Muslim Heretics Conference

Justice Saghir Ahmed, a judge of the Multan bench of Lahore High Court, Pakistan, sent on July 29, 2008 two under-aged Christian girls to a “darul aman” in Multan, Punjab, for their safety. Darul aman is the name of the institutions set up by government for the shelter of women needing temporary sanctuary or protection.
According to Aftab Alexander Mughal, of Minorities Concern of Pakistan, Saba Younis, 13 years old, and Anila, 10 years old, sisters and Christians, were kidnapped on June 26 by a Muslim man Muhammad Arif Bajwa and then forcibly converted to Islam. When the matter came before the court, Main Naeem Sardar, District and Sessions Judge Muzaffargarh, on July 12, ordered that the girls are not to be remanded to their Christian parents because the girls are Muslim now.
The father of the girls, Younis Masih, filed an appeal to the high court where a Muslim lawyer Rashid Rehman pleaded his case. The court did not believe that the girls accepted Islam by their own free will; therefore the girls were sent to a ‘darul aman’ in order to be relieved of pressure on the part of Muslims. The girls will again appear in court on Aug. 4 and then the case will be decided according to the girls’ statement.
“At least now the girls would be out of some pressure from those Muslims with whom they forcedly lived for 34 days,” said Rashid Rehman, a Muslim lawyer who appeared before the court on Masih’s behalf, as told to Minorities Concern of Pakistan.
The girls were kidnapped by Muslim fruit vendor Muhammad Arif Bajwa in Chowk Munda, a small town in South Punjab. They had come from Chak No. 552, a Muslim-dominated village, to Chowk Munda to visit their uncle. Bajwa kidnapped the girls at gun point and told them to remain silent or they would be killed. The girls were then sold to another Muslim man Falak Sher Gill , a well-known criminal.

Russian secular and religious leaders may be ganging up to pre-empt what they see as a bid for influence in Ukraine on the part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. Church in Russia is seen as “department” of government.

In Muslim-majority Pakistan, Christians and Hindus work in sub-human conditions and are arbitrarily force to vacate their shantytowns. A Christian, accused of theft, was beaten to death by Pakistani troops.

On June 27 the girls were forcefully converted to Islam, and on June 28 Saba Younis was made to marry Gill’s son Muhammad Amjid after receiving a fatwa (religious decree) from a Muslim religious leader, to justify their actions. Later on, it was disclosed that the Muslim religious leader was bribed to provide the ‘fatwa.’
When Masih went to Gill to demand his daughters back Gill refused to let them go. Gill, though, threatened Masih and said that now the girls had accepted Islam they could not return to their Christian family. Ashfaq Fateh, a Christian social worker from Toba Tek Singh, told Minorities Concern of Pakistan that Gill warned Masih that if he filed a case against him his family would be killed. He also claimed that he could not be caught by the police or found guilty by any court.
Despite these threats, Masih reported all the details to the local police. However, no action has been taken to get the girls released and the police have told him to keep quite about the whole affair.
This incident has created terror among the Christians of Chak 552 and adjoining areas where Christians are now very frightened to speak out against what has happened out of fear of their lives. There are 158 Muslim families in Chak 552 but only 14 Christian families. Law enforcement agencies have been silent and apparently hesitant to take action against the culprits.
Khalid Raheel, the uncle of the abducted girls, contacted Minorities Concern of Pakistan and reported that Ahsan ul Haq - a local member of provincial assembly (MPA) who belongs to the ruling PPP party - is supporting the abductors. Raheel stated that when the Christian members of the local government visited the police station for help they were totally ignored. He went on to say that Christians feel helpless.
The alleged culprits filed a case of harassment against Masih and his family claiming that as the girls have accepted Islam, Masih is threatening them and the other Muslims connected to the case. On the other hand, Masih also filed a petition in a local court for the recovery of his girls. Main Naeem Sardar, District and Sessions Judge Muzaffargarh, on July 12 declared because the girls admitted they are Muslim they cannot return to their Christian parents. According to Masih, the judge did not allow him to have word with his daughter. It is a common interpretation under Islamic law that a Christian cannot have custody of a Muslim.
This is the second time, that Christian girls from this area have been kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam and then made to marry a Muslim man without their consent.
In another incident about six months ago, Jamila Akhtar – a Christian woman from the same village - was kidnapped in a same area and sent to Karachi, the financial capital of Pakistan. The police did not help to find the missing woman and her aggrieved family is still awaiting her return. Her whereabouts are currently unknown to them.
Although there are many such incidents in the cities and especially in the villages in which girls of poor families are kidnapped by powerful people, it is easier to kidnap Christian, Hindu or Sikh girls, forcefully convert them to Islam, and then make them marry a Muslim man.
In such incidents, religious minorities generally struggle alone without the support of the authorities. The police and majority of the local Muslim community does not support non-Muslim families saying that when a girl has accepted Islam she can not go back to her non-Muslim parents. Many cases of kidnapping of Christians girls in Punjab and Hindu girls in Singh have been reported by human rights groups but very few get media attention.
Religious minorities represent but 3 percent (Christians are only 1.5 per cent) of the total population of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Under the constitution, religious minorities do not have equal rights as Muslims.
Cases of kidnapping of Christian girls:

