Generic hostility and contempt for the Christian in Muslim society is well documented. Consider the experiences of C. M. Doughty, a British writer who journeyed around Arabia and described his experiences in his Travels in Arabia Deserta. Bedouins told him, “Thou wast safe in thine own country, though mightest have continued there; but since thou art come into the land of the Moslemin [Muslims], God has delivered thee into our hands to die—so perish all the Nasara [Christians]! And be burned in hell with your father, Sheytan [Satan].” Doughty also records how Arabia’s Muslims would, while circumambulating around the Ka‘ba, supplicate Allah to “curse and destroy” the Jews and Christians. 4
Little has changed. To this day, as Muslims circumambulate around the Ka‘ba in Mecca, typical supplications routinely blasted on megaphones and chanted to by Islam’s devotees include formulations such as these:O Allah vanquish the unjust Christians and the criminal Jews, the unjust traitors; strike them with your wrath; make their lives hostage to misery; drape them with endless despair, unrelenting pain and unremitting ailment; fill their lives with sorrow and pain and end their lives in humiliation and oppression; inflict your tortures and punishments upon the unjust Christians and criminal Jews. This is our supplication, Allah; grant us our request!5
Or consider the words of an Ethiopian Christian—one of thirty-five arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2011 for holding a prayer meeting—who was imprisoned, abused, and released only months later: “We believe that we are released as the result of the pressure exerted by ICC [International Christian Concern] and others. The Saudi officials do not tolerate any religions other than Islam. They consider non-Muslims unbelievers. They are full of hatred towards non-Muslims [emphasis added].”6 Some eight hundred years earlier, Marco Polo, that famous European adventurer who traveled throughout the East in the thirteenth century, made a similar observation concerning the Arabian Peninsula: “The inhabitants are all Saracens [Muslims], and utterly detest the Christians [emphasis added].”7
Nor is this hatred limited to “Wahhabi” Arabia or Taliban-controlled regions in Afghanistan. It prevails even in Muslim countries deemed “moderate.” Consider Tajikistan, a nation few would associate with radical Islam or anti-Christian sentiment: in January 2012, “a young man dressed as ‘Father Frost’—the Russian equivalent of Father Christmas—was stabbed to death” by a Muslim mob while visiting relatives and bringing gifts. While beating and stabbing him, the mob screamed, “‘You infidel!’” Police cited “religious hatred” as the motivation behind the killing.8
This sort of hatred transcends doctrine—the letter of the Sharia law—and has become embedded in the fabric of Muslim society. When, in August 2011, a Muslim mob brutally assaulted a group of Christians as they were watching a movie about Jesus, destroying the projector, they were not carrying out a fatwa, obeying any particular verse of the Koran, or applying any specific provision of Sharia. They were giving vent to a deep-rooted contempt for Christians that had been fostered by Islam in general.
Here we will survey expressions of Muslim anti-Christian hatred that, over the course of nearly 1,400 years, have come to permeate the collective consciousness of the Muslim world—regardless of the supposed divide between “radical Muslims” and “moderates.” Put differently, radicals tend to act out their anti-Christian animus violently and in planned acts of terrorism, while moderates enable violence against Christians or simply look the other way. As we investigate the phenomenon of anti-Christian hatred in the Muslim world, we will look at three familiar categories: Muslim government policy, Muslim mob mentality, and Islamic jihadi terrorism.
MUSLIM GOVERNMENTS: PLANTING AND NOURISHING SEEDS OF HATE
Muslim governments around the Islamic world enable anti-Christian sentiment throughout Muslim society in two primary ways: 1) allowing educational curricula that condemn and demonize Christians and other non-Muslims; and 2) rarely, if ever, legally siding with a Christian against a Muslim, thus emboldening the latter to continue committing injustices against the former.
