In the above examples, Christians were attacked either because they fought back against Muslims or because they were rumored to have relationships with Muslim women—two things clearly banned by Sharia law. Indeed, the one condition that Caliph Omar himself is said to have personally stipulated when finalizing his Conditions with Christians is that they should under no circumstance ever raise their hand to a Muslim—even in self-defense—otherwise they forfeit all “protection.”
But almost any pretext suffices to justify collective punishment of Egypt’s Christians. Consider, for instance, the Kosheh Massacre of 1999. After a Christian merchant and a Muslim quarreled in the Christian-majority village of Kosheh, Muslim mobs rioted and attacked, massacring twenty-one Christians, burning churches and homes, and looting property. Local authorities did little to intervene and, in fact, even participated in the massacre. A court acquitted ninety-four of ninety-six suspects; no one was sentenced for the killings.46
While the Christians of Egypt are often prey to collective punishment, they are certainly not the only ones to suffer from it. Consider the ongoing collective punishment of Pakistan’s Christians. One of the more egregious examples occurred in 1997, inspired by the usual false accusation that someone from the Christian-majority village of Shanti Nagar had “desecrated” a copy of the Koran. Mosques everywhere started blasting calls to avenge Islam. Accordingly, tens of thousands of Muslims descended on the Christian village, burning fourteen Christians and over three hundred homes. Seventy Christians, mostly women and children, were abducted; some were raped, and others were forced to convert to Islam—rape and forced conversions being especially prevalent in Pakistan.
More recently, consider the collective punishment visited upon Pakistan’s Christians in response to the false accusation that a young Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, had desecrated a Koran in August 2012. Although Pakistan released her because the case had become an international liability—Rimsha’s story, like that of Pastor Nadarkhani in Iran, reached the mainstream media, prompting much international criticism—many Christians in Pakistan were still brutalized by rioting Muslims who destroyed Christian homes and churches, tore Bibles to pieces, and broke crosses. The Christians from Rimsha’s village, including many women and children, fled into the woods, building a church and settling there permanently.47 Other Christians, knowing what was in store for them, held a symbolic funeral procession for themselves.48
Their morbid predictions proved all too true—especially after another pretext for Muslims to exact collective punishment from Christians emerged: the Muhammad You Tube movie. After Friday prayers on September 21, 2012, Pakistani Muslims attacked, plundered, and killed the Christians in their midst. Hundreds of Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks, ransacked St. Paul’s Church in Mardan. After looting and desecrating it, they set the church on fire.49
That same day, Muslims raided a nearby church-operated school, looting and torching it as well—and burning down a library containing more than three thousand Christian books. Ironically the library also contained thousands of books on Islam—making the Muslim mobs’ actions blasphemous and themselves deserving of death under Pakistan’s own laws, but of course the law was not enforced impartially: “the attack continued for more than three hours, with minimal efforts by the authorities to stop it. ”50
In a separate incident, gunmen riding motorbikes and dressed in green, Islam’s color, opened fire on the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Cathedral in Hyderabad, murdering at least twenty-eight people. Their immediate target appears to have been a nun, Mother Christina. Days later, unidentified men reportedly threatened workers at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Hyderabad, saying, “We will teach a lesson to the Christians,” and destroying the hospital’s windows and doors.51
Such episodes of collective punishment are common throughout the Muslim world, and not just in Egypt and Pakistan. In 2009 in Indonesia, for example, after word got out that a Christian school teacher had allegedly insulted Islam in a passing comment she made to a student she was tutoring, five hundred Muslims rampaged the region, setting fire to several churches and sixty-seven homes.
Why do Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia see such identical patterns of attacks on Christians? These three nations differ in race, language, and culture. What do they have in common? Only Islam.
