Persecution: Al Qaeda Turns to Church in Iraq, Ahmadiyya in Pakistan

...[I]n predominantly Muslim countries, religious minorities—from Christians to fellow Muslim groups—often serve as canaries in the coal mine for larger issues of tolerance.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Excerpt
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast |
By Eliza Griswold | November 6, 2010

A bloodbath in a Christian sanctuary full of worshippers this week signaled a new shift in violence in Iraq.
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This latest massacre of Christians, which left 58 dead, is one of the bloodiest on record since the war began in 2003.  It also marks a shift in patterns of violence. It's nothing new for militants to destroy empty churches. But this bloodbath in a sanctuary full of worshippers is horribly new.
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Religious persecution is one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time. And it doesn't just apply to Christians, in Iraq or elsewhere.

Other religious minorities, such as Ahmadiyya Muslims, are also facing increasingly violent attacks in their home countries of Pakistan and Indonesia. (On May 28, 2010, in the most violent massacre to date, more than 80 Ahmadiyya were killed in an attack in the Pakistani city of Lahore.) Most Muslims generally hold that the Islamic Messiah has yet to arrive on earth; the Ahmadiyya believe that this reformer already came in the person of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.


In Pakistan, persecution is nothing new. The group was sentenced to death for apostasy decades ago. In Indonesia, which, with 240 million people, is the world's largest and most vibrant Muslim democracy, the Ahmadiyya have also been facing increasing persecution.

One California-based human-rights lawyer, Amjad M. Khan, who represents persecuted minorities like the Ahmadiyya and Egyptian Christians attempting to gain asylum in the United States, sees more and more cases each year.

"This isn't just a human-rights issue, this is a security concern," Khan says. He notes that in predominantly Muslim countries, religious minorities—from Christians to fellow Muslim groups—often serve as canaries in the coal mine for larger issues of tolerance.

To monitor such abuses, the United States passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998. The State Department formed an Office of Religious Freedom. Now, the U.S. generates an annual report that monitors violence against religious minorities in foreign countries, and lists countries of particular concern.

Critics of the International Religious Freedom Act, note, however, that the State Department doesn't monitor the United States, where violence against Muslims has faced a marked uptick in the past several years.


-- Eliza Griswold, a Senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Tenth Parallel.

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