Learning Hatred from Education
That anti-Christian teachings permeate the worldview of the average Muslim is ensured by the fact that, from childhood on up, Muslim students are regularly exposed to anti-Christian rhetoric in schools. By funding this kind of education, the governments of Muslim nations—including many deemed “moderate” “allies” of Western nations—are responsible for planting the first seeds of hate. This is not a new phenomenon. According to Arabist E. W. Lane, who traveled in Egypt in the 1820s, “children in Egypt are often taught, at school, a regular set of curses to denounce upon the persons and property of Christians, Jews, and all other unbelievers in the religion of Muhammad.”9
And while Christianity is openly disparaged in classrooms—even in the presence of Christian students, who must sit through it quietly—the study and sometimes even memorization of the Koran is mandatory, including for Christian students. My own father was educated in Egypt in the 1950s. Because he used to refuse to recite the Koran, he was frequently reprimanded, and twice beaten. In one instance, his religion teacher ground sand into his ear, while disparagingly calling him “Guirgus”—the Arabic version of “George,” a generic and derogatory appellation for Christians in Egypt. Soon thereafter my father abandoned Egypt for America.
This is a personal family anecdote, but evidence of far more graphic abuse across the Muslim world is overwhelming; it has only gotten worse over the decades. A product of Islamic indoctrination, such anti-Christian hatred is inevitable and will only get worse as Muslims continue turning back to their Islamic heritage, turning back to the Islamic way.
In October 2012, the Daily Beast reported how the Saudi education system continues to indoctrinate children with hatred and incitement, especially against Christians and Jews, despite Saudi promises to reform their textbooks. For example, a ninth-grade textbook published by the Ministry of Education states, “The Jews and the Christians are enemies of the believers, and they cannot approve of Muslims.” An eighth-grade textbook says, “The Apes are the people of the Sabbath, the Jews; and the Swine are the infidels of the communion of Jesus, the Christians.”10 These are just two examples of a long list of hate-filled passages, which, of course, trace back to the Koran and hadith. This is one reason that Muslim governments have trouble getting such teachings out of their textbooks and school curricula. Islam’s clerics remind authorities that these are the teachings of Islam and that to suppress them is to suppress Islam—and to be declared apostate rulers.
Nor is such hate being promoted in Saudi schools alone. Thanks to Saudi oil wealth and the vast network of Sunni organizations sponsored by the Saudis, the literature and educational materials produced in Saudi Arabia travel far and wide, ending up in mosques, Muslim schools (madrassas), and libraries around the world—including in the West.
Back in 2002, Fox News posed the question, “Can it be true? That Islamic schools in the United States teach hatred towards American Christians and Jews?” Fox reported that “one such school outside Washington, D.C., uses textbooks teaching 11th graders that ‘the Day of Judgment can’t come until Jesus Christ returns to Earth, breaks the cross and converts everyone to Islam, and until Muslims start attacking Jews.’ . . . Americans generally assume Islamic hate teaching resided ‘out there’—in Cairo or Riyadh. And yet it’s right here—in the elite Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C.”11
If such Saudi-sponsored hate is being taught in Muslim schools a few miles away from the capital of the United States, how ubiquitous must it be in the Islamic world?
Consider Pakistan. A November 2011 report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom demonstrates that Pakistani school textbooks promote intolerance for Christians, Hindus, and all non-Muslims, and that most school teachers view non-Muslim minorities as “enemies of Islam”: “Religious minorities are often portrayed as inferior or second-class citizens who have been granted limited rights and privileges by generous Pakistani Muslim
s, for which they should be grateful.”12
Another report, issued in April 2012 by the Catholic National Commission for Justice and Peace, details how Pakistani school textbooks “promote religious fanaticism, discriminate against minorities and trigger religious conflicts.” As in other Muslim countries, Christians and Hindus “are obliged to learn the basics of Islam”—studying the Koran is mandatory—while their own religions are openly denigrated. Even in subjects such as social science and linguistics, “about 20% of the content is linked to Islam.”13 Bonus points can be earned by anyone, including non-Muslims, who excel in Islamic studies, while Christians cannot earn extra points for excelling in their own religion.
