Bangladesh
In February 2011, Biplob Marandi, a twenty-five-year-old Christian man in Bangladesh, was sentenced to one year in prison for distributing Christian books and other literature near a major Muslim gathering. “Duty police found Marandi creating chaos as he was propagating his religion, Christianity, by distributing the tracts as a mobile court on Jan. 21 was patrolling near the field of the Bishwa Ijtema,” the verdict reads. Christian leaders and those close to Marandi counter by saying that local Muslims instigated the “chaos” because they deemed his literature un-Islamic. 155
Egypt
In June 2012, a Christian student reportedly handing out Christian literature at Egypt’s Asyut University “raised the ire of Muslim students,” resulting in violent clashes that left many on campus injured—all amid shouts of sectarian chants, no doubt including “Allahu Akbar!”156 In September 2012, the U.S. embassy in Cairo issued a press release saying it had “credible information suggesting terrorist interest in targeting U.S. female missionaries in Egypt. Accordingly, U.S. citizens should exercise vigilance. ”157
Ethiopia
In March 2011, after Evangelist Wako Hanake received threats “to stop converting Muslims to Christ,” “suspected Islamic extremists” burned down his home in Ethiopia. According to area Christians, “Hostility toward those spreading faiths different from Islam is a common occurrence in predominantly Muslim areas of Ethiopia and neighboring countries.” They added that they are often subject to “harassment and intimidation.” 158
Iran
In August 2011, Iranian officials launched a Bible-burning campaign, confiscating and destroying 6,500 Bibles. Many were burned in public, 159 and officials likened Iran’s tiny Christian minority to the “Taliban and ‘parasites’” for sharing the Gospel. 160 And as we have seen, in February 2012, in order to prevent Muslim Iranians from hearing or understanding the Gospel, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence ordered the last two officially registered churches holding Farsi-language Friday services in Tehran—Emmanuel Protestant Church and St. Peter’s Evangelical Church—to discontinue them. Such Friday services had attracted Muslims interested in Christianity since Friday is most Iranians’ day off: “Persecuted Christians and Churches in the Islamic Republic of Iran are banned from preaching the Gospel to non-Christians, holding Persian language services, teaching and or distributing the Holy Bible.”161
Kashmir
In October 2011, a mufti summoned C. M. Khanna, a Christian pastor he accused of being “involved in converting young Muslim boys and girls to Christianity,” to his court, threatening, “This warrants action as per Islamic law. . . . I will take all necessary measures in exercise of the powers vested in me by Islamic shariat. . . . It is a matter of grave concern that Christian missionaries active here should be running an organized and integrated campaign to convert young Kashmiri Muslims to Christianity.”162 According to Khanna, the mufti had falsely accused him because he was “annoyed” with Khanna for failing to do him a personal favor and so concocted this story to be avenged on him.163
Malaysia
In March 2011 Malaysian authorities detained thirty thousand copies of the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs in the Malay language. This would not be the first time government authorities seized Malay-language Bibles. Bishop Ng Moon Hing, chairman of the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM), decried the action, saying that the CFM is “greatly disillusioned, fed-up and angered by the repeated detention of Bibles written in our national language.... It would appear as if the authorities are waging a continuous, surreptitious and systematic program against Christians in Malaysia to deny them access to the Bible in [Malay].”164 An earlier consignment of 5,100 copies of the Good News Bible in Malay had also been detained in March 2009. As a condition of their release, authorities ordered the books be defaced with official stamps saying, “Bible is for use by Christians only.”165 In August 2012, religious police raided a Methodist church because of “fears that Muslims were being converted.” A Facebook campaign created to support the raid and to “prevent apostasy” had attracted support from twenty-three thousand people.166
The Maldives
On September 27, 2012, officials at the Malé Ibrahim Nasir International Airport in the Maldives seized eleven books about Christianity from Jathish Biswas, a Bangladeshi expatriate who had come to the Maldives via Sri Lanka. He was arrested, spent twenty-three days in jail, and was then deported. According to Biswas, “authorities treated me as if I wanted to destroy their nation by bringing in Christian books. They stripped me almost naked to see if I was carrying anything else. Customs and police officials would ask me question after question and deny me proper food.” An American Christian was also later arrested and deported for alleged links with Biswas.167
Morocco
In 2010 it was reported that Jamaa Ait Bakrim—a native Moroccan who had converted to Christianity, put up a cross, and started talking about his faith with fellow Muslims—was serving a fifteen-year-sentence for “proselytizing.”168 In the same year Moroccan Muslims posted on Facebook the names, faces, and addresses of people they described as “hyena evangelists,” who are trying to “shake the faith of Muslims” in Morocco—echoing the language used in the nation’s anti-proselytism law.169
Nigeria
In January 2012, Boko Haram members set ablaze a Christian missionary home in Nigeria, Bethany Home, and destroyed property worth millions of naira. “Although no life was lost in the attack, occupants of the home, mostly orphans and the less-privileged were rendered homeless as a result of the attack.” 170
Pakistan and India
