Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (19 page)

It is no longer plausible to argue that organizations such as Boko Haram—or, for that matter, Islamic State—have nothing to do with Islam. It is no longer credible to define “extremism” as some disembodied threat, meting out death without any ideological foundation, a problem to be dealt with by purely military methods, preferably drone strikes. We need to tackle the root problem of the violence that is plaguing our world today, and that must be the doctrine of Islam itself.

The Practice of Jihad: The Worldwide War on Christians

One of the most devastating manifestations of the modern era of jihad is the violent oppression of Christian minorities in Muslim-majority nations all over the world.

In Islamic history, the land controlled by Islam is referred to as
dar al-Islam
(the abode of Islam). The land controlled by non-Muslims is
dar al-harb
(the abode of war).
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Historically, after being conquered by Muslims, groups deemed People of the Book, including Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, were required to pay a special tax, the
jizya
, as a mark of their humiliation. If they did so, they were allowed to keep their religion (9:29). Yet there was always a strain of “eliminationism” in Islam, too. The Prophet himself promised to “expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and . . . not leave any but Muslims” (Sahih Muslim 19: 4363–67). The Qur’an (5:51) warns Muslims: “take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors.” Muslim men may marry Jewish or Christian women but Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men because under Islamic law the religious identity of children is passed through the father (5:5).

Modern Islamists go further. In some countries, governments and their agents openly sponsor anti-Christian violence, burning churches and imprisoning observant Christians. In others, rebel groups and self-proclaimed vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries. Often, local leaders and governments do little to stop them or simply turn a blind eye.

This phenomenon of Christophobia (as opposed to the far more widely discussed “Islamophobia”) receives remarkably little coverage in the Western media. Part of this reticence may be due to fear of provoking additional violence. But part is clearly a result of the very effective efforts by lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading journalists and editors in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a deep-rooted Islamophobia. This, of course, extends with an Orwellian illogic to coverage of Muslim violence against Christians. Yet any fair-minded assessment of recent events leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the Christophobia evident in Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.

Take Nigeria, where the population is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, who for years have lived on the edge of civil war. But the stakes have risen dramatically with the gains made by Boko Haram, which has openly stated that it will kill all of Nigeria’s Christians. And it is making good on its promise. In the first half of 2014, Boko Haram killed at least 2,053 civilians in ninety-five attacks.
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They have used machetes, guns, and gasoline bombs, shouting “
Allahu akbar
” (God is great) while launching their attacks, one of which—on a Christmas Day gathering—killed forty-two Catholics. They have targeted bars, beauty salons, and banks. They have murdered Christian clergymen, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers.

In Sudan, the authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian (as well as animist) minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained policy of persecution, which culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been charged at the International Criminal Court in The Hague with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted South Sudan’s independence in 2012, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, for example, Christians are still subjected to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnapping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that there are now 1 million internally displaced persons in South Sudan.
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Both kinds of persecution—undertaken by nongovernmental groups as well as by agents of the state—have come together in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. On October 9, 2012, in the Maspero area of Cairo, Coptic Christians—who make up roughly 5 percent of Egypt’s population of 81 million
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—marched in protest against a wave of attacks by Islamists, including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders, that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. During the protest, Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on protesters, crushing and killing at least twenty-four and wounding more than three hundred people.
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Within two months, tens of thousands of Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks.
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Nor is Egypt the only Arab country where Christian minorities have come under attack. Even before the advent of IS, it was dangerous to be a Christian in Iraq. Since 2003, more than nine hundred Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed in Baghdad alone, and seventy churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of Christians in the country from just over a million before 2003 to fewer than half a million today. AINA understandably describes this as an “incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.” The recent decimation by IS forces of Mosul’s two-thousand-year-old Christian population—who fled under threat of death or forced conversion, and saw their possessions stolen and looted, their homes marked with “N” (for Nazarene) and their churches desecrated—is merely the latest episode in a campaign of persecution.

One Mosul resident, Bashar Nasih Behnam, escaped with his two children. “There is not a single Christian family left in Mosul,” he said. “The last one was a disabled Christian woman. They came to her and said you have to get out and if you don’t we will cut off your head with a sword. That was the last family.” Those fleeing were also robbed: the IS fighters took their money and gold, ripped earrings from women’s ears, and confiscated mobile phones.

Then there are the states where intolerance is part and parcel of the nation’s legal code. Pakistan’s Christians are a tiny minority—only about 1.6 percent of a population of more than 180 million. But they are subject to intense segregation and discrimination: allowed to shop only at a few sparsely stocked stores, forbidden to draw water from wells earmarked for Muslims, and forced to bury their dead, stacked on top of one another, in tiny graveyards because Muslims cannot be buried near people of other faiths.

