Saturday, 14 December 2019
No Christians allowed
No Christians Allowed: Muslim UN Officials Block Syrian Christian Refugees from Getting Help
"Christian Syrian refugees have told CBN News that they have been blocked from getting help from the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, by Muslim UN officials in Jordan.
"One of the refugees, Hasan, a Syrian convert to Christianity, told us in a phone call that Muslim UN camp officials 'knew that we were Muslims and became Christians and they dealt with us with persecution and mockery. They didn't let us into the office. They ignored our request.'
"Hasan and his family are now in hiding, afraid that they will be arrested by Jordanian police, or even killed. Converting to Christianity is a serious crime in Jordan.
"A clear pattern of discrimination by the United Nations refugee agency in Jordan against Christians. And it appears to be one reason that while tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim war refugees have been settled in the United States and Britain, only a small number have been Christian."
And the two governments that could stop this persecution of Christian refugees – the US and Britain – have done little to nothing about it."
Full CBN News report HERE.
I doubt that this problem will be mentioned in cosy inter-faith gatherings far away from suffering Christians.
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Conversion out of Islam is indeed a dodgy issue in the more ostensibly liberal Muslim countries. Syria under the al Assad clan effectively guaranteed freedom both of belief and of public expression of that belief to Christians - understandable, perhaps, since the family are Alawites, who are seen by Sunnis as heretics. Christian villages often erected whacking neon crosses, and street processions on holy days were routine. Even Muslims of the less uptight sort would come to watch them and join in the general celebrations.
ReplyDeleteAnd when I stayed in Eilat - in the south of Israel - some years ago I discovered that the next-door town of Aquaba, immediately across the border in Jordan, has an Orthodox church with a tower and prominent Greek crosses on its walls and gates. There's also a care centre for disabled people run under the auspices of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
Freedom of religion for religious minorities isn't uncommon in the Arab world, though the rise of ultra-Islamism has raised the risk of occasional atrocities. But conversion seems to cause problems nearly everywhere. In Muslim majority countries, conversions to Islam are uncontroversial, but conversions out of Islam often aren't. The social expectation is that abandoning Islam for another faith is unacceptable.
More on "occasional atrocities" here
Deletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50800871?ocid=socialflow_twitter
Quite. With the ultra-Islamists it is a crude type of war, and the Sahel - in a belt from Mali through Niger to the north of Nigeria - seems to be their main field of operation right now. There was an interesting TV documentary only the other night exploring the impact of their presence in Mali.
DeleteWith them it has to be a 'war to the finish' - not least because they themselves would have it no other way.
You have, I fear, set up a false dichotomy here. Those of us who advocate Christians and Muslims trying to meet and understand each other are by no means unaware of the persecution of, and atrocities committed against, Christians in other parts of the world. Indeed, these actions sicken and appall us. And, while some Christians who seek dialogue would indeed try to squeeze the three Abrahamic faiths into one common mould (I’ve certainly met some!), there are others who are very mindful of the huge differences between us.
ReplyDeleteHowever this should not mean that we abandon attempts to comprehend and befriend each other here in Britain. Indeed one might hope that, if relations between the communities deepen, one can talk honestly about these issues, which must horrify many British Muslims as well as Christians. We must beware of tarring all Muslims with the same brush and remember that Islam has its denominations just as Christianity does; unfortunately recent years have seen an upsurge in those which are more fundamentalist and violent and one needs to ask what factors have encouraged this trend.
“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Q9:29)
Deletehttps://barnabasfund.org/en/news/Editorial-The-West-must-not-fall-for-Islamists-spin-on-jizya
Dear Baptist
DeleteThis site thrives on false dichotomies - but good for you for pointing it out. Characteristically, AB responds with his black and white thinking. In fact I propose the logo of this site be: Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus.
Keep up the good work, Baptist - I gave up ages ago trying to reason with this crowd.
Of course the best thing is to convert them to Christianity. Surely we all believe that without Jesus, these folk are lost! Without conversion, what is the point of dialogue? If you want to be chummy chummy for social reasons, then better the local food-bank, Women's Institute or football club!
DeleteNever forget Taquia.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of hostility to people in Muslim-majority societies to conversion out of Islam which is the context of AB's post, I'm somewhat reminded of my experience in my own family in the north of England nearly sixty years ago.
ReplyDeleteMy family was in practical terms entirely secular, though with a few vestigial remnants of religiosity which were still pretty general back then. No one ever attended public worship, not even on the great festivals. No one was confirmed or, therefore, a communicant; it was never even thought of, let alone mentioned.
On the other hand not arranging 'christening' for the family's newborns would have been unthinkable, as would marrying in a registry office rather than in a church. This appeared to be a more a matter of outraging family and social norms rather than an issue of Christian discipleship: propriety rather than doctrine!
But when in my mid-teens I became 'Christian-curious' - probably a rather out-of-the-ordinary form of teenage rebellion! - I found to my surprise that there were some really definite expectations and some no less firm 'no-no's, at least from my mother's side of the family.