Nor is collective punishment limited to the deeds of nearby Christians. The actions of secular Westerners, oceans away, regularly incite Muslims to attack the Christians in their midst. When Muhammad cartoons were published in Europe, Christians in faraway Muslim countries such as Nigeria were killed in retaliation. When Pope Benedict quoted a historical document deemed insulting to Muhammad, anti-Christian riots around the Muslim world erupted, churches were burned, and a nun, Sister Leonella, was murdered in Somalia.52 When the previously unknown American pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran, Muslims killed dozens of U.N. aid workers in Afghanistan, beheading some of them.
An April 2011 Fox News report reviewed the sorts of human rights abuses that Christians in Pakistan suffer—killed for “blasphemy,” constantly “abused in public and harassed in the street by groups of Muslim youths,” ostracized and treated unjustly by the government—and described the Muslim mentality that conflates Pakistan’s Christians with the West:Life on any given day for Pakistani Christians is difficult. But members of Pakistan’s Christian community say now they’re being persecuted for U.S. drone attacks on Islamic militants hiding on the border with Afghanistan. The minority, which accounts for an estimated one percent of the country’s 170 million population, says because its faith is strongly associated with America, it is targeted by Muslims. “When America does a drone strike, they come and blame us,” [said] Faisal Massi, a 25-year old student from Sau Quarter, a Christian colony in Islamabad. “They think we belong to America. It’s a simple mentality.” [Emphasis added.]53
It is the same in Iraq, where persecuted Christians have been targeted in part “over their religious ties with the West.”54
This is by no means exclusively a modern phenomenon. There are precedents going back to the Middle Ages. Historian Robert Irwin points out that “Christians living under Muslim rule suffered during the crusading period. They were suspected of acting as spies or fifth columns for the Franks and later the Mongols as well.”55 Indeed, according to Coptic chronicles, Saladin had many Christians in Egypt crucified in revenge against his Crusader enemies.56 And if the Ottoman state was becoming more tolerant of its Christian subjects and abolished the jizya because of British, French, and Russian intervention in the nineteenth century, when World War I broke out and the Ottoman state warred against the British, French, and Russians, the dormant hate for Christians expressed itself in the Armenian Holocaust.
As globalization shrinks the world—and Muslims continue to conflate the West with Christianity—the reasons to persecute the Christian minorities of the Islamic world grow. Shared religion, even if only nominal, makes all “Christians” liable for one another—that is, collective punishment doled out by Muslims makes the weak and vulnerable Christians answerable for the actions of the strong.
The al-Qaeda-affiliated perpetrators of the October 2010 Baghdad church massacre went so far as to threaten all Christians around the world as “legitimate targets for the mujahedeen [holy warriors] wherever they can reach them.”57 Bold as that sounds, the clause “wherever they can reach them” is a reminder that it is the Islamic world’s accessible, vulnerable Christians who will continue to be “reached.”
Forcible Conversions
Forced conversions permeate the whole of Islamic history. While the Koran states that “there is no coercion in religion”—and even Koran 9:29, which abrogates such verses, allows at least Christians and Jews the option to exist as dhimmis—the fact is, from the dawn of history up to the present, forced conversions have been a normal aspect of Islam. Not all were forced at the point of the sword; most forced conversions have been subtle and gradual, and yet forced nonetheless. As should be clear
by now, the non-Muslim dhimmi’s life is made so miserable by oppressive Sharia stipulations—punctuated by sporadic persecutions—that converting to Islam is the only way to end the suffering, not to mention join the winning team. It is disingenuous not to count such conversions as “forced” or at least “coerced,” as Islam’s apologists habitually do.
One is reminded of the frank words of the Muslim historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi in the Middle Ages, describing the consequences of the especially severe wave of Christian persecution under the “mad caliph” al-Hakim, which included severing Christians’ tongues in punishment for speaking Coptic, Egypt’s last indigenous language58: “Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims.” Western apologists for Islam continue to portray the persecution of Christians as an aberration, but this is simply not true. As we have seen, after al-Hakim died in 1021, Egypt’s Christians continued to see wholesale persecution, extortion, and slaughter. This persecution went on for centuries and was especially severe under the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, who further meted out collective punishment on Egyptian Christians in the context of their ongoing battles against European Christians. Coptic chroniclers make clear that it was primarily under the Mamluk era that the overwhelming majority of Egypt’s natives, the Coptic Christians, converted to Islam.59 One does not imagine they abandoned the religion their forefathers died for simply on account of Islam’s innate appeal.
