Morning Star

The faith of Asia Bibi

While political events swirl about her, Asia Bibi, imprisoned in Pakistan since 2009 on blasphemy charges, awaits her trial that is still two years down the road. This dedicated Christian woman spends her days praying in a stifling, mosquito-infested cell. An interview has been posted on-line with the author of a book whose English edition will be released this fall. Anne-Isabelle Tollet has spent time with Asia's family, and her book tells the story of this devout mother-of-five whose trouble began when she tried to drink water from a bucket shared by her Muslim friends.

She spends the day praying in her bed. And she waits every week for Tuesday to arrive, when her husband goes to the prison to see her. Otherwise she kills time reminiscing, thinking about her children and praying.

A petition signed by 50 UN NGO's can be found here. Although she is alone in her cell, she is not alone in her predicament -- in fact another Christian woman has just been sent to jail on similar charges. As that news account reminds us, freeing the prisoner is not the end of the ordeal, for many are killed by "vigilantes" upon their release.

Unfortunately, Christian minorities don't have much hope when the Muslims themselves treat their own children like this. Fundamental human dignity and a sacramental view of marriage are entirely missing from such cultures.

Confronting the myth of "islamophobia"

John Allen has some sobering words on who is really being persecuted today:

Stoked by historical images of the Crusades and the Inquisition, and even by current perceptions of the wealth and power of church leaders and institutions, it's tough for Western observers to wrap their minds around the fact that in a growing number of global hotspots, Christians today are the defenseless oppressed, not the arrogant oppressors.

Here's the stark reality of our times: In the early 21st century, we are witnessing the rise of a whole new generation of Christian martyrs.

Christians are today, statistically speaking, by far the most persecuted religious group on the planet. According to the Frankfurt-based Society for Human Rights, fully 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed against Christians. The Pew Forum estimates that Christians experience persecution in a staggering total of 133 nations, fully two-thirds of all the countries on earth.

As part of that picture, the Catholic relief agency "Aid to the Church in Need" estimates that 150,000 Christians die for their faith every year, in locales ranging from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America. This means that every hour of every day, roughly 17 Christians are killed somewhere in the world, either out of hatred for the faith or hatred for the works of charity and justice their faith compels them to perform.

Perhaps the emblematic example is Iraq, where a strong Christian community that took two millennia to build has been gutted in the arc of a little more than two decades. Prior to 1991, the year of the First Gulf War, there were more than 2 million Christians in Iraq, while today the high-end estimate is that somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 may be left.

Mark Durie writes extensively on Islam, pointing out that their claim to truth is the attendant expansion of their numbers. In fact, the call to prayer heard five times daily includes the words, "Come to success."

Christianity makes no such claim. Those who follow Christ are called to pick up their own crosses and follow in His footsteps.  Just as Our Lord was persecuted, his followers will be as well. As difficult as this is, we know that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, and our fidelity is what matters, not success. It sounds dark, but there is joy in such oblation, for we do not live by the spirit of this world. In fact, success in human terms might be a distraction, a temptation or a sign of compromise.

Persecution has a way of purifying our intentions, but that said, we pray for those being so mistreated.

The Persecuted Church

I have a piece posted on Catholic Lane, related to a conference I attended over the weekend here in the Boston area.

Most riveting were the firsthand accounts of two young women, Juliana Taimoorazy, the Executive Director of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, and Cynthia Farahat, an Egyptian political activist and writer. They testified to daily harassment and oppression by police and radical Muslims. They spoke bravely about the constant fear and the innumerable political obstacles to living freely in societies predominated by Islam.

One of the most poignant comments was made by Ms. Farahat, who explained that she was forced to live as a fourth-class citizen in Egypt. (Christian women rank behind Muslim males, Muslim females, and Christian males in such objectively stratified cultures. Surely, that reality is a far-cry from the constant grumbling about “patriarchal values in our own society, where females outnumber males in most post-graduate studies.)

As the article notes, there was great good in being there, seeing how many people see through the media distortions about the real victims around the world, but there was a significant disconnect as well, related to the Larger Narrative in which we're privileged to participate. [Read it all.]