Nearly One Million Christians - Most Of Them Now On The Run
It infuriates me as a Muslim and an Iraki that my Christian brothers and sisters in humanity in Irak are suffering completely undeserved persecution as a result of the lawlessness caused by the American invasion and the continued attempts to plant the American boot on our country’s neck. I know well from my Christian friends that the overwhelming majority Iraki Christians are loyal Irakis who hate the American invaders and what they have done to all Irakis, Muslim and Christian alike just as much, if not more, than I do.
In the Holy Qur’an God commands that there be no compulsion in Religion:
| 2:256 لااكراه في الدين قد تبين الرشد من الغي فمن يكفر بالطاغوت ويؤمن بالله فقد استمسك بالعروة الوثقى لاانفصام لها والله سميع عليم | La ikraha fee alddeeni qad tabayyana alrrushdu mina alghayyi faman yakfur bialttaghooti wayu/min biAllahi faqadi istamsaka bialAAurwati alwuthqa la infisama laha waAllahu sameeAAun AAaleemun |
Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things. |
| 10:99 ولو شاء ربك لامن من في الارض كلهم جميعا افانت تكره الناس حتى يكونوا مؤمنين | Walaw shaa rabbuka laamana man fee al-ardi kulluhum jameeAAan afaanta tukrihu alnnasa hatta yakoonoo mu/mineena | If it had been the will of your Lord that all the people of the world should be believers, all the people of the earth would have believed! Would you then compel mankind against their will to believe? |
| 22:39 اذن للذين يقاتلون بانهم ظلموا وان الله على نصرهم لقدير | Othina lillatheena yuqataloona bi-annahum thulimoo wa-inna Allaha AAala nasrihim laqadeerun | Permission to fight back is hereby granted to the believers against whom war is waged and because they are oppressed; certainly God has power to grant them victory |
| 22:40 الذين اخرجوا من ديارهم بغير حق الا ان يقولوا ربنا الله ولولادفع الله الناس بعضهم ببعض لهدمت صوامع وبيع وصلوات ومساجد يذكر فيها اسم الله كثيرا ولينصرن الله من ينصره ان الله لقوي عزيز | Allatheena okhrijoo min diyarihim bighayri haqqin illa an yaqooloo rabbuna Allahu walawla dafAAu Allahi alnnasa baAAdahum bibaAAdin lahuddimat sawamiAAu wabiyaAAun wasalawatun wamasajidu yuthkaru feeha ismu Allahi katheeran walayansuranna Allahu man yansuruhu inna Allaha laqawiyyun AAazeezun | They were evicted from their homes unjustly, for no reason other than saying, “Our Lord is God.” If it were not for God’s supporting of some people against others, monasteries, churches, synagogues, and Mosques - where the name of GOD is much mentioned - would have been destroyed. absolutely, God supports those who support Him. He is All-Powerful, Almighty. |
Despite God’s clear command there can be no doubt that Irak’s Christians are especially persecuted and that the persecution of Irak’s Christians is being done by people who dare describe themselves as Muslims and their crimes as “Jihad”.
As we have documented repeatedly on this site their priests and congregation are being kidnapped and killed (العثور على جثة المطران فرج رحو غربي الموصل), and their Holy Places attacked. Of the few that remain many of them dare not leave the neighbourhoods where they. Dead, fled, and terrorised that is the fate of the Christians of Irak. Just in the last few days there are these reports:
The monasteries and seminaries of Baghdad are all but deserted. And many churches almost empty due to the massive flight of Christians either to northern Iraq or to neighboring countries.
Source: Azzaman in English - March 22, 2008
Raed Joshua (37 years) was among those who immigrated. He lived all his life in Mosul among Muslim neighbors, neighbors whom he described as “good and I still remember them well”. The tragedy started when his father was abducted “by unidentified gunmen”. Although he paid the ransom of “20 thousand dollars,” his father was found dead in a neighborhood east of Mosul.
