At Nairobi’s Aga Khan University Hospital on Sunday, survivors spoke about how they escaped death in the mall. One British man said his wife and children were hiding behind a meat counter in a store with other women and children. The gunmen sprayed bullets at them, killing a woman and a teenage girl, and wounding his wife, said the man, who asked that neither his nor his spouse’s name be used because they feared retribution. His wife lay in a hospital bed and declined to speak.
The gunmen, the man said, released the children who were still alive and informed his injured wife that she, too, could leave if she converted to Islam, making her recite the Shahada, Islam’s basic profession of belief.
Pakistan, A Horrible Country
… for Christians, certainly. From a report on the ground by a Christian missionary who has worked in Peshawar, where suicide bombings wiped out scores of Christians the other day: “This is a catastrophe for the Christian community of Pakistan,” my secretary Ashbel Taj said to me a few minutes ago. He had just returned […]
… for Christians, certainly. From a report on the ground by a Christian missionary who has worked in Peshawar, where suicide bombings wiped out scores of Christians the other day:
“This is a catastrophe for the Christian community of Pakistan,” my secretary Ashbel Taj said to me a few minutes ago. He had just returned from visiting the wounded at Lady Reading Hospital after today’s bombing at All Saints’ Church in the heart of the old city of Peshawar.
Despite having the largest trauma unit in the world, the hospital scene was chaotic, he said, as staff struggled to treat the 200 or more wounded. Information is still emerging, but numerous conversations with colleagues in Peshawar – I’m in the USA at the moment – indicate that 150 or more people were killed.
I’ve tried to reach Bishop Humphrey Sarfaraz Peters, but he is fully occupied in visiting the wounded in hospital. He was on visitation at the parish in Bannu, in Waziristan, but rushed back upon news of the bombing.
Among the dead are students and alums of Edwardes College, the number yet to be determined. I am told that William Ghulam, who translated for me when I preached at All Saints’, was killed, as were a daughter and son of his. William was head of a high school in Peshawar and an Edwardian. His daughter was a current student at Edwardes, his son an alum who was in medical school. William had an active mind and was a keen observer of changing times in Pakistan. He would come to tea with me to discuss translation details of an upcoming sermon. We once discussed Edwardes opening an Education Department, and he was keen to be involved, especially as he was working toward an MPhil degree in Education.
The litany goes on.
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reports on the terrible conditions Christians in that country must live under. Excerpt:
One thing about Youhanabad that stands out is that its residents seldom, if at all, complain of having faced discrimination at the personal level. This changes radically at the community level though. There is not a single government school in Youhanabad while even small villages nearby, which house a majority of Muslims, sometimes have more than one government educational institution. The only education available is provided by private schools which charge as much as 2,500 rupees a month for each child studying there. A sanitation worker, earning anywhere between 10,000 rupees and 15,000 rupees a month, cannot afford such expensive education for any of his children.
Ishtiaque explains how the absence of government schools leads to another problem: since there are no government buildings in Youhanabad, no polling stations are set up there for thousands of Christian voters residing there. “Even though my brother is a political worker, he could not convince my mother to cast her vote as she was too scared to leave the security of our neighbourhood and go to a polling station in a Muslim neighbourhood,” he says, with a sad grin on his face.
Deep in the winding streets of Youhanabad, there is a house that always stays locked from inside. This is exceptional in a neighbourhood where doorways not only remain unlocked but even ajar at most times of the day. Those living inside this particular house do not open the door to visitors without first thoroughly inquiring about their identities and the purpose of their visit. Ashfaque and Saima (not their real names) who live inside have a reason for their caution: they don’t want anyone to know about them since this could endanger their lives. Fear, indeed, has haunted the two since they got married 16 months ago after Saima, a Muslim girl from a city in south Punjab, fell in love with Ashfaque, a Christian boy from Lahore. They had first met in a college in Lahore where they were both studying for their Bachelors’ degrees.
When Saima wanted to convert to Christianity in order to spend life with the man she loves, she was very scared. She had never heard of anyone do this before. As the two were making inquiries to find out how she could convert, her fear grew since religious punishment for a Muslim converting to another religion is death. Since then, her fears have subsided but every now and then her husband receives life-threatening phone calls – forcing her fears to come rushing back to her.
“I don’t think Ashfaque tells me about all the calls he receives. I think he wants me to raise our daughter in a sense of security,” says Saima as she rocks her four-month-old baby girl on her knee. She has not stepped out of her house since her marriage, except when she needed to visit the hospital.
A prisoner in her own home. Meanwhile, in Kenya, Islamic militants continue to evangelize for their faith:
Then the gunmen handed chocolates to the children as they left the mall, the man said.
In a nearby bed, Aquilah Kauser Ishaq, 32, a marketing manager for a local radio station, was nursing wounds from a grenade attack. She was on the top floor when she and her friends heard explosions. Outside in the parking lot, kids were taking part in a cooking class when the gunmen began firing randomly in their direction. “They actually targeted the kids,” Ishaq said. “There was a brother and sister running away. They were shot dead in front of us.”
Think of these 2010 words by Peter Berger, the eminent sociologist of religion:
Generally speaking, conflicts become more violent if they are legitimated in religious terms. No religious tradition, even the most pacific one (think Buddhism), is immune against serving this kind of legitimation. All the same, superimposing a religious world map over a similar map delineating violent conflicts, the borders of Islam stand out. And mostly Muslims are the initiators of the violence (though Christians may have tried hard to provoke them).
This is not to deny that most Muslims in the contemporary world desire to live in peace with their neighbors of other faith, nor to deny that there have been Muslim states that presided over such peaceful relations for long periods of time (for example, intermittently under the caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, in Moghul India and in the Ottoman empire). Nevertheless, there is a problem that goes back to the very beginnings of Muslim history: From the time that the first Muslims established themselves as the rulers of Medina, Islam was a political and increasingly a legal system as well as a faith. In Medina Muhammad continued to be a prophet, but he also became the head of a state and a military leader. With the exception of Southeast Asia (where Islam was spread by traders from the the subcontinent), what we now know as the Muslim world was established by conquest. It is no accident that in traditional Muslim thought the world is divided into two spheres—the realm of Islam (dar ul-Islam) and the realm of war (dar ul-harb). Put simply, it is assumed that the border between Islamic rule and the rest of the world marks a state of war, even if periods of armistice are possible. One should be cognizant of the important fact that there are Muslim thinkers today who are reformulating the nature of Islamic law (sharia) and of Islamic war (jihad) in a much more liberal manner. But one must also recognize that there is a weighty tradition to the contrary and that a large number of Muslims, possibly the majority, does not favor these reformulations.
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