In August 2011, Muslims in India intercepted and held three Christian women as they were traveling to a Muslim widow’s home, possibly to share the Gospel with her. The mob threatened to “burn them alive if they continued worshipping Christ,” even as they “pushed them around and verbally abused them for their faith in Christ,” following the teachings of Muhammad: “Do not initiate the Salam [peace greeting] to the Jews and Christians, and if you meet any of them in a road, force them to its narrowest alley.” They also abused the Muslim woman for inviting “infidels” to her home, threatening both her and the rest of “the villagers with the dire consequences they will face if they attend Christian meetings or talk to any one of them.” 171 In November 2011, a Christian evangelist was shot dead by “an unidentified gunman in what his family believes was a radical Muslim group’s targeting of a Christian.” According to the man’s son, “We firmly believe that my father was killed because of his preaching of the Bible, because there is no other reason.” 172 In August 2012, Pastor Kelvin, a married father of five, was kidnapped. He had begun to preach around Muslims, some of whom were “showing interest in Christianity.” Soon thereafter, the pastor began to receive threats. He subsequently disappeared, and his wife received a call threatening her not to go to police.173
The Philippines
In December 2011 in Mindanao, where Muslims make up one-third of the population, a twenty-year-old Christian preschool learning center was threatened with closure under technicalities. Mindanao “has the highest incidence of persecuted Christians doing missionary work in the Philippines and it was also in this region where a suspected man lobbed a bomb grenade at visiting Christian missionaries . . . priests and missionaries have also been kidnapped.” 174
Russia
Christian missionaries even in traditionally Christian countries are now under threat from the sword of Islam. In Russia, for example, in 2009, Father Daniil Sysoyev, a thirty-five-year-old Orthodox priest “known for promoting missionary work among Muslims,” was shot several times, including in the head, late one evening in his parish church and died soon afterwards. According to the New York Times, a Moscow Patriarchate official called the murdered priest a “‘talented missionary,’” speculating that his work among Muslims, including Tatars, may have been the motive for the slaying.175 In fact, soon thereafter, an Islamic militant organization based in Russia’
s North Caucasus claimed the killing in a statement: “One of our brothers . . . expressed his desire to execute the damned Sysoyev.”176
Saudi Arabia
In January 2011, two Indian Christians, Yohan Nese, age thirty-one and Vasantha Sekhar Vara, twenty-eight, were arrested by religious police and incarcerated for attending an apartment prayer meeting and for “converting Muslims to Christianity. . . . Religious police interrogated and beat them to the point that they suffered injuries, according to sources.... Authorities asked them how many Christian groups and pastors there are in Saudi Arabia and Riyadh. The religious police also put pressure on them to convert to Islam.” By phone, Vara said “If I have to die for my God, I will die for him here.”177 Likewise, Eyob Mussie, an Eritrean refugee and Muslim convert to Christianity, was arrested in February 2012 for talking to Muslims about Christianity. He was arrested for “preaching to Muslims, an offense that carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia.”178 However, authorities apparently decided that sending him back to Eritrea—where some three thousand Christians are in prison without charges, some isolated and tortured for years—was punishment enough. 179 And in late December 2012, religious police stormed a house in the province of al-Jouf, detaining more than forty-one guests for, in the words of the police statement, “plotting to celebrate Christmas.” 180
Somalia
In September 2009, Omar Khalafe, a sixty-nine-year-old man who had been a Christian for forty-five years, was discovered with twenty-five Somali Bibles in his possession. He was shot dead and the Bibles placed on top of his body as a warning.181 Around the same time, a Muslim sheikh sent his wife to the home of Mariam Muhina, a woman suspected of speaking about Christianity. The sheikh instructed his wife to pretend to be a potential convert to Christianity, who was interested in seeing the Bible. After it was discovered that Mariam did, in fact, have Bibles, she was murdered.182
Sudan
In December 2012, two priests of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Sudan were arrested after a Muslim converted to Christianity. An al-Qaeda-affiliated group issued a statement threatening violence against Copts unless the woman who converted and was “kidnapped” by the Christians was returned—in another instance of Muslim projection of Islamic tactics onto Christians.183 In May 2011, Sudanese National Security Intelligence and Security Service agents arrested Hawa Abdalla, a Christian woman in a Darfur camp for displaced people, accusing her of “possessing and distributing Bibles to others in the camp” and of “converting Muslims to Christianity.” Sources said she could also be tried for apostasy, “which carries the death sentence in Sudan.” Hawa was transferred to an unknown location in Khartoum, where sources said she would be tortured, as she had already been detained and tortured for six days in 2009 on similar charges.184 In January 2012 authorities threatened to arrest church leaders if they engaged in “evangelistic activities” and failed to comply with an order for churches “to provide their names and contact information.... The order was aimed at oppressing Christians amid growing hostilities toward Christianity. . . . Sudanese law prohibits missionaries from evangelizing, and converting from Islam to another religion is punishable by imprisonment or death in Sudan, though previously such laws were not strictly enforced.”185 Soon thereafter, two evangelists were arrested on spurious charges and beaten by police.186
