Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (15 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

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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.”
²⁰⁸The 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, even 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

Not only does Islam deem the Christian cross an idol, but the cross also symbolizes the fundamental disagreement between Christians and Muslims. Islam utterly rejects the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which are fundamental to Christianity. While Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet born of a virgin who will return at the end times, they vehemently reject the idea that he is the Son of God, crucified and resurrected from the dead. As historian Sidney Griffith put it, “The cross and the icons publicly declared those very points of Christian faith which the Koran, in the Muslim view, explicitly denied: that Christ was the Son of God and that he died on the cross.” Thus “the Christian practice of venerating the cross and the icons of Christ and the saints often aroused the disdain of Muslims.” Accordingly, there was an ongoing “campaign to erase the public symbols of Christianity, especially the previously ubiquitous sign of the cross.”
²¹²

Islam’s hostility to the cross, like all of Islam’s hostilities, begins with the Muslim prophet Muhammad. His abhorrence of the cross was such that his earliest biographers reported he would always destroy any object that resembled a cross. In William Muir’s words, Muhammad “had such a repugnance to the form of the cross that he broke everything brought into his house with its figure upon it.”
²¹³Moreover, the Prophet claimed that at the end times Jesus himself would make it a point to “break the cross.”
²¹⁴

Islamic history ever since Muhammad is riddled with anecdotes of Muslims cursing and breaking crosses—beginning with the earliest phases of the Islamic conquest. Prior to the Battle of Yarmuk in 636, which pitted the earliest invading Muslim armies against the Christian Byzantine Empire, Khalid bin al-Walid, the “Sword of Allah”—a particularly ferocious warrior still venerated among militant Muslims today—told the Christian army that if they wanted peace they would have to “break the cross” and embrace Islam, or pay jizya and live in subjugation.
²¹⁵The Byzantines opted for war.

Conquered Christians had no choice.
The History of the Patriarchate of the Egyptian Church
offers numerous accounts throughout the ages of Muslim authorities destroying the crosses of the Coptic Church—including the supposedly magnanimous Saladin, who ordered “the removal of every cross from atop the dome of every church in the provinces of Egypt. ”
²¹⁶

In fact early accounts of conflict between Muslims and Christians frequently focus on the cross and other religious symbols. Prior to the Battle of Yarmuk, for instance, another Muslim captain, Ubaida, sent a message to Caliph Omar lamenting that “the Dog of the Romans [Byzantine emperor Heraclius] has frustrated us with the ubiquitous presence of the cross.” His complaint is unsurprising given that, as one historian explains with reference to the Battle of Yarmuk, “Almost more important than tactics was the question of morale, and Byzantine leaders paid close attention to this. Byzantium’s role as the Christian Empire was central to its morale. Careful religious preparations preceded a battle,” including the parading of relics, images, and, of course, crosses.
²¹⁷

But Muslims cursing the cross (not to mention calling Christians dogs) is certainly not limited to history. In March 2012, a video of a Muslim mob attacking a commonwealth cemetery near Benghazi, Libya, where British officers who died during World War II were buried, appeared on the Internet. As the Muslims kick down and destroy headstones with crosses on them, the man videotaping them urges them to “‘Break the cross of the dogs!’” while he and others cry “Allahu Akbar!” At one point, he chuckles as he tells one overly zealous desecrater to “calm down.” When another Muslim complains that he is unable to kick down a particular stone, wondering if it is because “‘this soldier must have been good to his parents,’” the man videotaping replies, “Come on, they are all dogs, who cares?” Finally the mob congregates around the huge Cross of Sacrifice, the cemetery’s cenotaph monument, and starts hammering at it, to more cries of “Allahu Akbar. ”
²¹⁸

The persistence of Muslim hostility to the cross, from the birth of Islam to the present, speaks for itself. In August 2012 in Egypt, leaflets were distributed in areas with large Christian populations offering monetary rewards to Muslims who “kill or physically attack the enemies of the religion of Allah—the Christians in all of Egypt’s provinces, the Slaves of the Cross, Allah’s curse upon them.”
²¹⁹One month later, when the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was under attack, “Slaves of the Cross” was one of the epithets hurled by rioting Muslims.

Hostility to the cross frequently leads Muslims beyond the disparagement of “Christian dogs” and “Slaves of the Cross.” In Egypt, the Muslims who raided the Abu Fana monastery destroyed crosses and tried to force their monk victims to renounce and spit on the cross, while the Muslims who destroyed the St. George Church claimed the cross was “irritating Muslims and their children.”
²²⁰In Algeria, the Muslims who raided the Protestant Church of Ouargla made it a point to damage and dismantle the iron cross on the church’s roof. In Macedonia, rioting Muslims destroyed the cross of a church in the village of Labunista. And in May 2012 in Tunisia, as we have seen, Salafi Muslims “covered the cross of the Orthodox Church of Tunis with garbage bags, telling church members that they do not wish to see the vision of the Cross anywhere in the Islamic state of Tunisia.”
²²¹

