It is a story that has been playing out for decades in the Middle East, where Christianity began. One in 20 Arabs today is a Christian, where one in five was Christian in 1900.
Source/Credit:Canada.com / Postmedia News
By Matthew Fisher | September 30, 2013
BEIRUT — Those who identified themselves as Christians were summarily executed last week in that horrific terrorist attack by Muslim extremists on a shopping mall in Kenya.
Tens of millions of Christians as well as those other minority faiths face similar dangers in an arc from Egypt to the southern Philippines.
My friend, Patrick Gill’s religion is impossible to obscure. It is evident to every Pakistani in his given name.
Patrick’s wife died young and he takes his responsibilities towards their two daughters very seriously. He wants the girls, who are five and seven, to be educated at a Christian school. Christians are at or near the bottom of Pakistan’s economic heap so to give his daughters a Christian education requires most of Patrick’s meagre salary as a guesthouse manager.
Having daughters attend a Christian school in Pakistan is risky. As was brutally demonstrated on September 22, when twin suicide bombers killed 82 Christians at a church in Peshawar, Christians are often considered apostates in a country where such a charge can have lethal consequences.
Unbeknownst to most of Christendom, Pakistan has more than two million Christians. Since the rise of Islamic fundamentalists in the past 10 or 15 years their churches, schools and enclaves have frequently been attacked by mobs, sometimes after trumped up charges that a Christian had insulted Islam. A recent case involved a Muslim cleric who accused a mentally disabled 14-year-old Christian girl of doing just that. She was finally granted bail after she had spent three weeks in jail on the grave charge of blasphemy.
It is hard for them to do, but those Pakistani Christians who can get out often do. It is a story that has been playing out for decades in the Middle East, where Christianity began. One in 20 Arabs today is a Christian, where one in five was Christian in 1900.
The process of emigration has recently accelerated in countries such as Iraq and Egypt, where the Christian minority have often been targeted for violence or otherwise made to feel extremely unwelcome. I experienced this myself about eight years ago at a Chaldean Catholic Church in Baghdad. When mass ended mothers and grandmothers gathered around the not-so-young visitor from Canada to pose two questions. Was he married? If not, would he like to marry one of their teenage daughters?
The reason for such questions was obvious. Catholic and Orthodox churches were getting blown up all over the country by Sunni and Shia Muslims at the time and priests from Iraq’s ancient Christian community were abducted and beheaded. Half of Iraq’s 1.4 million Christians fled for their lives. The history of Christians on the run is now repeating itself in Syria where carrying a cross can be a death sentence.
Religious chauvinism and intolerance are not, of course, only about Muslims doing terrible things to Christians. Sunnis and Shias blow each other up all the time in half a dozen countries in the Middle East and South Asia. Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants have been at each other’s throats for centuries. During the Balkan wars in the 1990s, Orthodox Serbs killed Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats who in turn murdered Orthodox Serbs.
Supposedly pacifist Buddhists have been killing Muslims and burning their mosques in Myanmar this year. Muslims have done the same to Hindus in Bangladesh and Hindus have done the same to Muslims in India.
I was a witness to what Indians call communal violence after the assassination in 1984 of India’s Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Hours after Gandhi’s death I watched an elderly Sikh man stumble in front of my taxi as he was set upon by a gang of Hindu youths who bludgeoned him to death with stones. Over the next few nights the police in Delhi’s eastern suburbs stepped aside as cricket-bat wielding mobs of Hindus beat and sometimes burned to death hundreds of Sikhs.
What is it that motivates some people to behave with such barbarity in the name of God? Part of it stems from the weird group psychology that convinces a mob to attack those who are different. Part of it is payback for perceived injustices that often go back centuries. None of it is comprehensible.
What is certain is that before too long the only sizeable Christian communities left in South Asia and the Middle East will be in India, Egypt and perhaps Lebanon, if the jihadis’ war in Syria does not spill over.
My friend, Patrick and his daughters would get away if they could, but no western country wants to take them. So when Patrick sends his girls off to school every morning in an unmarked bus he tells me he prays that they will return home safely to him that evening.
Read original post here: Christians have much smaller place in the South Asia and Middle East of the future
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