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Meriam Yahya Ibrahim,
A Sudanese woman
sentenced to death for
converting to Christianity.
She was later released but
then re-arrested.
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I was
planning to move on to another topic today—possibly the accession of Elizabeth
I and her religious policies as she reestablishes non-papal Anglicanism in
England or perhaps the problem of the Tridentine Mass as a hangout for those
who reject the Second Vatican Council.
But there were two riveting editorials in the New York Times this morning that I think, each in a very different
way, carry on with the problem of the negative influence of religion in certain
circumstances. Now for the person who
trips across this blog entry, I am not anti-religion: not by any means. I am a practicing Roman Catholic. But I do see how religion—including
Catholicism—is often corrupted by some of its most devoted followers and
becomes very easily a tool for immeasurable evil.
I will give
you the links to the articles in the Times
but I am also going to reprint the articles for you to encourage you to
read them for yourselves.
The First
Article is by Nicholas Kristoff and deals with the problem of the apostasy laws
and people wishing to give up Islam for another faith.
Religious
Freedom in Peril
Nicholas
Kristoff
A Sudanese court in May sentences a Christian woman married
to an American to be hanged, after first being lashed 100 times, after she
refuses to renounce her Christian faith.
In country after country, Islamic fundamentalists are
measuring their own religious devotion by the degree to which they suppress or
assault those they see as heretics, creating a human rights catastrophe as
people are punished or murdered for their religious beliefs.
This is a sensitive area I’m wading into here, I realize.
Islam-haters in America and the West seize upon incidents like these to
denounce Islam as a malignant religion of violence, while politically correct
liberals are reluctant to say anything for fear of feeding bigotry. Yet there
is a real issue here of religious tolerance, affecting millions of people, and
we should be able to discuss it.
I’ve
been thinking about this partly because of the recent murder of a friend, Rashid Rehman,
a courageous human rights lawyer in Multan, Pakistan. Rashid, a Muslim, had
agreed to defend a university lecturer who faced the death penalty after being
falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. This apparently made Rashid
a target as well, for two men walked into his office and shot him dead.
No doubt the killers thought themselves pious Muslims. Yet
such extremists do far more damage to the global reputation of Islam than all
the world’s Islamophobes put together.
“No compulsion is to be on them,” he wrote. “If a
female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her
approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray.”
Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today, but,
for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were.
As recently as the Dreyfus Affair in France more than a century ago, Muslims
defended a Jew from the anti-Semitism of Christians.
Likewise, the most extreme modern case of religious
persecution involved Europeans trying to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust.
Since then, one of the worst religious massacres was the killing of Muslims by
Christians at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It’s also true that some of the bravest champions of
religious freedom today are Muslim. Mohammad Ali Dadkhah,
an Iranian lawyer, represented a Christian pastor pro bono, successfully
defending him from charges of apostasy. But Dadkhah was then arrested himself
and is now serving a nine-year prison sentence.
Saudi
Arabia may feud with Iran about almost everything else, but they are twins in
religious repression. Saudis ban churches; it insults Islam to suggest it is so
frail it cannot withstand an occasional church.
Particularly insidious in conservative Muslim countries is
the idea that anyone born Muslim cannot become a Christian. That’s what
happened in the case I mentioned in Sudan: The court considered the woman,
Meriam Ibrahim, a Muslim even though she had been raised a Christian by her
mother. The court sentenced her to die for apostasy; that was overturned, and she is now
sheltering with her family in the United States Embassy in Sudan,
trying to get permission to leave the country.
A Pew Research Center study found Muslims
victims of religious repression in about as many countries as
Christians. But some of the worst abuse actually takes place in
Muslim-dominated countries. In Pakistan, for example, a brutal campaign has
been underway against the Shiite minority. Likewise, Iran represses
the peaceful Bahai, and similarly Pakistan and other countries brutally
mistreat the Ahmadis, who see themselves as Muslims but are regarded as
apostates. Pakistani Ahmadis can be arrested simply for saying, “peace be upon
you.”
COAll this is a sad index of rising intolerance, for
Pakistan’s first foreign minister was an Ahmadi; now that would be impossible.
I hesitated to write this column because religious
repression is an awkward topic when it thrives in Muslim countries. Muslims
from Gaza to Syria, Western Sahara to Myanmar, are already enduring plenty
without also being scolded for intolerance. It’s also true that we in the West
live in glass houses, and I don’t want to empower our own chauvinists or fuel
Islamophobia.
Yet religious freedom is one of the most basic of human
rights, and one in peril in much of the world. Some heroic Muslims, like my
friend Rashid in Pakistan, have sacrificed their lives to protect religious
freedom. Let’s follow their lead and speak up as well, for silence would be a
perversion of politeness.
The second is the story of a Palestinian mother’s anxiety
for the safety of her children in East Jerusalem and the discrimination against her and her
family because of their Palestinian nationality. While this may appear to be a political issue
rather than a religious one, in fact it is not only the historic antagonism
between Judaism and Islam that is causing the current outbreak of violence in
Palestine/Israel but the conviction by Jewish extremists that the land of
“Eretz Israel” belongs exclusively to the Jewish people by God’s gift and that
they have a right to drive all others from the land. In fact the Palestinian people were settled
in the land at the time that Joshua led the ancient Israelites into the land
approximately twelve centuries before “the Common Era,” and the struggles for
possession of land were as much an issue in the times of the Judges and Kings
as they are today.
A
Palestinian Mother’s Fear in East Jerusalem
By RULA SALAMEHJULY 9,
2014
JERUSALEM — THERE was a huge crash, and I felt the ground
shake under my family’s home. We heard the first explosion just as we had
finished our iftar meal ending the daily Ramadan
fast and settled down in front of the television. Out the window, I could see
people running in the streets of Beit Hanina, my Palestinian
neighborhood. Then came a second crash, and a third.
