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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

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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
 
I
slamic 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
 
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
BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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