Source: Aswat Aliraq
If you use the search system for this site a few of the results you will get are these:
- Carnage and Despair | بين المجازر واليأس
- Iraqi Christians are defenseless, says top clergyman
- Gunmen kidnap Iraqi Chaldean Catholic archbishop | مسلحون يخطفون كبير اساقفة كلدانيا كاثوليكيا في العراق
- Wave of attacks target Christian houses of worship in Mosul
- Iraqi Christians under threat in Baghdad
- Baghdad Christians flee as violence against them mounts
- Passionless celebrations connect Iraqi Christians on Easter
- Iraq’s Christians At Risk Of Annihilation
Three days ago one of my colleagues posted without comment a short piece “فرنسا ستستقبل خمسمئة مسيحي من العراق” on the statement by the French foreign affairs minister M. Kouchner that France was preparing to receive about 500 Iraki Christian refugees on the grounds that no other country wanted them and they were more vulnerable than others. Yesterday this article which I post below in full, “Iraqi Christians scorn West’s offer of help” appeared in the English language version of al Zaman. As the article makes clear it is true that Iraki Christians are a particular target for persecution, it is also true that offering 500 places is “gesture politics” and a bad joke.
One church source described France’s bid to offer asylum for 500 Iraqi Christians as “a joke.”
He said there were nearly 1 million Christians most of them now on the run. “Who is going to save them? These statements are merely for propaganda purposes. We have seen nothing tangible on the ground.”
How did this shameful situation come about? Some of the answer lies in history. Under the Ottomans Christians were free to practise their religion and to live and trade peacefully but high office was (in general) forbidden them. (I do not know if being forbidden high office was the case everywhere in the Ottoman empire but it was the case in Irak.) Like the Jews the Christians prospered under the Ottomans and gained a reputation for being shrewd traders and for being rich as a result. Few Irakis were rich under Ottomans and, like the Jews in Europe and here, Iraki Christians were believed by some — wrongly, as engaging in dishonourable and corrupt business practises and of having prospered from them.
When the British came they followed their customary practice of “divide and rule” and treated the Christian minority with particular favour. A disproportionate number of Christians served the colonial civil service and a disproportionate number of Christians prospered. Some even converted to the form of Christianity called Anglicanism, perhaps some of those conversions were sincere, perhaps others were less so, but the British left behind them a congregation of Anglicans which like other Christian communities of Irak was seen by some — again wrongly, as unfairly wealthy. Iraki Anglicans have suffered and lost their loved ones out of all proportion to their numbers, the killing of much of their leadership on September 29, 2005 is perhaps the best known example.
None of this explains why with the exception of some relatively recent converts to various Christian sects associated with Britain and America people who are members of some of the oldest Christian communities in the world and who are indisputably patriotic Irakis should be so persecuted. It does not even explain why Iraki Anglicans are persecuted. There is no real connection between Christianity in Irak and either the British invaders or their American successors.
In modern times in Irak several of the young officers who threw the British out were Christians, and it is often forgotten that the Ba’ath drew heavily for their ideology on the writings of the Syrian Christian Michael Aflaq whose political beliefs were a form of pan-Arabic socialism. Under the tyrant Christians did reasonably well, and some like the journalist Tariq Aziz Aziz rose to high office. In part this was because many Christians were part of the post-colonial elite and in part it was because Saddam, despite what American propaganda would have you believe, did not run a “Sunni” regime, he was a secularist hostile to any potential power centre that could oppose the Ba’ath and interested only in one thing among his henchmen — that they be absolutely loyal to his regime, and to him personally.
(If you do not believe that Saddam cared only about loyalty to him, I invite you to do some research and then explain to me whose family, Sunni and Shia alike, suffered grievously under Saddam and whose family, Sunni and Shia alike, rejoiced and sang when he was dead, why, in the famous deck of cards issued by the American invaders of top Ba’athist’s they wanted to capture slightly more than two-thirds were Shia.
Once you have done that I invite you to do some further research and then explain to my good Kurdish Christian friend and neighbour Basil whose family was almost completely wiped out in the campaigns against the Kurds why Saddam often used Kurdish regiments and Kurdish police in his suppression of the Kurdish rebellions.)
Part of the answer to why people who have been part of Iraki society for nearly two thousand years have been singled for particular persecution is touched upon in the article in al Zaman:
The leaders, refusing to be named, said their followers were paying for the West’s mistakes and blunders in dealing with the Muslim world.