In other formerly Christian nations, similar waves and even whole epochs of persecution saw the overwhelming majority of indigenous populations, the vast majority of whom had originally been Christians, convert to Islam or flee. Christian populations went from majorities to extinct species. This is the story across North Africa, from Libya to Morocco, where Christians, who were once the majority—St. Augustine, a pillar of Western Christianity, was Algerian—currently account for less than 1 percent of the population. Now that “democracy” and the “Arab Spring” have come to Iraq and Syria, Christian populations that have lived in those countries since the time of Jesus’ disciples are now on their way to extinction, as shall be described in more detail below.
This is the true story of Islam’s “spread.” Often forgotten is that at the time of the early Islamic conquests of the seventh till the end of the eleventh century, half of the world’s Christian population lived precisely in those nations subjugated by Islam60—including Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.61 In The Arab Conquest of Egypt, the nineteenth-century historian Alfred Butler highlights the conquering Muslims’ “vicious system of bribing the Christians into conversion” :[A]lthough religious freedom was in theory secured for the Copts under the capitulation, it soon proved in fact to be shadowy and illusory. For a religious freedom which became identified with social bondage and with financial bondage could have neither substance nor vitality. As Islam spread, the social pressure upon the Copts became enormous, while the financial pressure at least seemed harder to resist, as the number of Christians or Jews who were liable for the poll-tax [jizya] diminished year by year, and their isolation became more conspicuous.... [T]he burdens of the Christians grew heavier in proportion as their numbers lessened [that is, the more Christians converted to Islam, the more the burdens on the remaining few grew]. The wonder, therefore, is not that so many Copts yielded to the current which bore them with sweeping force over to Islam, but that so great a multitude of Christians stood firmly against the stream, nor have all the storms of thirteen centuries moved their faith from the rock of its foundation.62
It is not an exaggeration to say that “the Islamic world” would be a fraction of its size, or might not even exist at all, were it not for the fact that non-Muslims were compelled to convert to Islam simply to evade oppression—beginning, as we have seen, with the earliest Arabs attacked by Muhammad. Once all these Christians converted to Islam, all their progeny became Muslim in perpetuity, thanks to Islam’s apostasy law.
Which leads to one of Islam’s most bitter ironies: a great many of today’s Christians, especially those in the Arab world, are being persecuted by Muslims whose own ancestors were persecuted Christians who converted to Islam to end their own suffering. In other words, Muslim descendants of persecuted Christians are today persecuting their Christian cousins—and thus perpetuating the cycle that made them Muslim in the first the place. Not, of course, that most Muslims are aware of this fact. Indeed, in 2011 the Egyptian Muslim scholar Fadel Soliman published a book that was well received and widely promoted in the Islamic world, including by Al Jazeera, entitled Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad, making the ahistorical and anachronistic—in a word, the absurd—argument that Egypt’s seventh-century Christians were really prototypical Muslims and that that is why Arabia’s Muslims came to “liberate” them from Christian rule.63
As for the classic forced conversion—at the point of the sword—this, too, has been a regular feature of the Islamic world, past and present. Contempt for non-Muslims, who are seen as inferior in light of the aforementioned Islamic doctrines, is the primary source of this phenomenon. While the average Muslim may not know the letter of the Sharia law, based on the cultural milieu he is raised in, he instinctively knows that being an infidel is a terrible thing. “Compelling” such people to embrace Islam is invariably rationalized as an altruistic act. After all, how bad can it be to force someone who is hell-bound into the true religion? Why apologize for this? Why be penalized for putting them on the correct path?
