The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World

February, 06 2012

 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Newsweek

 
From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered because of their faith. 

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

Read more here . . .

Muslims and Catholics Together? How Far Can We Go?

The Muslim-Catholic Forum: Can You Name the Animals?

By Robert Reilly

SATURDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2011

Late last month, twenty-four Catholic and twenty-four Muslim leaders, scholars, and educators met on the east bank of the Jordan River for the second of the two Catholic-Muslim Forums, inaugurated by Benedict XVI in 2008 to encourage dialogue between the world’s two largest religions. How much can be gained from such encounters is hard to say. But the extremely astute Fr. Samir Khalil Samir has said, “dialogue is better than indifference and reciprocal silence.” The forum’s subject was “Reason, Faith, and Mankind,” a highly important topic. King Abdullah saluted the participants: “the forum is the outcome of ongoing initiatives to foster concepts embraced by both Muslims and Christians. . . .” There certainly are things in common, principally in morals, but the sources of those morals differ significantly in terms of the authority on which they draw.  I often reflect upon the moving episode that my wife experienced in Cairo during the 1995 U.N. Population Conference. She and her colleagues from the National Institute of Womanhood were busy assembling papers opposing the U.N.’s pro-population control and abortion policies. The Muslim women staff of the hotel would voluntarily help my wife collate the sheets and assemble them for distribution. After several days, she tried to thank them. They responded, “Please don’t thank us; we should thank you for coming here to help save our country.”   I have also worked closely with Muslims both in the United States and in the Middle East. If they discern you are primarily motivated by moral concerns which they share, the walls of separation quickly come down.   But it can be difficult to go any further because of various theological problems. Thomas Aquinas counseled his fellow Dominicans about how to approach Muslims: you cannot appeal to them from our revelation, he said, because they do not accept it; and you cannot appeal to them from their revelation because we do not accept it; therefore, you must deal with them as natural men. By this, of course, he meant appeal to their reason. The problem is whether Muslims accept themselves as natural men. Muslims believe that all men are naturally Muslims. If you are not a Muslim, it is probably because you have been apostasized by your parents. In this view, people do not convert to Islam so much as revert to it. The essential issue here is the status of reason, which is why this latest forum was so important. Can we reason together? This was an issue Benedict XVI dealt with in the Regensburg Lecture. His answer: this is possible only in so far as we and they are Hellenized, which means that we both recognize reason as capable of apprehending reality. Adam Naming the Animals by Currier & Ives Is this the case? On the Muslim side, Ibrahim Kalin, a Turkish philosopher, certainly thinks so. In Jordan, he said, “Islam largely shares this notion of rationality with Judaism and Christianity.” According to The Tablet, he claimed that “the Qur’an teaches a natural law that would be quite familiar to Thomists. Charges of irrationality persist, he said, because Islam kept a balance of faith and reason while the Enlightenment tipped the focus of Western thought towards reason and science.” Would that this were so; then there could be a very deep dialogue, indeed. Unfortunately, Kalin omits that the one Muslim theological school that roughly fits his description, the Mu’tazilites of the early ninth century, were irreparably crushed, starting with caliph Al-Mutawikkil around the year 850 AD. This is the period of de-hellenization to which the pope has referred.  After that, the notion of natural law became anathema in Islam, because of its view of God as omnipotent pure will, unconstrained by anything, including reason. Fire does not burn cotton; God does. Gravity does not make the rock fall; God does, etc. Rather than avoiding the Enlightenment, this form of Islamic occasionalism beat David Hume to the punch by some 800 years. The denial of cause and effect in the natural world eventually devastated the Muslim realm, which looked to Allah as the first and only cause of all things. To suggest otherwise became a form of blasphemy. While I would agree that there are invitations to natural theology in the Qur’an, there are also several less inviting things. For instance, in the Qur’an’s account of creation, there appears an interesting detail. In Genesis, God parades the animals in front of Adam, who then names them, and these names are what they are. In the Qur’an, it is Allah who names the animals, not man. Man does not have this power to name.   This is symptomatic of the difference between the two views of man in Genesis and the Qur’an. The power to name is, in a way, the power to know. Joseph Pieper once wrote, “Reality becomes intelligible through words. Man speaks so that through naming things what is real may become intelligible.”  If you cannot name a thing, can you know it?  Can reality be intelligible to you without this power? Actually, the situation in the Qur’an is even worse. The angels complain to Allah in Surah 2 about his having created Adam. Allah then challenges them to name these very same animals. The angels cannot do it, and respond: “Oh, Allah, You who know all things, You know we do not know; we know only what You have taught us.”  Not even pure spirits have within their reason the ability to apprehend reality independent of what God himself directly places in their minds. This seemingly little detail foreshadows what later develops within Islam:  the epistemological inability to grasp reality and to know only that which God himself has revealed. Islam thus loses rational access to reality through a deformed theology, which in turn has produced a dysfunctional culture.  Until these problems are addressed (the extent to which they still exist is displayed in the recent Arab elections), it will be very difficult toreason together.  First they have to be able to name the animals. Robert Reilly, a new contributor to The Catholic Thing, is a former director of the Voice of America. He has taught at the National Defense University and served in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His most recent book is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist. © 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

Retrieved December 10, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=view

Egyptian Muslims Serve as "Human Shields" to Protect Coptic Christians

Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as "human shields"
Yasmine El-Rashidi, Friday 7 Jan 2011
Muslims turned up in droves for the Coptic Christmas mass Thursday night, offering their bodies, and lives, as “shields” to Egypt’s threatened Christian community

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular Muslim televangelist andpreacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly Street. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

The attack has rocked a nation that is no stranger to acts of terror, against all of Muslims, Copts and Jews. In January of last year, on the eve of Coptic Christmas, a drive-by shooting in the southern town of Nag Hammadi killed eight Copts as they were leaving Church following mass. In 2004 and 2005, bombings in the Red Sea resorts of Taba and Sharm El-Sheikh claimed over 100 lives, and in the late 90’s, Islamic militants executed a series of bombings and massacres that left dozens dead.

This attack though comes after a series of more recent incidents that have left Egyptians feeling left out in the cold by a government meant to protect them.

Last summer, 28-year-old businessman Khaled Said was beaten to death by police, also in Alexandria, causing a local and international uproar. Around his death, there have been numerous other reports of police brutality, random arrests and torture.

Last year was also witness to a ruthless parliamentary election process in which the government’s security apparatus and thugs seemed to spiral out of control. The result, aside from injuries and deaths, was a sweeping win by the ruling party thanks to its own carefully-orchestrated campaign that included vote-rigging, corruption and widespread violence. The opposition was essentially annihilated. And just days before the elections, Copts - who make up 10 percent of the population - were once again the subject of persecution, when a government moratorium on construction of a Christian community centre resulted in clashes between police and protestors. Two people were left dead and over 100 were detained, facing sentences of up to life in jail.

The economic woes of a country that favours the rich have only exacerbated the frustration of a population of 80 million whose majority struggle each day to survive. Accounts of thefts, drugs, and violence have surged in recent years, and the chorus of voices of discontent has continued to grow.

The terror attack that struck the country on New Year’s eve is in many ways a final straw – a breaking point, not just for the Coptic community, but for Muslims as well, who too feel marginalized, oppressed, and overlooked by a government that fails to address their needs. On this Coptic Christmas eve, the solidarity was not just one of religion, but of a desperate and collective plea for a better life and a government with accountability.

Retrieved January 9, 2011 from http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/3365.aspx