypt’s oppressed Christians claim their human rights, has accused prosecutors in these cases of relying “exclusively on circumstantial evidence. And the judges do not behave like impartial judges, but rather as demagogues haranguing an already frenzied mob, and then sacrificing the Copts to satisfy them. Nor do they allow any representation for the accused. Judges just show up and pass their verdicts in very brief mock trials.” Khalil confirms that “Egypt is rapidly turning into another Pakistan,” adding that, “even those Christians who manage to avoid prison, their lives are often ruined, they have to flee their homes and villages, they lose their jobs and find it hard to get a new one.”
Pakistan and now Egypt are the Muslim countries where Christians are most at risk of blasphemy prosecutions, but examples abound from across the Muslim world. To show how widespread this phenomenon is and how it crosses racial and national boundaries, the following are three cases from three very different regions—Far East Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the Arab world.
Indonesia
In February 2011 over a thousand rioting Muslims stormed an Indonesian courthouse because a Christian, Antonius Richmond Bawengen, had received what they deemed to be too lenient a sentence for blasphemy—the maximum five years. They attacked the judges, prosecutors, and, of course, the defendant—injuring nine people, including a missionary priest. The mob also attacked two churches and a Christian school and set vehicles on fire. Bawengen was found guilty of “spread[ing] hatred about Islam” because he had distributed pamphlets that some Muslims deemed offensive to Islam and Muhammad.138
Ethiopia
In May 2011, a recently widowed Christian man in Ethiopia was accused of “desecrating the Koran” and forced to spend two years in prison, where he was abused, pressured to convert to Islam, and left partially paralyzed. On returning home, he discovered that his two young children had been abducted by local Muslims: “My life is ruined—I have lost my house, my children, my health. I am now homeless, and I am limping.”139
Tunisia
In Tunisia, the “moderate” Muslim country where the “Arab Spring” began, one of the first things Ennahada, the new ruling Islamist party, did in August 2012 after winning elections was to file a bill to criminalize offenses against “sacred values,” including prison terms and fines for broadly worded offenses such as insulting or mocking the “sanctity of religion,” including “insults, profanity, derision and representation of Allah and Mohammed.” 140
SILENCING THE GOSPEL
Although Islam’s anti-proselytism law regularly oppresses Christians indigenous to the Islamic world, it has also—since St. Francis in the thirteenth century, as we have seen—oppressed Western Christians who try to talk to Muslims about the Gospel. Recently, for example, in December 2012 in Pakistan, Birgitta Almby, a seventy-year-old Bible school teacher from Sweden, was shot by two men in front of her home and died soon thereafter. She had served in Pakistan for thirty-eight years. Police said they could not find the assassins and could not unearth a motive, though Christians close to her have no doubt “Islamic extremists” murdered the elderly woman: “Who else would want to murder someone as apolitical and harmless as Almby, who had dedicated her life to serving humanity?”141 Her assassination fits a familiar pattern. In one month alone, March 2012, two American Christians were murdered in Iraq and in Yemen in the context of proselytism.
Spotlight on American Christians
On March 1, 2012, Jeremiah Small, a “beloved teacher and friend” who taught at a Christian school “in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, in Iraq’s most peaceful region,” was shot to death by an eighteen-year-old student, even “as he bent his head to pray at the start of a morning class. The 33-year-old teacher from Washington State took bullets to the head and chest and died at the scene.”142 According to students, “‘Mr. Jeremiah’s hands were still folded in prayer when he fell.’” According to World magazine, the day before the shooting “a heated discussion” had broken out between Small and one of his students, “during which the pupil threatened to kill the teacher because of conflicting religious views.”143
While the Wall Street Journal called the source of the quarrel a “mystery,” 144 CBS reported that Small “was a devout Christian who frequently praised Christianity and prayed in the classroom, and his friends in Washington said his evangelism is what motivated him to teach in Iraq.” A pastor who once interviewed Small says, “He knew he was putting his life on the line.... He felt this was a way to serve and touch some lives for God.” His parents wrote on Facebook, “Our oldest, Jeremiah was martyred in Kurdistan this a.m.”145 And the Muslim father of the pupil who killed Small portrayed Christians such as the slain American teacher as “more dangerous than al-Qaeda.”146
On March 18, 2012, just a few days after Jeremiah Small’s murder, Joel Shrum, a twenty-nine-year-old American teacher living in Yemen with his wife and two children, was shot eight times and killed by gunmen and members of the al-Qaeda-linked Supporters of Sharia. The group later issued a message saying, “This operation comes as a response to the campaign of Christian proselytizing that the West has launched against Muslims,” calling the teacher “one of the biggest American proselytizers.” Although his employers issued a statement insisting that Shrum would never do such a thing as talk about Christianity around Yemen’s Muslims, Shrum’s wife indicated in an interview that Shrum was an open Christian, likely to share his faith. There is no reason to doubt his Islamic murderers when they say he was targeted for “proselytizing.” There are other Westerners in Yemen. If supporters of Sharia were simply targeting American infidels in general, there would be more random killings.
