A court in Pakistan today acquitted Rimsha Masih, the teenage girl whose arrest on blasphemy charges this summer drew worldwide attention. A local mullah had accused Masih, who has Downs Syndrome, of burning pages from a Quran. The case against her fell apart, however, when associates accused the mullah of planting the incriminating evidence. Masih has been out on bail at an undisclosed location. The case has shed light on Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which, detractors claim, is often used as a pretext for settling scores with Christians and other religious minorities. The Wall Street Journal has the story here.
Christianophobia
In the last few years, a new word has crept into our vocabulary: Christianophobia. As far as I can tell, the word is being used to refer to two different, though related, phenomena. The first is the anxiety and antipathy that traditional Christianity creates in cultural and intellectual institutions in the West: academia, journalism, publishing, the entertainment industry. I believe this is the “Christianophobia” to which Pope Benedict refers, for example, when he decries the growing “hostility and prejudice” against Christianity in Europe.
I’m not sure that “Christianophobia” is the right word to use in this context. The hostility to Christianity one encounters in the West is mostly ideological. What we have is a struggle between competing worldviews, one of which seeks to win by excluding the other, which it sees as irrational, from public debate. This strategy is illiberal, ill-informed, and childish, but it is not really “phobic” in the way we normally use that term. It reflects not so much a visceral antipathy to Christians as people as a desire for Christians to keep quiet and stop retarding social progress.
Now, things may be changing. When critics denounce Christians as “bigots” — for maintaining the traditional understanding of marriage, for example — that does imply a personal judgment. Bigots are bad people; you wouldn’t want them living next door to you or building a gathering place in your neighborhood. You Read more
Coptic Church Names New Pope
A follow up to Thursday’s post: on Sunday, the Coptic Orthodox Church named its 118th pope, Tawadros, a bishop from the Upper Nile region. Pope Tawadros now has what Walter Russell Mead ruefully calls “the toughest job in the world”: negotiating for the Christian minority in an Egypt governed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, as well as their political rivals, the even more fundamentalist Salafists, have talked about increasing the role of Islamic law in Egypt. The National (United Arab Emirates) reports:
At the center of the political squabbling in Egypt is the role of Islam in the country’s new constitution, currently being drafted. . . . Christians, along with liberal and secularists, oppose demands by Islamists to increase the role of Shariah. The prospects of a stronger role for Islamic law in legislation increase the community’s concern of further marginalization, or of a curtailing of their rights of worship and expression.
Al Jazeera also has interesting coverage, including a group interview with scholars and representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Coptic Church.
What Film?
That, I think it’s fair to say, was the first reaction most Americans had to the news that a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad had set off mobs in Egypt and Libya, resulting in attacks on American embassies and the murder of an American ambassador. Apparently, the story is this. A couple of Americans have posted a film on YouTube, the oddly-named “The Innocence of Muslims,” that ridicules the Prophet and the founding of Islam, and also portrays the suffering of Coptic Christians in contemporary Egypt. It’s unlikely the “film” — it’s really more a poorly-done video — would have been seen by more than a handful of internet trawlers, had not Terry Jones, the Florida pastor last known for threatening to burn a Quran, promoted it. Word spread through the Middle East – who knew Jones had a following there? – and, eventually, as one thing led to another, Islamist mobs saw a chance to stoke resentment against the US. And now we see the results.
There will be time to reflect on all of this, but two things seem immediately clear. First, there’s going to be more violence before this episode ends. Some of that violence will be directed against American interests, but most will be directed against the Middle East’s own Christians, particularly Egypt’s long-suffering Copts. Local governments will do relatively little to protect these Christians, and the international human rights community will remain largely silent as well. (Hopefully, the US is getting ready to grant a wave of asylum applications from Coptic refugees, but you never know). In Syria, Assad’s support among Christians will only solidify. Syrian Christians really need no reminder of what is likely to happen to them if the Ba’ath regime falls, but yesterday’s events do underscore things.
Second, whatever happens in this crisis, similar crises are bound to occur in future. As long as America continues to respect the First Amendment, people will continue to make and show films like “The Innocence of Muslims.” In a YouTube age, in which anyone with a video camera and a computer can beam films around the globe for very little money, it will be virtually impossible to restrain them — even assuming it would be legal, which it would not be, to attempt to do so. And, as long as the religious sensibilities of the West and the Muslim world continue to diverge so radically — as long as videos most Americans would dismiss as obscure junk continue to be bloody provocations in the Muslim world — clashes like yesterday’s seem sadly inevitable.
Conference on Christian Persecution
Notwithstanding this weekend’s good news from Iran, the persecution of Christians around the world continues to pose a major human rights problem. This November, the Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame will hold a conference, “Seed of the Church: Telling the Story of Today’s Christian Martyrs,” addressing the issues. Here’s an excerpt from the conference announcement:
It is striking how little attention the secular world pays to this injustice, despite the fact that the persecution of Christians is one of the largest classes of human rights violations in the world today. The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community estimates that some 100 million Christians are victims of severe persecution. Yet governments, human rights organizations, the global media, and the western university pay little heed. For example, of three hundred reports that Human Rights Watch has produced since 2008, only one focuses on a case of Christian persecution. Similarly, despite the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act by the U.S. Congress in 1998, neither U.S. foreign policy nor civil society has ever made the persecution of Christians a high priority.