We heard that bomb shelters had been opened in West
Jerusalem, so we assumed these were rockets from Gaza.
But the only bomb shelters near us are in Jewish settlements
like Pisgat Ze’ev and Hagiva Hatzarfatit in occupied East Jerusalem, and we
were not going to go there, especially after the events of the
past weeks. Just days ago, in apparent retribution for the killing
of three Israeli youths, Jewish extremists kidnapped, tortured and murdered
Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian boy one year younger than my own son, and
Israeli authorities have arrested and beaten hundreds of Palestinians
throughout East Jerusalem.
So we sat in our living room listening to the explosions —
the sound of rockets being intercepted in the air — painfully aware that Gaza
civilians would pay a heavy price for their leaders’ attempt to hit the Israeli
seat of government.
I was born and raised in Beit Hanina, and I attended Bir
Zeit University near Ramallah. When the first intifada started in 1987 and the
Israeli military closed my university, I began working as a journalist,
covering not only the stone-throwing demonstrations but also the lesser-known
civil-resistance campaign to end the Israeli military occupation.
In 1989, I flew to a conference in London about education in
the Palestinian territories; there I met the man who would become my husband.
He was a Palestinian, too, and his family came from Nablus. But he was born and
raised in Doha, Qatar, so he had never been allowed to visit the West Bank,
like millions of other Palestinian refugees.
In 1994, both of our families traveled to Jordan and we
celebrated our marriage in a country that was home to none of us. I moved to
live with my husband in the Persian Gulf, and I became pregnant in 1996. After
consulting with lawyers, I realized that I would need to go home to Jerusalem
to deliver my son so that he would be issued a Jerusalem residency number, and
not risk being banned from visiting the Palestinian territories, like his
father.
I returned to Jerusalem alone. In a cruel twist of fate and
policy, the Israeli authorities informed me that my son would not be given a
Jerusalem ID as long as I remained married to his father. Because one of his
parents was a Palestinian without a Jerusalem ID, my son was not entitled to
inherit my residency status. After years of financially and emotionally
draining legal struggle, my husband and I divorced — the strain ended not just
our marriage but our relationship — and my son, Marwan, was given his identity
card.
Today Marwan — whom we call Memo — is 17 years old. One week
ago, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was 16 and who lived two minutes down the road,
left his house to go to the mosque in the early morning after eating breakfast
with his mother before starting the fast for Ramadan. As he was standing
outside, he was grabbed by a group of Israelis in a white car, tortured and
burned alive and then left in a nearby forest.
I have not been able to sleep since I heard this news. I
constantly think of Memo, who often goes out with his friends to watch a
football game or to pick up groceries, and I think of Muhammad’s mother, Suha,
whose son went out one morning and never returned, and I think of the mothers
whose sons have been arrested, beaten and humiliated by the Israeli police in
the days since. Every mother I have spoken to in East Jerusalem is thinking of
the same things. We are all terrified for our children’s safety.
My neighborhood of Beit Hanina borders the Israeli
settlements Pisgat Ze’ev and Neve Yaakov. How can we continue to live like
this? In September, when our children return to school, how will we let our
sons and daughters walk by themselves in the mornings and evenings? How can a
mother let her children out of the house, knowing now that in addition to the
harassment and threats they have always faced from the Israeli police and
authorities, they may be grabbed off the street and murdered?
No parent — Israeli or Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim —
should have to live with such fear. Violence and repression will not make
anyone’s children safer.
The situation didn’t begin with the kidnappings, and we have
to pay attention to that fact. The world must hold the Israeli government
accountable for its actions. For its military campaigns that have taken the
lives of too many sons and mothers in Gaza over the past few days and in the
West Bank over the past few weeks. For its blatant disregard for Palestinians
living in East Jerusalem — the lack of bomb shelters is just one of many basic
services that the Israeli authorities fail to provide to Palestinians living
under their rule. And for the entire occupation, whose violence and cruelty is
the dark context for so much of what has happened over the past few weeks.
Seventeen years ago I returned to Jerusalem so that my son
would not be denied the right to live in the city of his ancestors. I never
thought I would be so frightened for him to do so.
Rula Salameh is a journalist and outreach manager at
Just Vision, an organization that documents the stories of Palestinians and
Israelis who use nonviolence to end the occupation and conflict.
I found the following comment after Ms.
Salamenh’s article particularly troubling.
It is from one Michael Danzinger.
“It's
hard to know where to start correcting all the selected truths in this op-ed.” “Correcting all the selected truths…”—really,
Mr. Danzinger. Can’t you listen to a
person’s story without feeling the need to “correct it.”
Rather than listen to Ms. Salamenh’s
story and the anguish behind it, Mr. Danzinger and others who share his views
are only anxious to discredit her anxiety for her family’s safety. Historians will assure Mr. Danzinger that in
the telling of any story by anyone on any side of any issue, that the truths
are “selected.” Even when the goal of
the historian is to be as objective as possible and include as much data as is
available to him or her, there will be facts yet unknown to the historian and
the manner in which he arranges the facts and tells the story—the choice of
words, the syntax, the language itself—will reflect his conscious or
unconscious prejudices.
When religion increases human
communication, when it opens us up in compassion to the one who is different
from ourselves, when it makes us think and reflect critically and examine—and reexamine—our
prejudices, it is a good thing but when it is used to uncritically support
those in power over and against those who are not in power, when it is used to
support unjust social, political, or economic structures, when it is used to
divide people into factions rather than unite them in mutual respect, then it
becomes evil. The religious situation in
Israel/Palestine is about as evil as it can get.
