Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (20 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

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While examples of harassment, imprisonment, and even killings of apostates in Iran are many, just a few examples from recent months follow here:
In July 2012, a six-year prison sentence for Pastor Farshid Fathi Malayeri was upheld—though, as Barnabas Aid reported, “the political charges [against him] are a pretext for locking up the pastor, a convert from Islam to Christianity, on account of his faith.”
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Another prominent house church pastor, Benham Irani, remains behind bars even as his family expresses concerns that he may die from continued abuse and beatings, which have led to internal bleeding and other ailments. The verdict against him contains text that describes the pastor as an “apostate” who “can be killed.” According to one human rights activist, “His ‘crimes’ were being a pastor and possessing Christian materials.” He is being beat in jail and getting sick, to the point that his hair has “turned fully grey.”
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In January 2012, Leila Mohammadi, a convert to Christianity, was arrested when security agents raided her house. Locked away for five months in Iran’s “notorious” Evin prison, she was eventually given an official sentence of two years’ imprisonment there.
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Mohabat News
reported in June 2012 that five months after five apostates to Christianity were arrested their condition and fate remained unknown. They were accused of “attending house church services, promoting Christianity, propagating against the regime and disturbing national security.” The report explained the strategies being used against apostates: being imprisoned for 130 days without word “is an obvious example of physical and mental abuse of the detainees. . . . One of the prison guards openly told one of these Christian detainees that all these pressures and uncertainties are intended to make them flee the country after they are released. . . .”
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In January 2012 Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a young woman who had recently converted to Christianity and who was an outspoken activist against the Islamic regime, was found dead “slumped over the steering wheel of her Nissan Altima steps from her home with a single gunshot wound to her head.”
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In February 2012 Iranian authorities “arrested Christian converts from Islam,” up to ten of them, “while they were meeting for worship at a home in the southern city of Shiraz.” The report from World Watch Monitor adds, “Authorities often detain, question and apply pressure on converts from Islam, viewing them as elements of Western propaganda set against the Iranian regime; as a result, the converts are forced to worship in secret.”
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In March 2012, authorities arrested 12 more converts to Christianity living in Isfahan, the country’s third largest city, in what is seen as a tactic to discourage Muslims from attending official churches—including one man who was reportedly taken into custody on March 2 when he returned home from work. “Security authorities raided his home and seized him without explanation.”
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In October 2011, a “group of four officers engaged in a commando-style raid on the house” of Fariborz Arazm, a Muslim convert to Christianity, arresting him, confiscating his Bible, and “transferring him to an unknown location.... His family was also threatened to remain silent and not to talk about this incident to anyone.” The
Worthy News
report of this incident also mentions another Christian named “Mohammad”—that is, an apostate—who was arrested and interrogated “for the charge of Christianity. ”
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In August 2012, a report sourcing
Mohabat News
said that Iranian authorities “raise[d] unsubstantiated charges” against five arrested converts to Christianity to “pressure” and “intimidate” them, including by falsely accusing them of desecrating the Koran and holding them for indefinite periods. “Although their situation is still unclear six months after their arrest, there is no doubt that the Christians’ only crime is related to their faith in Jesus Christ.”
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More recently, in October 2012, several reports appeared of Christian men and women, especially Evangelical Protestants and Muslim apostates, being “dragged to prisons.” According to a council member of the Church of Iran house church movement, “‘We have learned that at least 100, but perhaps as many as 400 people, have been detained over the last 10 days.... it has become clear that Protestant Christians are now viewed as enemy number one of the state.’” Some of those arrested, after serving time and being tormented, are “‘forced to say they will no longer attend church services in exchange for freedom.’” At least five apostates were confined in cells housing dangerous criminals on charges of “creating illegal groups,” “participating in a house church service,” “propagation against the Islamic regime,” and “defaming Islamic holy figures through Christian evangelizing.”
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Spotlight on Somalia
 