- On June 4, 2008 a Muslim Ramzan kidnapped two (2) Christian sisters of Chak 285-JB, a village in Toba Tek Singh of Punjab province.
- On March 28, 2008, a Christian girl Farzana Rashid, 14, was kidnapped by policemen from her house in Lahore Cantonment. Later on, she was raped and charged under a false case.
- On May 14, 2008 a Christian girl Sumaira Rafiq Masih was raped by 3 influential landlords of the area while she was working in the fields near Patoki, Punjab province. Police have still not arrested the culprits.
- On Aug. 5, 2007 in Faisalabad, Punjab, two (2) Christian girls aged 11years and 13 years were kidnapped, forcibly converted to Islam and then married off to strangers.
- In another heinous crime on May 26, 2006 a six-year old Sikh girl was forcibly converted to Islam at Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
- In 2005, about 50 Hindu and 20 Christian girls were kidnapped in the country and majority forcibly converted to Islam.

Martin Barillas is a former US diplomat, who also worked as a democracy advocate and election observer in Latin America.

Christian girls forced to convert to Islam | Spero News

AYAAN Hirsi Ali shivers through a cold morning in Australia, where the southern hemisphere winter had caught her unprepared. The chilly five-star hotel room in which we meet, with its bare walls, narrow windows and security guards at the door, conjures up a prison. The image is apposite.

Hirsi Ali is a woman who has faced a death sentence since 2004, when a threat to kill her was pinned with a knife to the body of her friend Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was assassinated in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim extremist.

Her visit to Australia is unannounced. The security arrangements are elaborate and secretive, reminiscent of Cold War spy stories. But this is a new war, waged against ordinary and - in Hirsi Ali’s case - extraordinary people, and Hirsi Ali is on the front line.

The Islamists want her dead because she is an apostate: she no longer believes in Allah and has renounced the Islamic faith. The penalty for this, under sharia law, is death.

“I read yesterday that 36 per cent of British Muslims believe apostates should be put to death, but in many Islamic countries it is 80 or 90 per cent,” she says. “In a way I am lucky. I have the privilege of being protected from the Islamists who want to murder me. But what about the people who don’t have protection, who are murdered or blown up in the street in India or Turkey or Iraq?

“This is a war that is being waged both internally and externally. It is waged against people within the Islamic world who are seen as infidels or as hypocrites who are not strong enough in their Islamic faith, and it is also waged against the West.”

Hirsi Ali is delicately built and softly spoken, with only the trace of a foreign accent in her pronunciation of the letter R.

She occasionally brings an elegant hand down on the table to emphasise a point, but she commands with the force of her ideas, not the force of her voice.

It is impossible in her presence, surrounded by police and security, not to be conscious of what she has sacrificed: the right to wander at will in the street, to do what she wants, safe in the knowledge that she lives in a law-abiding society. Yet it seems these privations have allowed her to focus on the life of the mind.

It is almost two years since the publication of her autobiography, Infidel, an account of her journey from childhood in Somalia to becoming one of the most prominent critics of Islam and particularly the religion’s attitude towards women. It offered the backstory to her earlier book The Caged Virgin, a call for the emancipation of Muslim women.

On her short visit to Australia, she talks about the ideas she will present in her next book. Shortcut to the Enlightenment, due out in 2010, will explore the key differences between Islam and the West through imagined conversations in the New York Public Library between the prophet Mohammed and three of her favourite philosophers, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek.

“I was inspired to write the book after September 11,” she says.

“I followed intently the debate in books, on television, in newspapers. And it became clear to me that there were three fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and the West, and three philosophers, whose work I had read and admired, each of whom wrote about one of these issues.”

In The Road to Serfdom, a book published in 1944, towards the end of a war against one form of totalitarianism and on the eve of a war against another, Hayek champions the rights of the individual. For Hirsi Ali, Hayek’s philosophy is a challenge to Islam, which demands that the believer sacrifice their life on earth for a utopian afterlife.