This kind of educational abuse is also common in Turkey—which is still being touted as “secular” by the mainstream media and Western academics. In February 2012 the Turkish Association of Protestant Churches’ annual Report on Human Rights Violations noted, “Christians in Turkey continue to suffer attacks from private citizens, discrimination by lower-level government officials and vilification in both school textbooks and news media [emphasis added].” A “root of intolerance” prevails in Turkish society toward adherents of non-Islamic faiths: “The removal of this root of intolerance is an urgent problem that still awaits to be dealt with.”14
Despite promising to reform its school textbooks, Turkey’s Ministry of Education made no changes to a tenth-grade textbook that portrays the Assyrian Christians—the nation’s longest-established indigenous community—as traitors. Objections were raised back in 2011, and the Turks, like the Saudis, had issued a statement promising to revise the texts in the next printing, scheduled for 2012. Yet the books were reprinted in October 2012 without any improvements. “In fact, the negative and slanderous portrayal of Assyrians [Christians] has increased in the new edition,” decried one reviewer.15 “The book now not only portrays Assyrians as traitors in the past but says the Assyrians continue their betrayal of Turkey today.” The Assyrian International News Agency pointed out that Turkey’s government still denies the Armenian genocide of Turkey’s Christian population and is in fact “not hesitant to distort historical events by inverting victim and perpetrator.”16
Ironically, instead of reforming its own textbooks to reflect objective history, the chairman of the Turkish parliament’s education committee engaged in projection, accusing the French government of “planting seeds of hate” for including the Armenian genocide in French history and geography school books. 17 (Most objective historians agree that about 1.5 million Christian Armenians were systematically slaughtered during World War I in a deliberate policy of genocide ordered by the Ottoman government.)
The anecdotes above demonstrate the role of Muslim governments in inciting, or inculcating, anti-Christian sentiment. An Islamic cleric on an October 2012 episode of Al Hafiz TV, an Islamic satellite station, explained why Christian teachings must never be taught in Muslim classrooms, even to Christians: “they truly stab at the rulings of Islam,” that is, Christian teachings contradict Islamic teachings and thus must be suppressed. To exemplify, he read from a Christian text that said “the Christian religion does not differentiate between women and men, but it confirms their perfect equality: it gives them an equal share in inheritance, it bans divorce, and it bans polygamy.”
“Now,” said the sheikh, “if my son hears such things while he’s in school, he’ll come home and say to me, ‘Father, why do you have many wives? You are unjust—unlike Christianity which is full of justice!’” The cleric went on to complain that Christian teachings contradict “the religion of the prophet,” who of course had many wives—more than the Koran’s prescribed four; made divorce a simple matter for men; and decreed that females inherit only half of what males inherit. The cleric complained that Muslim men who try to exercise their Islamic rights—to polygamy, double-inheritance, and easy divorce (now via text messaging, as a recent fatwa allows)—become “criminals, and the religion [Islam] that taught them such things taught them crimes.” In short, “it is impermissible to produce texts that contradict the teachings of the Koran”18—another echo of Islam’s ban on free speech and non-Muslim proselytism.
While negative depictions of non-Muslims proliferate in Islamic school textbooks, a whitewashed image of Islam predominates in Western education, particularly in the United States. According to a 2009 American Textbook Council report citing a number of popular textbooks used by American junior and senior high school students, “key subjects like jihad, Islamic law, [and] the status of women are whitewashed” because of political correctness, or out of fear of Muslim activists. Discussing the strikes of 9/11, one textbook never mentions Islamic ideology, referring to the nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers simply as “teams of terrorists”—this despite the fact that al-Qaeda has repeatedly articulated its distinctly Islamic worldview, with a stress on hating “Christian infidels” and waging jihad on them.