They are also subjected to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, which make it illegal to declare belief in the Christian Trinity. When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. In the spring of 2010, the offices of the international Christian aid group World Vision were attacked by ten men armed with grenades, who left six people dead and four wounded. A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack, on the ground that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the survivors of a major earthquake.)

Not even Indonesia—often touted as the world’s most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation—has been immune to the fever of Christophobia. Between 2010 and 2011, according to data compiled by the
Christian Post
, the number of violent incidents committed against religious minorities (and at 8 percent of the population, Christians are the country’s largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276.

Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in Saudi Arabia as foreign workers, even private acts of Christian prayer are banned. To enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s. Saudi Arabia bans the building of churches, and its textbooks enshrine anti-Christian and anti-Jewish dogma: sixth-grade students are taught that “Jews and Christians are enemies of the believers.” 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.”
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Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.

Anti-Christian violence is not centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency. It is, rather, an expression of anti-Christian animus that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities. As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with
Newsweek
, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have “lost the protection of their societies.”

Of course, intolerance of different faiths is not unique to Islam. The Roman Empire first persecuted Christians, then persecuted non-Christians after Christianity was adopted as the Empire’s official religion. In medieval Christendom there was no “religious freedom” as we would recognize it today; heretics were cruelly punished, Jews persecuted. When Pope Urban II called for the first crusade in 1095, he told knights willing to journey to Jerusalem that they would be forgiven all their past sins if they killed unbelievers in the Holy Land. And when European Christians set out to conquer and colonize the world, their treatment of “heathens” was often brutal to the point of genocide. Yet Patricia Crone argues that there was always something unique about the Muslim concept of jihad—“the belief that God had chosen one people over others and ordered them to go conquer the earth.” Christians today, with few exceptions, repudiate the intolerance of the past. In the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust forced Christian thinkers to confront the pernicious role of anti-Semitism in European history. The contrast with the Muslim world is stark. There, intolerance is on the rise and the remit of jihad has been extended to include all nonbelievers.

Why Are the Jihadists Winning? Because We Are Letting Them

In July 2014, the prospect of a flag bearing the words of the Shahada being raised over Downing Street got the attention of one hundred British imams, who signed a letter urging “British Muslim communities not to fall prey to any form of sectarian divisions or social discord” but rather “to continue the generous and tireless efforts to support all of those affected by the crisis in Syria and unfolding events in Iraq . . . from the UK in a safe and responsible way.” Qari Muhammad Asim, the imam at the Makkah Mosque in Leeds and one of the authors of the letter, told BBC radio: “Imams from a cross-section of theological backgrounds have come together to give a very strong message to young British Muslims who might be inclined to go to Syria or Iraq to fight, saying to them, ‘Please don’t expose yourselves, don’t put your lives at risk and the lives of others around you.’ ” Responding to a question, he went further:

Islam itself has been hijacked and [some] people . . . have been completely brainwashed. It’s completely ridiculous to say that people, fellow human beings, are enemies and as a result they should be blown up. Obviously, social media plays a huge part, the Internet plays a huge part, in brainwashing and radicalizing people.
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According to Asim, more than one hundred imams were planning to launch appeals on social media and platforms like Twitter. They have even developed a website, imamsonline.com. “A lot of work needs to be done,” he acknowledged. But “it’s not just the responsibility of the Muslim community and the imams. It’s law enforcement, intelligence services. We all need to work together in partnership and make sure that young British Muslims are not preyed upon by those who want to use them for their own political gains.”

It would, of course, be deeply reassuring if we could believe that the Western jihadists are merely the victims of online brainwashing and that a few moderate websites would soon fix the problem. But the reality is very different. Those who have been recruited to the cause of jihad have not just been unlucky in their Internet browsing selections. Since the 1990s, foreign-born imams have established themselves in pockets of London and other major European cities, preaching sermons and distributing audio recordings in which they have explicitly and repeatedly called for jihad.

With the best of intentions, no doubt, the British government opened its doors to many of these imams, often recognizing them as legitimate asylum seekers and offering them the usual welfare benefits available to those fleeing persecution. To give just one example, the Finsbury Park Mosque, led by the Egyptian imam and now convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri, had among its congregation the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, the 9/11 “twentieth hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be Los Angeles airport bomber Ahmed Ressam, as well as Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who stands accused by the Pakistani government of murdering the
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl.

In response to this kind of threat, the British government developed what it calls the “Prevent strategy.” Prevent is supposed to stop Britons and residents from being drawn into terrorist activities and networks, by working with all branches of government, from education to law enforcement. For instance, Prevent is supposed to help the immigration authorities to deny visas to extremist imams. But the remit of Prevent is broad: it is supposed to cover all forms of terrorism, from right-wing extremism to something vaguely called “nonviolent extremism,” whatever that means.