Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (3 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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PART ONE
 
LOST HISTORY
 
A
t this moment, from one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are being persecuted. A January 2012 Reuters report cited an estimated “‘100 million Christians persecuted worldwide.’”
1
A few years earlier the British Secret Service, M-16, had put the number of Christians being persecuted around the world at twice as high, 200 million.
2
A human rights representative for the Organization for Security and Cooperation on Europe estimates that a Christian is killed for his faith “every five minutes.”
3
The vast majority of those martyrs are being killed in the Islamic world. Eight of the top nine offending countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Maldives, Mali, Iran, and Yemen—have a majority of Muslims (the ninth, Eritrea, is roughly half-Muslim). Of the top fifty countries documented for their persecution of Christians, forty-two either are Muslim-majority nations or have a sizeable Muslim population that is attempting to subjugate or eliminate surrounding Christians (Nigeria being the primary example of the latter pattern).
4
The pages to come will be filled with a small selection of the overwhelming evidence.
From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are suffering under the return of Sharia. Often translated as “Islamic law,” Sharia simply means the “Islamic way”
5
of doing things. Accordingly, wherever and whenever Muslims are in power or getting more power, churches are outlawed, burned, and bombed, while Bibles and crucifixes are confiscated and destroyed. Freedom of speech—to speak positively of Christianity or critically of Islam—is denied, often on pain of death. Born Muslims who wish to convert to Christianity out of sincere religious conviction are denied this basic freedom, also on pain of death. Christians are deemed to be less than second-class citizens by many Muslim governments and Muslim populations. They cannot get justice against their Muslim oppressors. Christian women and children are routinely abducted, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. Increasingly, Christians are able to justify their very existence only by paying large amounts of ransom—money extorted in the name of “jihad,” Islam’s “holy war” to subjugate or eliminate non-Muslims.
Although Muslim persecution of Christians is one of the most dramatic stories of our times, it is also one of the least known in the West. Such ignorance was not always the case. Ironically, much of the material in this book that will be new to Western readers would have been old news to their European ancestors of centuries past. The exact patterns we see today in the Muslim persecution of Christians were quite familiar to Christians who lived in contact with the Muslim world in past centuries. There is a reason, however, why Muslim persecution of Christians is, in certain respects, “new,” and why Westerners are unable to acknowledge it. We will be able to understand the reality of the situation only if we grapple with a widespread misreading of history, particularly the history of the colonial era.
Tragically, a misunderstanding of the past has both exacerbated Muslim persecution of Christians and blinded the West to its scope and real causes.
MIGHT MAKES RIGHT
 
From its very beginnings, Islam’s appeal was tied to its ability to offer its followers worldly success and prosperity. From Muslim prophet Muhammad’s first successful caravan raid at Badr to the centuries of jihad conquests that followed, Islam was synonymous with power and success. From the seventh century to the nineteenth, Muslims were accustomed to being the victors.
6
Up until that time, they saw in Christian Europe just another part of the world that in due time would also be conquered and annexed to Islam.
In just the first few decades of its existence, Islam had already conquered half of the Christian world’s lands—including regions that were the backbone of early Christianity, such as Syria and Egypt—while Europe was continually besieged. In fact, Europe as we know it was forged in large measure by the Islamic conquests, which severed the Latin West from the Greek East, turning the once highly trafficked Mediterranean into a “Muslim Lake”—so that, in the words of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, “the Christians could no longer float a plank upon the sea.”
7
Thus, “the classic tradition was shattered,” writes historian Henri Pirenne, “because Islam had destroyed the ancient unity of the Mediterranean.”
8
For centuries European Christians lived perpetually under threat of the Islamic conquest that had already forever changed the Mediterranean. Middle East historian Bernard Lewis writes,
For more than a thousand years, Europe, that is to say Christendom, was under constant threat of Islamic attack and conquest. If the Muslims were repelled in one region, they appeared in greater strength in another. As far away as Iceland, Christians still prayed in their churches for God to save them from the “terror of the Turk.” These fears were not unfounded, since in 1627 Muslim corsairs from North Africa raided their coasts and carried off four hundred captives, for sale in the slave market of Algiers.
9
 
