Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (30 page)

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Authors: Raymond Ibrahim

BOOK: Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians
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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.
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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.
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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 some 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.)
Today, the same story is once again being repeated around the Islamic world.
AsiaNews
reported in September 2012 on approximately three hundred Christian children in Bangladesh who were recently abducted and “forcibly converted to Islam.” Middlemen visit “poverty-stricken communities” and convince Christian families to send their children to school at supposed mission hostels, charging them a significant amount of money for schooling, room, and board. But the children never make it to the hostels: “After pocketing the money, the intermediaries sell the children to Islamic schools elsewhere in the country ‘where imams force them to abjure Christianity.’” The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After full indoctrination, they are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers.
68
The tiny Palestinian Christian community in the Hamas-run Gaza strip is under siege from Muslim kidnappers. In July 2012, five Christians were abducted and pressured into converting to Islam. Because Christians protested the forced conversions, “members of the Christian community now fear reprisal attacks by Muslim extremists.” Some have appealed to the Vatican and Christian groups and churches in the West for help. Yet “‘we only hear voices telling us to stay where we are and to stop making too much noise,’ said a Christian man living in Gaza City. ‘If they continue to turn a blind eye to our tragedy, in a few months there will be no Christians left in Palestine. Today it’s happening in the Gaza Strip, tomorrow it will take place in Bethlehem.’”
69
Indeed, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity’s founder, boasted a Christian population of 60 percent in 1990, but only 15 percent of those living there today are Christians .
70
The fact that Islamic indoctrination tends to inspire Muslims to put pressure on Christians to convert is exemplified by an August 2012 incident in Pakistan. After a Muslim opened a
madrassa
—that is, an Islamic school—near where Christians held their tent church worship, Muslims began harassing the Christians, spraying their homes with bullets and saying, “Convert to Islam or leave this neighborhood.” They also tried to trick a pastor into confessing that he proselytizes Muslims, and they gathered in front of the church to harass Christian girls as they left after services.
71
Just as they have done for over a millennium, Muslim authorities still offer Christians reprieve from their sufferings if they only convert to Islam. In Uzbekistan in August 2012, a twenty-six-year-old Christian woman, partially paralyzed from youth, and her mother were violently attacked with sticks by six men who broke into their home at 4:00 a.m. The men ransacked the house, confiscating “icons, bibles, religious calendars, and prayer books.” When the paralyzed woman furtively tried to phone for help, she was beaten again. The home invaders and the Christian women were all taken to the police department, where the paralyzed woman was “offered to convert to Islam.” She refused, and the judge eventually “decided that the women had resisted police and had stored the banned religious literature at home and conducted missionary activities. He fined them 20 minimum monthly wages each.”
72
In Pakistan in November 2011, a Christian couple was arrested on a false charge and severely beaten by police. The pregnant wife was “kicked and punched” even as her interrogators threatened to kill her unborn fetus. A policeman offered to drop the theft charge if the husband would only “renounce Christianity and convert to Islam. ”
73
Likewise in August 2011, Muslims beat unconscious a Christian man celebrating Pakistan’s Independence Day; they told him he should convert to Islam if he wanted to join in the celebration .
74
In Sudan in February 2011, Muslims kidnapped a fifteen-year-old Christian girl, Hiba Abdelfadil Anglo. Her mother, a widow, received menacing phone calls ordering her to pay $1,500 Sudanese pounds to get back her daughter, who was referred to as a “slave.” When the mother went to the police station to open a case, officer Fakhr El-Dean Mustafa, of the ironically named “Family and Child Protection Unit,” told her, “You must convert to Islam if you want your daughter back.” Soon after the mother’s Muslim employer told her she could take time off to find her daughter, she was fired.
75
Over one year later, the girl managed to escape after having pretended to convert to Islam. She had been locked in a room and “beaten until she was unconscious.” The leader of the Muslim gang raped and beat her. In her own words:
Several times I was warned that if I do not convert to Islam, then I risk losing my life.... The man who put me in his house on several occasions tortured me and threatened to kill me. He did not allow me to pray Christian prayers. He even insulted my family as a family of infidels.... Apart from abusing me sexually, he tried to force me to change my faith and kept reminding me to prepare for Ramadan [the Muslim holy month].... I cannot forget this bad incident, and whenever I try to pray, I find it difficult to forget. I ask believers to pray for me for inner healing.
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The Jihad on Christian Women: Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion
 
Hiba’s story is tragically common. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Christians being forced to convert to Islam are women, who are pressured by means of rapes and beatings. There are several reasons that Muslims specially target women for forced conversion. First and foremost is the fact that in the Koran and according to Sharia, non-Muslim women are to be treated as plunder by Muslim men in the context of jihad. Both the Prophet of Islam and his followers regularly abducted women from non-Muslim tribes and kept them as concubines, or sex slaves. This practice is even sanctioned in the Koran: “Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice, then only one, or what your right hands possess.” (Koran 4:3). Islamic authorities understand “what your right hands possess” as women taken captive in war .
77
Indeed, the institution of infidel sex slaves is so well documented in the whole of Islamic history and doctrine that various Muslim scholars and activists today are calling for its official revival. Salwa al-Mutairi, a female political activist and former parliamentary candidate for Kuwait’s government, is pushing for the legalization of enslaving and selling non-Muslim women for sexual purposes.
In a 2011 video she posted on You Tube, Mutairi insists that “it’s of course true” that “the prophet of Islam legitimized sex slavery.” She recounts how when she was in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, she asked various sheikhs and muftis about the legality of sex slavery according to Sharia, and they all confirmed it to be perfectly legal. Kuwaiti scholars further pointed out that extra-virile men would do well to purchase sex slaves to sate their appetites so they will not be tempted to sin by fornicating with Muslim women. In Mutairi’s own words:
A Muslim state must attack a Christian state—sorry, I mean any non-Muslim state—and they [the future sex slaves] must be captives of the raid. Is this forbidden? Not at all; according to Islam, sex slaves are not at all forbidden. Quite the contrary, the rules regulating sex slaves differ from those for free women: the latter’s body must be covered entirely, except for her face and hands, whereas the sex slave is kept naked from the bellybutton on up—she is different from the free woman; the free woman has to be married properly to her husband, but the sex slave—he just buys her and that’s that.
 

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