Though most of the family viewed my interest as distinctly odd and even borderline unhealthy, my mother was quite happy for me to explore the Church; but it absolutely had to be the Church of England because that, she insisted, is what 'we' were. Any investigation of the Congregational church a bit further away was, in our family, inappropriate! And, a bit later on, my grandmother told me emphatically that if I started dabbling with Roman Catholicism, she'd disinherit me and want nothing to do with me.
Not for sure the same level of social rejection as being excluded from a refugee camp because of your new religious allegiance, but, I suggest, essentially the same mindset. I think we rather forget how recent our contemporary society's respect for freedom of choice and conviction is in matters of this sort.
If you think the two are comparable, I pity you.
ReplyDeleteDominic
Then muster an argument. You can be certain that condescending de haut en bas sneering won't 'cut the mustard'.
DeleteJE - AB has provided unarguable instances of how Christians are treated harshly by some Muslims. You have implausibly argued that this is essentially of 'the same mindset' as the bias to belong to the C of E that used to prevail in our country. Really! On the contrary, Britons have a wo derful record for providing food for the needy, whether friends or former enemies.
DeleteIs this an example of poor judgement or an abuse of reason? One thing is certain: changing languages - from English to French - does not strengthen your case, although the attempt to be smugly superior is noted.
Dominic's posts make good sense.
Rob
The mindset of my mother and my grandmother strikes me as at bottom identical to that of those who deny the legitimacy of conversion from Islam, in that both assert that 'you are what you are' and therefore that changing is somehow illegitimate. In the realm of ideas and beliefs that's simply untrue. There'd be no Christians now if people hadn't revised their beliefs and ideas!
DeleteAnd nowhere did I suggest that Christians aren't treated harshly by some Muslims; indeed, I've commented on another of AB's post advocating a much more robust and through-going policy response than any government has hitherto implemented in respect of British mosques and Islamic centres which are proved to have nurtured jihadists or incited violence. Islam has a very long history of routinely treating Christian populations as second class citizens.
As to being 'smugly superior', the English language has a host of borrowings from other languages which are routinely used. 'De haut en bas' is just another. If you say 'et cetera' or write 'i.e.' or 'e.g.' - or respond ironically to a politician's latest banality with 'quelle surprise', are you then ipso facto (there's another one!) 'smug'? If so, there are a lot of smuggers about!
Common sense, really, but if you can't or won't see that, there's no hope.
ReplyDeleteD
You still mahe no case. I commented that 'not for sure the same level of social rejection as being excluded from a refugee camp because of your new religious allegiance, but, I suggest, essentially the same mindset'. I stand by that.
DeleteI can't know for sure if it would have come to it as I did stick with Anglicanism; but if I hsdn't done so I could conceivably have ended up being shunned by my entire family for making a religious choice. When you're only in your mid-teens, that's quite some pressure, and a huge deal.
Whereas in the Syrian instance which AB cites, you seem to have some petty local official not threatening life and limb, but simply blocking someone from taking refuge in a camp because he can, and because the said petty official has taken umbrage at a flouting of what he perceives as social norms. I don't see that much difference.
Unconvincing, but this response response shows more humility.
ReplyDeleteDominic
Another significant example, reported today on the World Service of the BBC:
ReplyDeleteAceh in the north of Sumatra is the only province of Indonesia to have imposed sharia law. That came about as a result of an internationally brokered agreement back at the start of this century which settled a decades-long civil war in which locals had sought indepedence from Indonesia. The dispute wasn't primarily religious in its origins, but the fact that Aceh has traditionally followed a more austere and puritan form of Islam than is general in Indonesia had readily prompted the independence movement to add a religious aspect. And 98% of people in Aceh identify as Muslim.
The BBC's reporter had discovered a Christian congregation worshipping discreetly in a tent in a patch of woodland. Apparently they were stuck with the tent - fraught with practical difficulty in a wet tropical climate - because permission to erect or acquire a church building is extremely difficult in that the public support of a hundred non-Christians is an absolute requirement before permission will be granted.
And local Muslim clerics teach that as religions other than Islam are haram, so giving support to Christians seeking permission to open a church must by extension be no less haram. 'It doubles the sin', as one of them explained to the reporter.
All religions appear to produce a fundamentalist element. But Islam, by virtue of its core doctrines, seems to me to be peculiarly susceptible to fundamentalist and oppressive interpretation.
I am pleased to praise you, John Ellis, for a change.
ReplyDeleteRob
Well, in the nature of things we'd be likely to discover agreement in at least some matters!
DeleteJust to make my position clear, I recall arguing when I was a student way back in the 1960s that the degree of inward migration that the UK was then experiencing from places in the world where people's worldview and values were very different from, and in some respects entirely at variance with, those generally accepted here, and over time I believed that it would damage the cohesiveness of our society.
That wasn't a very popular view in student circles back in the 'summer of love' era, but the only aspect of that opinion from which I'd resile was that I thought the community discohesion would become evident a good deal earlier than it ultimately did.
I believe that, in Indonesia, there have long been laws which make it almost impossible to change your religion.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia has an interesting and informative page on 'Christianity on Indonesia'. I hadn't previously realized just how many Christans there are - twenty-four million, which is 10% of the population - and that in some areas Christians comprise the majority. But the page suggests that the situation of Christians in some areas can be difficult.
Delete