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The Joy Of Islam In Pakistan

The New York Times catches up with a man on the run for his life: In a dank basement on the outskirts of Kabul, Josef read his worn blue Bible by the light of a propane lantern, as he had done for weeks since he fled from his family in Pakistan. His few worldly possessions […]

The New York Times catches up with a man on the run for his life:

In a dank basement on the outskirts of Kabul, Josef read his worn blue Bible by the light of a propane lantern, as he had done for weeks since he fled from his family in Pakistan.

His few worldly possessions sat nearby in the 10-by-10-foot room of stone and crumbling brown earth. He keeps a wooden cross with a passage from the Sermon on the Mount written on it, a carton of Esse cigarettes, and a thin plastic folder containing records of his conversion to Christianity.

The documents are the reason he is hiding for his life. On paper, Afghan law protects freedom of religion, but the reality here and in some other Muslim countries is that renouncing Islam is a capital offense.

Josef’s brother-in-law Ibrahim arrived in Kabul recently, leaving behind his family and business in Pakistan, to hunt down the apostate and kill him. Reached by telephone, Ibrahim, who uses only one name, offered a reporter for The New York Times $20,000 to tell him where Josef was hiding.

“If I find him, once we are done with him, I will kill his son as well, because his son is a bastard,” Ibrahim said, referring to Josef’s 3-year-old child. “He is not from a Muslim father.”

Josef’s brother-in-law Ibrahim arrived in Kabul recently, leaving behind his family and business in Pakistan, to hunt down the apostate and kill him. Reached by telephone, Ibrahim, who uses only one name, offered a reporter for The New York Times $20,000 to tell him where Josef was hiding.

“If I find him, once we are done with him, I will kill his son as well, because his son is a bastard,” Ibrahim said, referring to Josef’s 3-year-old child. “He is not from a Muslim father.”

Read the whole thing.  It’s not clear from the story if his wife is a Christian convert or not. One interesting aspect of this story: Josef’s sister lives as an immigrant in Germany, and is eager to help him escape so he can practice his new religion in freedom. Meanwhile, their family back home want to murder him and his child, because Islam.

Are there organizations that serve as facilitators for an underground railroad for Christians like Josef? Because if so, I would like to donate to them. Back in ’06, I met a young Christian journalist at a conference overseas. He worked in a Muslim country, his homeland. He lived in secret because of the same thing. As I recall, he was married, but couldn’t come out as Christian to his Muslim wife, out of fear for his life.

We Christians in the West have no idea. No idea at all.

The older I get, the more I believe that freedom of religion — the freedom to practice one’s religion, the freedom to change one’s religion, and even the freedom to abandon one’s religion — is the most important freedom we have. No freedom is or can be absolute, but to my way of thinking, the First Amendment is as close to secular Scripture as we Americans have.

UPDATE: A reader comments in the thread below:

It’s a tragic state of affairs, but it would be far more conducive to both the cause of democracy and freedom of religion, not to mention world peace, if Christians owned their own history regarding this struggle and refrained from using these instances of obvious aggression and intolerance as propaganda points against the competitive faith.

This comment is an example of Manning’s Corollary To Godwin’s Law:

In any online conversation about an incident of violence perpetrated by adherents of Islamic fundamentalism, the conversation will inevitably devolve into claims that Christians commit the same type and degree of violent acts, regardless of how demonstrably false that is; further, the claim will be made that past historical violence involving Christians means that present-day Christians are morally incapable of denouncing current instances of religiously-motivated violence committed by Muslims.

Internet genius that I am, I have come up with a unit of measurement to determine the potency of the presence of Manning’s Corollary in a given comments thread: the Ditchkins Unit (DU). (For an explanation of “Ditchkins,” see here.) The DU measurement is the number of comments that appear before an example of Manning’s Corollary. In this instance, 12 comments appeared before the Manning’s Corollary one, giving the comment at issue a rating of 12 DU. This is just a service I provide y’all for free. You’re welcome.

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