“Christian harassment is on the rise. Can you do anything to stop it?”

Last updated on: June 3, 2017 at 9:23 am by Dan Peterson

“Christian harassment is on the rise. Can you do anything to stop it?” 2017-06-03T09:23:13-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The “Hanging Church” or “Suspended Church” in the Coptic section of Old Cairo is itself ancient, and stands on a site where a church has stood since the third century AD. (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

This topic isn’t receiving nearly enough attention:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865681212/Do-US-efforts-to-help-persecuted-Christians-around-the-world-help-or-hurt.html

Incidentally –I may have made this comment before, but, in this context, I feel like making it again — while living in Egypt (for four years) immediately after our marriage, my wife and I had a very close Egyptian Christian friend. He told me once of how often he had been asked, by American and European Christians, who it was that had converted his family. Was it the English, they asked, or the French? To which he typically responded that it was St. Mark the Evangelist, in the first century. Christianity, you see, didn’t start in Rome or Canterbury or Wittenberg. It started in Palestine. It’s been a Middle Eastern religion from its very beginnings. Jesus was Middle Eastern. The twelve apostles were Middle Eastern. They spoke Aramaic.

Anyway, that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Lately, for example, I’ve had a couple of people assure me that it’s Islam, as such — not an aberrant form of Islam, and not merely an intolerant radical sub-sect of Islam, but Islam itself — that is killing Christians in the Middle East, because Muhammad and the Qur’an commanded that all Christians should be murdered.

But this is historically absurd.

Islam has dominated the Middle East since the seventh century AD. If Muhammad and the Qur’an really command that Muslims should kill all Christians, why are there still Christians in the Middle East? (Of course, the more fundamental question would be, if Muhammad and the Qur’an really command that Muslims should kill all Christians, why is no such command to be found in the Qur’an or the sayings of Muhammad? But that’s not today’s topic.)

Perhaps one explanation might be that Christianity only arrived recently in the Middle East. Perhaps with Billy Graham. That’s why anti-Christian Islamic activity has spiked in the past few years. But any such notion is historically false. (To be generous with it.)

In fact, we know that Egypt, for example, converted very gradually to Islam, requiring several centuries after the Arab conquest of the mid-seventh century before it attained to a Muslim majority. There has never been a government-sponsored campaign of anti-Christian genocide in Egypt or anywhere else under Islamic rule.

So the claim that Islam, as such, is the problem, when (a) the current problem is only a few years old and (b) Islam has dominated the region for something on the order of seventeen centuries, fails the test of obvious, basic logic.

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