Posted on 10/01/2011 2:41:51 PM PDT by Cronos
IF THE "Arab Spring" bathed the Middle East in some much-needed sunlight, there's at least one group that sees ominous clouds on the not-so-distant horizon. That would be the region's embattled and apprehensive Christians, who've lived a kind of double life for many decades.
While nominally citizens of the countries they inhabit, most non-Muslims, the majority of whom are Christian, are treated as second-class members of society because so many governments in that part of the world adhere to sharia, and anyone familiar with the Islamic legal system knows that it codifies discrimination.
For example, while Christians are free (and in some cases pressured) to convert to Islam, Muslims are barred from converting to Christianity. In a notorious case now in the headlines, Yusuf Naderkhani, a Christian pastor, has been sentenced to death in Iran for refusing to renounce his faith, to which he'd converted as a teen.
And Gabriel Said Reynolds recently wrote in Commonweal that an Egyptian Christian who petitioned the government to allow his daughters to receive a Christian education was forced into hiding after receiving death threats when his request was made public.
So Christians in the Middle East can be forgiven if they don't embrace the Arab Spring with as much fervor as their Muslim brothers and sisters because - to put it bluntly - the devil they know is at least more predictable than the devil they don't - which is, without a doubt, Islamic fundamentalism.
And in many parts of the Middle East, that's the only form of Islam there is, despite what you hear from organizations such as the Council on American Islamic Relations.
While Christians were as oppressed as the next citizen in countries when secular tyrants like Hosni Mubarak, Moammar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein ruled the roost, at least they weren't prey to the sectarian hostility rampant in other places such as Iran and Afghanistan, hotbeds of jihadism.
It's true that Egyptian Christians were always treated poorly by the government, but so was the Islamic Brotherhood, which was crushed into submission by the iron will of Mubarak and his military junta. Christians were merely as persecuted - or as tolerated - as any other group that the government didn't like.
But now, as the tyrants topple like dominoes, Christians have good reason to worry that they will be unique and tragic victims of this Arab awakening.
Heck we are persecuted here!
There was a thriving Christian community in Iraq up ‘til 2003. Oops!
Thanks Cronos.
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