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Islamists Accelerate Religious Rhetoric, Intolerance
by Barbara G. Baker
ISTANBUL, March 19 (Compass) -- Hours before a U.S.-led war to topple Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein appears poised to begin, Iraq’s small Christian minority fears more
than American bombs. They expect to be targeted by a growing tide of Islamic militancy now
being encouraged in the secularized Arab state.
Numbering less than 400,000, Iraq’s Christian community has in recent months become
the object of overt discrimination by Islamist elements. The attacks have ranged from
verbal abuse and graffiti campaigns to stone-throwing and even brutal assassinations.
Although Saddam Hussein initially kept religion out of Iraq’s political life, he
began to encourage devotion to Islam after the 1991 Gulf War, emblazoning the Muslim
slogan “God is great” on the Iraq flag and claiming descent from the family of
the prophet Mohammed. Four years ago he launched a “faith campaign” to promote a
revival of Islam, building scores of new mosques and religious schools across the country.
Over the past few weeks, local church leaders report that anti-Christian rhetoric has
dominated Friday-prayer sermons in Baghdad’s mosques. “Mohammed said fight the
infidels with everything you have,” Abu Bakr al-Sammerai declared at the Abdel Qadr
al-Gaylani mosque on March 7.
Ignoring the government’s previous rules on religious tolerance, other Muslim
preachers have urged their listeners to “fight the followers of the devil,”
openly labeling Christians (known locally as “Nazarenes”) as
“infidels.”
On March 13, Iraq’s leading Muslim scholars issued a religious edict, declaring that
anyone who aided the U.S. and British forces would be “condemned to hell.”
Last week a bishop of the largest Christian denomination, the Chaldean Catholic Church,
told a “New York Times” reporter that he had lodged an official objection with
the Ministry of Religious Affairs over this blatant threat against the local Christian
community.
“You have some mullahs denouncing the Crusaders and the infidels from the minaret,
meaning us as the Christians here,” Chaldean Bishop Shlemon Warduni protested.
“The fanatics in Iraq are using it as an excuse to act against the Christians.”
Dominated by Wahhabi zealots linked to Saudi Arabia’s intolerant sect of Islam, the
new breed of Iraqi Islamists have been blamed for a number of incidents and threats of
violence across Iraq in the past year.
A Chaldean Catholic nun murdered on August 15 in her convent in central Baghdad had been
executed in what local church sources had described as “an Algerian-style Islamist
killing.” According to the medical examiner, the 70-year-old nun had been stripped
naked and cruelly tortured for five hours before her throat was cut and she was beheaded.
Fellow nuns of Sister Cecilia Musha Hanna “think it was a hate crime against
Christians,” according to an October 28 “Newsweek” magazine report. When
Wahhabi Muslims built a mosque in 1998 directly across the street from the Order of the
Daughters of the Sacred Heart, the nuns said, graffiti against the nuns started to appear
on nearby walls, followed by rock-throwing and other difficulties.
In the northern city of Mosul, known now as a Wahhabi stronghold, local Christians have
also reported growing harassment of their clergy and church communities. Some 15
Christians were wounded in September when Islamist zealots stoned them coming out of
church. Bishops and leading Christian families in the northern city have received letters
telling them to convert to Islam, sometimes with accompanying threats, other times
offering them cash rewards.
Local nuns have been subjected to such abuse that some have stopped wearing their habits,
and many report that strangers on the street have ordered them to remove their crosses.
From the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Northern Iraq, a leading evangelical clergyman told
Compass this week that he and his church members expect potential attacks from both
Islamic militants as well as from secular anti-Western elements.
“This is not just because of our evangelical activities,” the church leader
said, “but also because of our relationship and support from American and British
friends.”
Just two days ago, the pastor said, he had prepared his church members to be ready to
leave their homes, shops and church buildings within a half-hour’s notice. “We
have hidden all our equipment, Bibles, books, computers, emptying our offices of
everything of value,” he said, in case they needed to flee rapidly.
In addition, he said, many Christians in Northern Iraq’s cities are preparing to
leave their houses, renting a room or finding other lodging for their families in
undisclosed locations in the surrounding villages. Although local believers continue to
meet for fellowship in small groups and the schools remain open, they have developed
contingency plans to avoid attacks by strangers and post-war looting.
In mid February, a Kurdish Christian was publicly assassinated in Northern Iraq by a
fanatical Muslim who claimed he was “fulfilling the will of Allah” by killing an
apostate from Islam. The police chief of Zakho has declared he will demand the death
penalty against the arrested murderer of Ziwar Mohammed Ismaeel, who is survived by his
widow and five children.
“In the event of an aggression by the West,” Father Youssef Tuma told Reuters
news agency this week, “we pray the other party does not take it out on us or look at
Christians of the East as the cause.
“Prayers are all we have left,” the Iraqi priest concluded.
Iraq’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has shrunk from 10
percent of the population 20 years ago to about 1.5 percent of the country’s 24
million people. The majority of the Christians are Catholic or Orthodox, with several
dozen evangelical congregations located mostly in larger urban areas.
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