After the Russian ambassador in Tunis requested that the nation’s Ministry of Interior “protect the church,” both the Russian school located behind the church and the Christian cemetery in Tunis were vandalized. The walls of the school and religious frescoes were smeared with fecal matter, while the cemetery’s crosses were destroyed.
²²²

Attacks on Christian cemeteries and their crosses are on the rise. The historical graveyard of English Christians in Bushehr, Iran, which was also used by the Armenian community, is in complete disarray and “all the crosses on graves are broken.”
²²³In Islamist-dominant Iran, one may presume that the animus behind the desecration of this Christian cemetery and its crosses is the same hatred that can be seen on the videotape from the Benghazi cemetery.
²²⁴All the way at the other end of the Islamic world, in Muslim-majority Senegal in October 2012, more than 160 graves were desecrated in two Catholic cemeteries: “Crucifixes and other stone objects were taken away from their graves in the Christian cemeteries of Saint Lazarus of Bethany and Bel Air, by individuals who have not yet been identified. ”
²²⁵

Nor is it just graves that are attacked when Muslims take offense at the cross. In Egypt in October 2011 seventeen-year-old Ayman Nabil Labib, a Christian student, was strangled and beaten to death by his Muslim teacher and some fellow students—simply for refusing to obey the teacher’s orders to remove his cross. Student eyewitnesses present during the assault said that while Ayman was in the classroom he was told to cover up his tattooed wrist cross, which many Copts wear. Not only did he refuse, but he defiantly produced the pectoral cross he wore under his shirt, which prompted the enraged Muslim teacher and some students to attack and severely beat the Christian youth. According to his father, who spoke to eyewitnesses, “They beat my son so much in the classroom that he fled to the lavatory on the ground floor, but they followed him and continued their assault. When one of the supervisors took him to his room, Ayman was still breathing. The ambulance transported him from there dead, one hour later.”

The headmaster, informed of the attack in progress, reportedly ignored it and “continued to sip his tea.” As usual, Egyptian state media tried to minimize the attack, insisting the “conflict” was “non-sectarian” and that it revolved around non-religious matters. When the truth was later revealed, one prominent columnist wrote in the independent newspaper
Masry Youm
, “I was shaken to the bones when I read the news that a teacher forced a student to take off the crucifix he wore, and when the Christian student stood firm for his rights, the teacher quarreled with him, joined by some of the students; he was beastly assaulted until his last breath left him.” After the funeral service for Ayman, over five thousand Christians marched, denouncing “the repeated killing of Copts in Egypt” and referring to Ayman as a “Martyr of the Cross,” an honorific that litters the annals of Christian history under Islam.
²²⁶

Such stories of Christian children being abused for wearing the cross are not uncommon in the Muslim world. A 12-year-old Turkish boy who converted to Christianity and decided to profess his new faith by wearing a silver cross necklace in class was attacked by Muslim classmates and teachers, who spit on him and beat him regularly.
²²⁷

In Egypt in July 2010, the case of Nagla Imam, an apostate to Christianity who was being persecuted by both family and nation, was covered by satellite media stations. After her arrest, a top government official “twisted the cross she was wearing, tightening the chain around her neck, while saying ‘the cross will be the death of you.’ He then proceeded to beat her, leaving her with a black eye, a bruised body, and broken teeth. Before releasing her, he said, ‘Stay in your house, till you are carried out to your grave,’ adding that if she does not return to Islam, ‘people’ would be dispatched to ‘take care of her.’”
²²⁸

The cross often exposes its bearer’s Christian identity, bringing on abuse and even murder. In January 2011, an off-duty Muslim police officer on a train from Asyut to Cairo shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and opened fire on six Christians, killing a seventy-one-year-old man and critically wounding the rest. The newspaper
Masry Youm
reported that the assailant had checked for passengers with the traditional Coptic cross tattooed on their wrists.
²²⁹(Interestingly, Copts traditionally wore these tattooed crosses at least in part so that they could be identified as Christians in case they were abducted and forced to convert to Islam. Several accounts exist of Muslims scraping these tattooed crosses from the wrists of their victims.)
²³⁰

In July 2012, Julie Aftab, a Pakistani Christian woman now living in the U.S., revealed how, ten years earlier, when she was sixteen and living in Pakistan, Muslims disfigured her in an acid attack after one man noticed the “small cross she wore around her neck,” which exposed her as a Christian. From the account in the
Daily Mail
:

The man became abusive, shouting at her that she was living in the gutter and would go to hell for shunning Islam. He left and returned half an hour later, clutching a bottle of battery acid which he savagely chucked over her head. As she ran screaming for the door a second man grabbed her by the hair and forced more of the liquid down her throat, searing her esophagus. Teeth fell from her mouth as she desperately called for help, stumbling down the street. A woman heard her cries and took her to her home, pouring water over her head and taking her to hospital. At first the doctors refused to treat her, because she was a Christian. ‘They all turned against me . . . even the people who took me to the hospital. They told the doctor they were going to set the hospital on fire if they treated me’. . . . 67 percent of her esophagus was burned and she was missing an eye and both eyelids. What remained of her teeth could be seen through a gaping hole where her cheek had been. The doctors predicted she would die any day. Despite the odds she pulled through.
²³¹

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