John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter and CNN, who recently wrote an interesting essay on the subject, will be one of the keynote speakers. Conference details are here.
Catholic Representative Accuses Israel of Ignoring Attacks on Christians
Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa is the “Custodian of the Holy Land,” in charge of Catholic rights in Christian holy places in Israel and Palestine. Normally, Custodians are fairly circumspect. This week, however, Fr. Pizzaballa gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, in which he criticized Israeli law enforcement for failing to do enough to prevent attacks on Christians. Fr. Pizzaballa’s comments came in response to a recent arson attack by Jewish settlers on an 11th-Century Trappist monastery. The monastery’s door was set on fire and anti-Christian graffiti sprayed on the walls. Although the Israeli government condemned the attack, Pizzaballa alleges that police are not taking the crime seriously. In his view, Christians are convenient scapegoats in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. “Those who sprayed their hateful slogans expressed their anger at the dismantlement of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank,” he says. “But why do they vent this anger against Christians and Christian places of worship?”The Haaretz interview requires a subscription, but you can read an account in the Telegraph, here.
Girl in Pakistani Quran-Burning Case to be Released on Bail
Rimsha Masih, the Pakistani Christian teenager who has been in prison for weeks on blasphemy charges, will be freed on bail to await trial, the Guardian reports. A local mullah had accused Masih, who has Down’s Syndrome, of burning pages from a Quran. This week, however, the mullah’s colleagues accused him of framing Masih by planting incriminating evidence on her as part of a plot to drive Christians from the neighborhood. A senior Muslim cleric subsequently spoke in Masih’s defense and personally guaranteed her safety if the court were to release her. The case has shed light on Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which, detractors claim, is often used as a pretext for settling scores with Christians and other religious minorities. Ali Dayan Hasan, the Pakistani director of Human Rights Watch, says that he hopes the Masih case will lead to re-examination of the law, but other experts have expressed doubt about the possibility of reform. The law enjoys great popular support in Pakistan.
Today’s Argument at the ECtHR: Highlights
Today in Strasbourg, a chamber of the European Court of Human Rights heard oral argument in four consolidated cases from the United Kingdom: Chaplin v. UK, Eweida v. UK, Ladele v. UK, and McFarlane v. UK. The applicants in these cases argue that UK courts failed to protect their Article 9 and Article 14 rights by allowing their employers to discipline them for practicing Christianity. Chaplin, a nurse, and Eweida, a British Airways employee, were forbidden by their employers from wearing cross necklaces at work. Ladele, a public registrar, lost her job when she declined, on the ground of religious conviction, to register same-sex civil partnerships. McFarlane, a psychotherapist, lost his job when he expressed doubts as a Christian about the morality of homosexual conduct.
For an American watching the webcast on the ECtHR’s website, today’s hearing offered some surprises. First, the argument was about two hours long, and the judges waited patiently to the end before asking any questions. A note to our readers in Europe: in an American courtroom, the judges would have interrupted in two minutes! Substantively, the counsel for the UK, James Eadie, made some claims that strike an American lawyer as remarkably broad. For example, he argued that Article 9 does not even cover the practice of wearing crosses. Article 9, he argued, only protects religious practices that are “generally recognized” within a religion, and there is no consensus in Christianity that adherents must wear crosses. I’m not aware of any analogous principle in American law. In response to Eadie, Eweida’s attorney, James Dingemans, scoffed at the idea that a practice must be “generally recognized” or “scripturally Read more
ECtHR Broadcast of Hearing in British Christians’ Cases to Begin Shortly
This morning in Strasbourg, a chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held a hearing in four consolidated cases concerning religious freedom in Britain. The applicants are British Christians who allege that UK employment law does not sufficiently protect their rights to wear crosses at work and to refuse duties that, in the applicants’ view, condone homosexual activity. The court will post a broadcast of the hearing on its website shortly, starting at 2:30 pm local time. For the ECtHR’s press release summarizing the issues in these cases, follow the links here.
Developments in Pakistani Quran-Burning Case
Some interesting developments in the case of Rimsha Masih, the 13-year old mentally handicapped Pakistani girl currently under arrest for violating that country’s blasphemy law. Masih is in custody on charges that she burned pages from a Quran; as a result of threatened reprisals, 900 of her fellow Christians have fled their neighborhood outside the capital of Islamabad. Yesterday, Pakistani police arrested one of the Masih’s main accusers, a mullah named Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti, on charges that he framed the girl by placing pages from a Quran in a trash bag she was carrying. Two of the mullah’s assistants have come forward to say that Chishti did this in order to drive Christians from the neighborhood, where Muslims wish to build a madrasa. Today, one of Pakistan’s senior Muslim clerics intervened in the controversy, condemning Chishiti and the plot to drive out Christians and personally guaranteeing the safety of Masih if she is released from prison. The Guardian (why is the American news media ignoring this story?) reports that the support for Masih “from the chairman of the All Pakistan Ulema Council, a grouping of Islamic clerics, is being seen as a remarkable turn of events in a country where individuals accused of insulting Islam are almost never helped by powerful public figures.” Last year, a regional governor and cabinet minister were assassinated after they publicly criticized the country’s blasphemy law.