Not all Americans talking about Christianity in the Muslim world are murdered; some manage to get away after a sound thrashing. For example, in Indonesia in October 2011 an American family was attacked by a Muslim mob that set fire to their property and vehicle after they were accused of proselytizing Muslims. “Only the intervention of police saved the lives” of David Ray Graeff, his wife Georgia, and their two sons Benjamin and Daniel, from “an enraged mob spurred by a local religious leader.”147 Right around the same time, angry Muslims and Indonesian authorities expelled Christians from their Protestant church and shut it down for allegedly engaging in proselytizing in “a predominantly Muslim area.” As in previous cases when churches were seized, “the fundamentalists were aided and abetted by the local administration.”148
Likewise, in Bangladesh in February 2012, according to the New York Post, three American Christians were injured after their car was attacked by a Muslim mob that suspected they were converting Muslims into Christians. At least two hundred irate locals chased the missionaries’ car and threw stones at it, cutting the Americans with the broken shards of glass.149
Still, the bulk of persecution for sharing the Gospel in the Islamic world is reserved for indigenous Christians, simply because there a
re many more of them than foreign Christians. Examples from all corners of the Islamic world follow.
Afghanistan
According to a September 2012 report by ASSIST News Service, “Christian evangelism [in Afghanistan] has turned into a sensitive and complicated issue in the last 10 years. Muslims target Christians every day. They use the Islamic Sharia Law to charge Christians with blasphemy. The rate of growth of Christianity in Afghanistan has caused Afghani Muslim clerics to consider it a threat.”150
In July 2007, the Taliban abducted twenty-three South Korean Christian missionaries, executed two men, and later released the rest, after South Korea “agreed to end all missionary work in Afghanistan. . . .”151 In September 2008, Amin Mousavi was arrested for “allegedly promoting Christianity” and sentenced to death, although he was later released and fled the nation. And the Taliban, although ousted of power by then, killed several converts to Christianity in a spree in 2004: “A group of Taliban dragged out Mullah Assad Ullah and slit his throat with a knife because he was propagating Christianity. ”152
Algeria
In March 2006 the Algerian parliament approved a new law that requires a prison sentence of two to five years plus a heavy fine for anyone “trying to call on a Muslim to embrace another religion” or anyone who “stores or circulates publications or audio-visual or other means aiming at destabilizing attachment to Islam.”153 In May 2011, Karim Siaghi received the maximum five-year prison sentence and the maximum fine on the accusation that he had shared a Christian CD with a Muslim and blasphemed the prophet. In November 2011, during Siaghi’s appeal hearing, more evidence emerged. The Muslim merchant who brought the accusations against him had earlier initiated a conversation on religion with him: “Unhappy with Siaghi’s non-Muslim answers, the merchant tried to force him to pay homage to the Prophet and to recite the Muslim shahada: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ When Siaghi refused and said he was a Christian, the merchant filed a complaint that the convert had belittled the Prophet, and in the absence of further witnesses, charges were brought against him. The merchant was said to have seen Siaghi give a CD to someone, but never appeared in court to testify to that effect.”154
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