Then the unthinkable happened. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, an infidel from Christendom, invaded and subjugated Egypt, the heart of the Islamic world, with barely a struggle. This crushing defeat was followed by any number of European powers conquering and colonizing much of the Muslim world. As a result, for the first time in history, Muslims questioned the superior strength of Islam and its power to fulfill their desires; for the first time in history, Muslims looked with awe and respect on the West.
10
As a historian of the period put it, “Napoleon’s invasion introduced educated Egyptians to the ideas of the French Revolution,” which “generated a gnawing and uncomfortable feeling among them that the ‘umma’ [the Islamic community] was not as perfect or as strong as they had imagined. Such uncertainty was the basis of new ideas and conceptions.”
11
It was one thing to hold unhesitatingly to Islam and Sharia when Islam was conquering and subjugating non-Muslims, as it had done for well over a millennium. It was quite another thing for Muslims to remain confident in the Islamic way when the despised Christian infidels were conquering and subjugating the lands of Islam with great ease—displaying their superior weapons and technology, not to mention all the other perks of Western civilization. In the oft-quoted words of Osama bin Laden, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”
12
For the first time Muslims, who for over a millennium had operated under the belief that might makes right and that Islam was the embodiment of might, began to emulate the West in everything from politics and government to everyday dress and etiquette. The Islamic way, the Sharia, was the old, failed way. To be successful and prosperous, one had to follow the West and its victorious way. Thus during the colonial era and into the mid-twentieth century, all things distinctly Islamic—from Islam’s clerics to the woman’s “hijab,” or headscarf—were increasingly seen by Muslims as relics of a backward age, to be shunned. Most “Muslims” were Muslim in name only.
One need only turn to the history of Turkey to demonstrate the intensity of the wholesale emulation of the West. In the early twentieth century, Turkey abolished the Ottoman Empire, the final caliphate (or sultanate) of the Islamic world and disavowed its Islamic identity and heritage—even discarding the sacrosanct Arabic script for the Latin alphabet in order to be more European.
13
Turkey went from being the standard-bearer of Islam and the epitome of Islamic supremacy and jihad for some five hundred years to being possibly the most Westernized Muslim nation in the world.
Turkey is known for modernization and Westernization under Mustafa Kemal Attatürk. But the same trends that were at work in Turkey were also at work throughout much of the Muslim world. All of the popular Arab nationalist movements that appeared in the twentieth century were distinctly secular and Westernized, certainly in comparison with the religious rhetoric that prevailed in earlier times. As late as 1953, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser poked fun at the hijab and the Muslim Brotherhood on Egyptian national television in front of a packed live audience—to wild applause and laughter.
14
In the 1950s, few Egyptian women wore the hijab.
15
Today the majority of women in Egypt veil themselves. Those who do not wear the hijab—mostly Christians—are often harassed and even sexually assaulted in the streets.
THE CHRISTIAN GOLDEN AGE
 
One natural byproduct of Muslims Westernizing was that, for the first time in history, the Christians of the Islamic world were by and large no longer oppressed—certainly not by the standards of their previous history under Islam. Two causes account for this Christian Golden Age in the Muslim world. In the first place the European powers, which in the nineteenth century still largely identified with Christianity, directly intervened in the Muslim world to liberate and protect Christians.
16
Second and even more important was the fact that many Muslims emulated Western ways, naturally sloughing off their Islamic identity and mentality and the contempt for “infidels” that, as we shall see, is an integral part of that mentality. As a missionary to the Muslim world wrote in the early twentieth century, “tolerance toward converts from Islam seems often to be in direct proportion to the proximity of foreign government and their influence, and the impact of Western civilization in breaking down fanaticism.”
17
Thus the discriminatory Sharia laws governing “dhimmis”—that is, non-Muslims living in conditions of subjugation and humiliation under Islamic hegemony—were all abolished during this era. The most obvious example was the abolition of the “jizya”—the monetary tribute Christians had to pay to safeguard their lives in an Islamic state. In 1856, the Ottoman Empire, under pressure from European powers, especially England and France, issued the Hatt-i Humayun decree as part of its overall reforms (or “tanzimat”): for the first time in Islam’s 1,200 years of existence (at the time), non-Muslim subjects were to be treated as equal to Muslims, and their right to religious freedom and worship was to be guaranteed. It is often forgotten, but a great many Christian churches still in existence today in the Islamic world were built precisely during this era of colonial intervention, Muslim emulation of the West, and unprecedented tolerance.
One historian writes about Egyptian Christianity under Islam through the centuries, “There can scarcely be any argument, however, about whether the Coptic Church was significantly stronger in 1882 than it was in 1798, by almost any measure.” (Recall that 1798 was the year of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt.) An Egyptian Christian chronicler writing around the turn of the twentieth century summarizes the Golden Age for Christians thus: “In a word we say that the Egyptian State [1874–1894] was at the highest degree of justice and good order and arrangement. And it removed religious fanaticism, and almost established equality between its subjects, Christian and Islam, and it eliminated most of the injustice, and it realized much in the way of beneficial works for the benefit of all the inhabitants.”
18
Of course, one should not oversimplify the situation. There were still pious Muslims and oppressed Christians even during this period. The point is that, overall, acceptance of Christians reached unprecedented levels during this era—hence it is rightfully referred to as the Golden Age.
Christians, for their part, came to champion yet another Western innovation—nationalism—that helped identify them no longer as members of a religious minority but as fellow members of the nation-state. Membership in “the Arabic Nation” was open to everyone who spoke Arabic, which obviously included Christians. It was a subtle but important shift from the predecessor idea of the umma, the distinctly
Muslim
nation. In the 1920s and 1930s, Egyptian intellectuals traced their lineage to and identified with Pharaonic and Hellenistic Egypt—not the Arab past. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Middle East’s Christians were widely seen, particularly by the educated elites and those in power, as no different from their Muslim counterparts. Thanks to nationalism, they were now all citizens of the state: “An inferior religious minority had become an integrated and equal part of Egyptian society.”
19
Indeed, because Muslims identified Christianity with Western civilization, which was widely acknowledged for its superiority, Christians were sometimes respected precisely because they were Christian. (Muslims still conflate Christianity with the West; today, however, this confusion only leads to more persecution of Christians, as we shall see.)
It is this historical fact—that the colonial and post-colonial era, roughly 1850–1950, was the Golden Age for Christians in the Muslim world—that has created chronological confusions and intellectual pitfalls for Westerners on the subject of the return of Christians’ persecution. This hundred-year lull in persecution is taken as the norm by recent generations of Westerners who see events closer to their time as more representative of reality. Thus many Westerners see the contemporary persecution of Christians by Muslims as the historical aberration, and they seek vainly to explain that violence away without recourse to Islam, remembering the relatively non-violent Islam of just a few decades ago. They fail to comprehend that the Golden Age was the historical aberration—an exception to the rule, not the rule.

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