Consider the following anecdotes separated by five hundred years, which demonstrate the continuity of forced conversions and the price paid by Christians who refuse. In the year 1522, local Muslims denounced two Christian brothers in Egypt named Gabriel and Kyrmidoles for blasphemy—“mostly out of jealousy and envy.” So the emir arrested them and “began flattering them and asking questions about their faith.” The brothers made it clear that they were firm adherents of Christianity. “The Muslims in the audience became enraged with the brothers when they heard their answers, and they began screaming and demanding they must become Muslims.” The brothers responded by refusing to “deny the faith we received from our forefathers, but we will remain unshaken and very firm in it until the end.”
The Muslim judge deciding their case told the Christian brothers that if they simply embraced Islam, they “would be given many honors and much glory.” Otherwise they would die. At that point, the brothers’ mother came to support them, but “when the Muslims in court noticed her, they fell upon her, tore her clothing, and gave her a thorough beating.”
After rebuking the Muslim assailants for their savagery, the brothers reaffirmed that they would never deny Christ for Islam, adding, “behold our necks, do what you wish, but do it quickly.” Then,Hearing this, one of the Muslims in the audience became so angry that he took out a knife and stabbed Kyrmidoles in the chest, while someone else kicked him as hard as possible, and another dropped a large stone on his head. Finally, they plucked out his eyes. Thus Kyrmidoles died. As for Gabriel they threw him to the ground and one of the soldiers severed his right shoulder and then proceeded and cut off his head.64
One does not doubt that Islamic slogans—chief among them, “Allahu Akbar! ”—were being screamed in the courtroom during this proceeding.
Compare this incident from nearly five hundred years ago with the following incident from August 2011 in Pakistan. According to World Watch Monitor, two Christian men, Ishfaq Munawar and Naeem Masih, were returning from a church service when six Muslims accosted them. The Muslims questioned them about their faith and later tried to force the two Christians to recite the Kalma—a single recitation of the shehada, the Islamic conversion creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”—and become Muslims, “telling them that this was the only way they could live peacefully in the city. They also offered monetary incentives and ‘protection’ to Ishfaq and Naeem, but the two refused to renounce Christianity.”
“After cajoling the two Christians for som
e time,” the Muslims pretended to go away, only to ram their car into the Christians. Then they “got out of the car armed with iron rods and attacked Ishfaq and Naeem, shouting that they should either recite the Kalma or be prepared to die.” The Muslims “severely beat the two Christians, fracturing Ishfaq Munawar’s jaw and breaking five teeth, and seriously injuring Masih. . . . The two Christians fell unconscious, and the young Muslim men left assuming they had killed them.”65
Not all Christians who refuse to convert to Islam survive to tell the tale. In March 2010, Muslim men butchered Rasheed Masih, described as a “devoted Christian,” “with multiple axe blows for refusing to convert to Islam.” Earlier, “six men had threatened to kill 36-year-old Rasheed Masih unless he converted to Islam when they grew resentful of his potato business succeeding beyond their own.” According to a pastor who knew Rasheed, “As the Christian family [of Rasheed] strengthened in business and earned more, the Muslim men began to harbor business resentment, as Muslims are not used to seeing Christians more respected and richer than them.” Eventually he was lured to one of their farmhouses, where he was slaughtered by means of repeated axe blows. The autopsy revealed he had twenty-four wounds.66
The above accounts, one from medieval Egypt and two from modern-day Pakistan, are separated by culture, language, thousands of miles, and half a millennium. How can we explain the identical patterns—envious or resentful Muslims, Christians threatened to convert to Islam, and murderous responses when they refuse? What binds these stories together? The only honest answer is Islamic culture.
Even institutions of forced conversion once thought defunct are being revived in modern Islam. Throughout Islamic history, Muslim empires abducted Christian children, forced them to convert to Islam, raised them to be jihadis par excellence, and then unleashed them on their own Christian people. This is the story of the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluks of Egypt .67 (The word “Mamluk” originally meant “owned”—slaves—but the Egyptian Mamluks eventually took over the sultanate.)
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Page 21