“It is the second time in history we are being persecuted and paying dearly for what the Christian West does,” said one of them.
He was referring to the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages during which European states mobilized huge armies and invaded Palestine, parts of Syrian and Lebanon.
The article then goes on:
U.S. troops practices at the start of the war, and the attempts by some U.S. churches to proselytize Muslims by handing out free copies of the Bible in Arabic, made many Muslims think that the invasion was yet another “crusade”, said the cleric.
U.S. troops would decorate vehicles, particularly at the start of the war, with Christian symbols and U.S. Christian denominations began building or establishing new churches in Baghdad and other major cities.
“We keep telling everyone that we as Christians are different. We have got nothing to do with such practices but it seems they provided the fuel for the calamity we suffer from now,” said one church source.
Yes indeed, “nothing to do with such practices“, first as a Muslim and then as an Iraki who hates the American invaders, I testify to any Muslim reading this that the Iraki Christian community as a community have had nothing to do with such acts by the invaders. That they have had nothing to do as a community with the desecration by the Americans of the Holy Qur’an, that they have had nothing to do as a community with the American soldiers who have fouled the Mosques with their excrement, and that they have had nothing to do as a community with the Americans who have daubed Christian religious symbols and slogans in the Mosques. I tell you first as a Muslim and then as an Iraki who hates the American invaders that they as a community are wholly innocent of collaboration in such barbaric behaviour and that those who accuse them of it are either repeating something they have heard or that they are deliberately telling you a lie.
I tell you further first as a Muslim, and then as an Iraki who hates the American invaders that it is wholly shameful that they or any Christian anywhere be persecuted on the basis of such lies.
Like other Irakis Christians are persecuted also by criminals purely for gain. It does not in truth matter that they are Christians to such vermin. All that these criminals are interested in is that they believe they will be able to steal money, they do not care who they terrorise to steal it or who they steal it from. That such vermin flourish and are able to carry on their foul trade is, in common with those who prey upon Christians for false “reasons” of “religion”, a sign of the complete breakdown of law since the Americans invaded. They have brought with them barbarity, savagery, and deliberately fostered a complete collapse of law. This may be a reason, or part of one of many reasons, but it is not an excuse, there is no excuse for going flat against the word of God and persecuting those who we are commanded as Muslims to place under our protection, to treat them with justice, giving them their full rights to freely worship God as best they able, to order their community according to their beliefs.
Their rights, their lives, their property, and their honour all these must be inviolable. They have the right to any employment except that which would put them in charge of supervising the religious duties of Muslims, they have the right to full education, to better themselves as best they are able, and the right to freely engage in commerce excepting only that they may not entice Muslims to buy what is forbidden to us as Muslims but not to them as Christians.
There is no place in Islam or in Islamic societies for the use of weapons to compel people to revert to Islam and those who say that using weapons or the threat of them to encourage “reversion” and those who go further and use weapons or the threat of them to compel “reversion”, deny the basic Islamic principle taught to us by God in the Holy Qur’an that there may never be compulsion in matters of religion. Weapons can only be drawn against those who persist in persecuting and oppressing others and preventing them from freely following their conscience. It is lawful that weapons be drawn against those who oppress the Christians of Irak. It is pleasing to God to do so for the same reason that it is pleasing to God to attack the invaders who oppress the Muslim people of Irak and whose ultimate aim is to oppress all Muslims by emasculating Islam into some tame and human thing that apes their doctrines, their ways, their belief that greed is good, that only material success is pleasing to God, and that those who have seized and hold the wealth of this world using it only for their own benefit and power are also the elect of the next.
Those who use weapons or the threat of them against our Christian brothers and sisters in humanity are doing the work of the evil men and women who launched the invasion of Irak, who toppled the legitimate government of Iran putting in his place the puppet Shah to do their bidding, who prop up tyranny after tyranny throughout the the Muslim world, and who even now push for yet more war and yet more hate against Muslims. Against those who further this vileness by persecuting Christians and thus giving the evil men and women who ordered the invasion of Irak the excuse that the American presence in Irak will ultimately further human rights here there can, and must, be a reckoning.
Mohammed Ibn Laith