One seventh-grade American textbook offers wishful thinking in place of facts: “Jihad represents the human struggle to overcome difficulties and do things that are pleasing to God. Muslims strive to respond positively to personal difficulties as well as worldly challenges. For instance, they might work to be better people, reform society, or correct injustice.” Impressionable American students are unlikely to guess that “correcting injustice” could mean killing an apostate and “reforming society” could include subjugating Christian infidels—as is happening now under the “Arab Spring”—but that is exactly how many Muslims would understand jihad.
Even the primary sources of Islamic history, written by authoritative Muslim historians venerated throughout the Islamic world, make it absolutely clear that Islam conquered much of what is today called the “Muslim world”—including half of what then constituted the Christian world—by the sword; but the report finds that these facts are glossed over or distorted in American textbooks. Islam ambiguously “spread” or was “brought” to those areas. This is from the same textbooks that allot whole chapters to bemoaning the Crusades and portraying Christians as intolerant fanatics (ignoring the fact that the Crusades were in response to jihadi conquests of Christian lands and the centuries-long persecution of Christians).19
Learning Hatred from the Law
Another way that Muslim governments contribute to the hatred of Christians has to do with the justice systems in Muslim countries. Regardless of what is formally written about religious equality and citizenship in the constitutions of these nations, authorities will rarely if ever side with Christians vis-à-vis their Muslim persecutors. When it comes to Muslim-on-Christian violence, police habitually look the other way until Muslim culprits have done their damage and fled. This pattern is most obvious in cases when Muslims riot and destroy churches. It often takes police hours to arrive, and the perpetrators are rarely arrested—whereas the Christian victims often are. When Muslims rob, plunder, or annex the land of Christians, authorities ignore it, sometimes even warning the Christians not to complain. The police may not actively side with the mob, but they do not want to be in the awkward position of arresting and prosecuting fellow Muslims—which might make them appear un-Islamic, and thus worthy of the same treatment as Christians.
Muslim authorities have also sided with Muslim abusers in instances of Christian girls being abducted, raped, and forced to convert to Islam and “marry” their Islamic kidnappers. On those rare occasions when such rape victims escape back to their frantic families, police often seize them and return them to their Islamic rapist “husbands,” a scenario that is played over with great frequency, particularly in Pakistan.
Legal complicity in Muslim violence against Christians can be traced to the Islamic doctrine of “Loyalty and Enmity,” which commands Muslims always to side with fellow Muslims against non-Muslims. This doctrine is built atop Koranic verses such as 5:51, which warns believers against “taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies . . . whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them,” that is,
any friend of the Christians becomes himself an “infidel.” According to the classical and authoritative exegete al-Tabari, Koran 5:51 means that the Muslim who “allies with them [non-Muslims] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community.”
One can easily see how this teaching compels Muslim authorities never to “ally” with and “enable” Christians against Muslims— but rather to turn a blind eye to Muslim abuse of Christians. Similar scriptures include Koran 3:28, 4:89, 4:144, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 58:22; the last simply states that true Muslims do not befriend non-Muslims—“even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin.” Likewise, according to Muhammad, “A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He neither oppresses him nor humiliates him nor looks down upon him”20—certainly not for the sake of the hated infidels, whatever their grievances.
Two stories, both from May 2012 in Egypt, illustrate how the “Loyalty and Enmity” doctrine plays out in practice. In a court verdict that was criticized by human rights organizations as “unbelievable” and “extremely harsh,” twelve Christians involved in a riot were convicted to life imprisonment while eight Muslims—including some who had participated in the torching of nearly sixty Christian homes—were acquitted, all to thunderous cries of “‘Allahu Akbar!’” in the courtroom. 21 A different Muslim judge in Upper Egypt dismissed all charges against a group of Muslims who had accused a Christian man of having an affair with a Muslim woman, terrorized his family for over a year, and finally cut off his ear in a knife brawl while trying to force him to convert to Islam.22
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Page 19