If Christians are being harassed, imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes killed in Iran, they are being butchered in Somalia. “All Somali Christians must be killed according to Sharia. A Muslim can never become a Christian, but he can become an apostate. Such people do not have a place in Somalia; we will never recognize their existence, and we will slaughter them.” These words, spoken in 2006 by influential Somali Sheikh Nur Barud, sum up the situation for the very few Christians remaining in Somalia, who must live in hiding. The al-Qaeda-linked Islamic organization al-Shabaab—“the Youth”—which has vowed to rid Somalia of any trace of Christianity, has been at the forefront of slaughtering converts to Christianity in the name of Islam.
In January 2011, Muslims from al-Shabaab slaughtered a mother of four after discovering she had converted to Christianity. Asha Mberwa, thirty-six, was murdered on the outskirts of Mogadishu, in a “ritual slaying” : after she was “arrested” by al-Shabaab in front of her home, members slit her throat in front of villagers who came to witness. “She is survived by her children—ages 12, 8, 6, and 4—and her husband, who was not home when she was apprehended.”
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In August 2009 four Christians who worked for a human aid organization helping orphans were abducted and beheaded “after they refused to renounce their faith in Jesus Christ.” Their bodies were not returned to their families for burial, because “Somalia does not have cemeteries for infidels”—according to a local Muslim calling himself “the Sword of Islam.” One eyewitness said, “All the four apostates were given an opportunity to return to Islam to be released but they all declined the generous offer. ”
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In February 2012, al-Shabaab Muslims beheaded another Muslim convert to Christianity, Zakaria Hussein Omar, twenty-six. He was abducted and murdered less than ten miles from Mogadishu, the capital. According to a close friend, who identified the body, “We have been communicating with Omar, and he was sharing with me his life as a Christian.... Last year he mentioned to me that his life was in danger when the NGO [Non-Governmental Organization] he worked for was banned by the al-Shabaab.”
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In September 2011, Juma Nuradin Kamil, another Muslim convert to Christianity, was abducted and decapitated, his body later found dumped in the road. According to a leader of the underground church, “It is usual for the al-Shabaab to decapitate those they suspect to have embraced the Christian faith, or sympathizers of western ideals.”
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In October 2011, after invading the home of twenty-one-year-old Hassan Adawe Adan, in the words of a witness, “Two al-Shabaab members dragged him out of his house, and after 10 minutes they fired several shots on him. . . . He then died immediately.” The two militants then shouted “Allahu Akbar” before fleeing. “Adan, single and living with his Muslim family, was said to have secretly converted to Christianity” some months earlier. Area Christians said they believed someone had told the Islamic militants of Adan’s new faith: “This incident is making other converts live in extreme fear, as the militants always keep an open eye to anyone professing the Christian faith,” said one source.
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In January 2012, Sofia Osman, a twenty-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity, was “paraded before a cheering crowd” and “publicly flogged.” She had been imprisoned since November in an al-Shabaab camp, and “the public whipping was meant to mark her release.” She received forty lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered. Bloodied and battered, she passed out. According to an eyewitness, “‘I saw her faint. I thought she had died, but soon she regained consciousness and her family took her away.’” In the days following her ordeal, she appeared traumatized and unable to talk. She has since fled the region.
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In September 2012, al-Shabaab Muslims shot three converts to Christianity. The men had converted while in Ethiopia in 2005, but pretended to be Muslim. When more zealous Muslims became suspicious, “militants” attacked the apostates, bursting into their homes and opening fire .
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Sometimes the families of apostates are attacked; sometimes they are killed as well. In 2009, when a secret convert to Christianity and leader of the underground church fled his home because al-Shabaab Muslims were coming for him, they took his children and beheaded them instead.
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And in January 2012 al-Shabaab members arrested a Muslim father after two of his children converted to Christianity and fled, accusing him of “‘failing to raise his sons as good Muslims,’ because ‘good Muslims cannot convert to Christianity.’” According to a Somali Christian leader, “This tactic [of arresting parents for conversion of children] is apparently intended to discourage Muslims from converting to Christianity since their Muslim parents could be held accountable for their conversion. The Somali Islamists have previously tried other failed harsh tactics such as summary executions of converts to minimize the number of Muslims converting to Christianity. Please pray for the Somali Christians, especially those living in Islamist controlled areas in southern Somalia.”
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Spotlight on Egypt
 
A 2010 Pew Research Center poll found that 84 percent of Egyptian Muslims believe those who leave Islam should be killed.
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Nor is death for apostasy in Egypt a phenomenon of recent years. E. W. Lane, an Arabist who traveled around Egypt in the 1820s disguised as a Muslim, was one of the first modern Europeans to witness the execution of an apostate—in this case, a female convert to Christianity who was exposed by her Coptic cross tattoo. In Lane’s own words,
Apostasy from the faith of Islam is considered a most heinous sin, and must be punished with death, unless the apostate will recant on being thrice warned. I once saw a woman paraded through the streets of Cairo, and afterwards taken down to the Nile to be drowned, for having apostatized from the faith of Muhammad, and having married a Christian. Unfortunately, she tattooed a blue cross on her arm, which led to her detection by one of her former friends in a bath. She was mounted upon a high-saddled ass, such as ladies in Egypt usually ride, and very respectably dressed, attended by soldiers, and surrounded by a rabble, who, instead of commiserating, uttered loud imprecations against her. The Kadee [or
qadi
, a Muslim judge] who passed sentence upon her, exhorted her, in vain, to return to her former faith. She was taken in a boat into the midst of the river, stripped nearly naked, strangled and then thrown into the stream.
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Little has changed in Egypt since the 1820s. In 2007 Eman Muhammad Al-Sayed, a twenty-six-year-old woman who had converted to Christianity, was violently attacked by her relatives in a park where she was walking with her husband, also a Muslim convert to Christianity. She had escaped her family four years earlier, gotten married, and lived in hiding ever since. As her family was beating her and vowing to kill her in public, police eventually intervened, taking the woman into custody and handing her over to state security, who proceeded to strip her naked and take photographs of her to shame her; they also “subjected Al-Sayed to severe torture, including electrocution of sensitive parts of her body.” She was eventually handed over to her family, who dragged her away from the police station screaming, even as they violently beat her some more before forcing her in a waiting car and driving away.
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There are dozens of cases in Egypt of Muslims apostatizing to Christianity only to be attacked by their family, neighbors, colleagues, or the notorious mob. But as in Iran, perhaps the more telling cases are the ones that actually involve Egyptian courts and authorities ruling in accordance with Sharia, such as the aforementioned case of Muhammad Hegazy, who was not permitted to change his religion from Islam to Christianity on his I.D. card. In February 2009, another apostate, Maher Al-Gohary, fifty-eight, tried to officially convert to Christianity—only to be accused of apostasy, with prosecutors calling for the death penalty. As Maher himself put it: “Our rights in Egypt, as Christians or converts, are less than the rights of animals. We are deprived of social and civil rights, deprived of our inheritance and left to the fundamentalists to be killed. Nobody bothers to investigate or care about us.”
He has been attacked in the street, spat upon, beaten, and threatened by text messages and phone calls—all simply because he petitioned to be granted the right to convert to Christianity. Eventually he and his daughter fled to Syria, once a moderate nation under secularist Bashar Assad. However, since the “Arab Spring” reached there, too—with Syrian Christians under attack by jihadis—in 2011, Maher and his daughter managed to flee to France where they applied for asylum.
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