Turkey
In April 2007 in Turkey, several Muslims attacked a publishing house that distributed Bibles. They bound and stabbed three of its employees—Necati Aydin, Ugur Yuksel, and Tilmann Geske, two Turkish converts to Christianity and a German—and tortured them for several hours before murdering them by slitting their throats.187 One unidentified suspect was later quoted as saying: “We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for our religion [Islam].... Our religion is being destroyed. Let this be a lesson to enemies of our religion.”188 Evidence further indicates that an “undercover unit of the military” may have been involved in the massacre.189
Turkmenistan
In September 2012 a Christian in Turkmenistan was reported as saying, “The situation has got markedly worse since July and we don’t know why.” Christian homes were raided and Bibles confiscated; Christians were threatened for not participating in Muslim prayers; they lost their jobs and businesses; Christian children were harassed and discriminated against in schools. In one instance, “secret police officers raided a flat where five elderly Christian women had gathered for worship, as was their regular practice. They were so frightened by the incident that they have stopped meeting together.” 190 In February 2012, Begjan Shirmedov, a seventy-year-old Christian man, was “detained and questioned by police for six hours as he tried to print copies of a small book of Christian poetry.” He was “forced to write a statement and banned from travelling outside his home region” while his case is under investigation.191
As with Islamic attacks on Christian worship, Islamic attacks on Christian freedom demonstrate remarkable continuity. Whenever and wherever there are Muslims—in “white,” “yellow,” “brown,” and “black” nations, from the seventh century to the twenty-first—there is intolerance for criticism of the Prophet and for attempts to persuade Muslims to leave Islam. Sharing the Gospel or questioning Muhammad is dangerous. Many Muslims have believed (and many still maintain) that apostates should be punished with death—or at least confined and beaten until they return to the Islamic fold. Some Muslims do not hesitate to act on that belief, and Christians have suffered the brunt. Thus Islam continues to demonstrate its incompatibility with freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and even freedom of belief.
PART FOUR
CLIMATE OF HATE
Islamic doctrines unequivocally create hostility toward Christians. As we have seen, Muslims around the world are quite deliberately enforcing the provisions of Sharia law against Christian worship, Christian evangelism, freedom of speech, and even freedom of conscience. But Christians also suffer violence at the hands of Muslims for reasons that go beyond conscious applications of Islamic doctrines. The hostility Sharia engenders toward Christians has permeated the culture, mentality, and worldview of the average Muslim. The extent to which violent hatred toward Christians animates an individual Muslim depends on many factors, of course. But clearly one of those factors—in many cases, the deciding factor—is how much or how little that particular Muslim is immersed in and influenced by Islamic civilization.
Marshall Hodgson, a scholar of Islam, discussed this phenomenon. He coined the term “Islamicate,” which refers “not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims. . . .”1 Historian Daniel Pipes elaborates:Sharia regulations were also at the heart of many Islamicate patterns....
In contrast to Islamic patterns [prayer, for example], which affect individuals, Islamicate patterns [for example the inferior social status of non-Muslims] affect communities. A person’s private faith determines the extent to which he follows Islamic regulations, but it is the whole society that is influenced by Islamicate patterns.2
Simply put, while “radical” Muslims consciously seek to uphold the letter of Sharia, the average Muslim unconsciously conforms to its cultural, social, and political manifestations. This should not be surprising. To see how the cultural aspects of a religion can become embedded into the social fabric of a civilization one need only look to Christianity and the influence it continues to exhibit even on the secular West—including on those who most disavow it. Tolerance, human rights, a desire for peace, and being the “nice guy”—all of those concepts championed by today’s leftists and liberals—did not develop in a civilizational vacuum, but rather from the singular teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, which over the course of some two thousand years have had a profound influence on Western epistemology, society, and culture, to the point that they are now simply taken for granted.
Accordingly, we should not be shocked if very different values pervade societies shaped by a very different religion, started by a
very different founder. Consider the pervasiveness of anti-infidel sentiment in Muslim culture. Samuel M. Zwemer, author of the 1916 book Law of Apostasy in Islam, explains the origins of this sentiment in the context of apostasy:The law of apostasy . . . is not a dead letter. It is known to all Muslims from their youth up, if not in its detail of legal penalties, yet in its power of producing an attitude bitterly hostile toward converts to Christianity. What else could such a law produce except a fanatic attitude toward all who are not Muslims? The more Muhammadan a country or a community, the more does it despise the Christian. [Emphasis added.]3
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