“The great thing about Hayek is his proposition that the individual’s life is here on earth, not in the hereafter.

“The collective have to not just accommodate the idea of freedom but create institutions that protect the freedom of the individual, and every individual must learn that my freedom ends where yours begins.”

Hirsi Ali beams as she says this. It is clear that these ideas had the force of a revelation for her, coming from a society where, as a Muslim woman, she had no rights as an individual. Hirsi Ali, who was forced by her father into arranged marriage, clearly finds the ideas of Hayek personally liberating and defends him as if he were an old friend.

But she is not optimistic that the exposition of Hayek’s ideas in her book will easily persuade Muslims. “For Muslims to change to Hayek’s point of view, they have to acknowledge that collectivism has failed.”

The trouble is, she explains, that every time an Islamic society fails to live up to the utopian dream, the reformers say that it was because the ruler wasn’t pure enough.

Osama bin Laden is a case in point, she says. He criticises the Saudi royal family for being corrupt and says the solution is to follow strictly the life and teachings of Mohammed. “And that has been what every reformer has said for 1400 years.”

It isn’t just the Muslim world that has trouble with the ideas of Hayek, I tell Hirsi Ali. Kevin Rudd, in an article published last year in The Monthly, saw “the influence of Friedrich Hayek” behind a brutopia of market forces, relentlessly encroaching on the life of the family, friends and community.

Hirsi Ali looks astonished. “Your Prime Minister still has to do a bit of reading, I guess,” she says, laughing softly. “I haven’t read the article, so I can only comment on what you say. But if that is that is what he said, he is wrong about Hayek. Hayek’s argument is that because there is competition, because individuals are free to choose who to trade with and under what circumstances, and because the free market under the rule of law is a regulated market, it works. Not that it is perfect but that it is better than any other system. Hayek’s criticism of the theory that you need a larger government, a bureaucratic hand, the well-meaning socialist to guide us in achieving social justice and in sharing income, is: who are these people? Hayek also shows that in all the places where socialism and its more extreme form, communism, have been tried, they failed terribly.”

As for destroying the family, she is mildly indignant. “Hayek says that the human being is free to choose who to associate with. As a woman you can choose who your spouse is. I don’t see how Hayek’s views corrode family life in any way. Both individuals and the children are equal before the law.”

Her book also explores the ideas Popper presented in The Open Society and Its Enemies, his highly influential two-volume book, also written during the course of World War II. “Popper examines Plato in the first volume and then leaps straight to Hegel and Marx, missing out Mohammed in the middle,” she says. “I’m not going to say anything offensive about Islam. I once said that Mohammed was a pervert and a tyrant. I got into trouble for that and I’m not going to do that again. I just want to set out the ideas of Islam and in this case the relationship between the individual and the collective or the ummah, as Muslims call it.”

But it is a given that even when she tries to avoid controversy, her ideas will be profoundly controversial. Hirsi Ali argues that Popper’s critique of Plato and Marx - that their utopian idylls were actually horrific totalitarian nightmares - applies equally to Islam.

“I can see very striking similarities between Marxist arguments and Mohammedan arguments,” she says. “It’s all about social justice, about the poor and the orphans and the downtrodden. How can you be against social justice? It’s just that the ends justify the means. All means. In Mohammed’s case, jihad. Killing the innocent. Plundering, pillaging. Marx never became a ruler the way Mohammed became a ruler but Stalin, Lenin did.

“Ideas are very powerful. Ideas inspire people to do things. I think it’s good to have the ideas of Western liberal society and Islam put starkly side by side so the reader can see why they are incompatible.”

The final piece of writing that Hirsi Ali examines is Mill’s essay The Subjection of Women, written with his wife in 1869. “John Stuart Mill wrote at a time when gender relations were set in stone. It so happened that the woman’s position was the less pleasant one. Their education was limited to preparing them to be wives and mothers and hostesses. It was never as bad as in the time of Mohammed, and I’m not comparing the two.”

She sees a similarity in the rigidity of gender roles and argues that in the context of his time, Mohammed was a progressive. “Mohammed lived in a time when … girls were buried before the age of seven. Men could have as many wives as they wanted. He was the first to set up some rules, to limit men to four wives, to say that infanticide should be stopped. He decreed that women could inherit and gave them a small share.

“All Mill is going to argue is that educated women are better for society, why societies that free women from the shackles of tradition are more successful than societies that do not do that.

“Mohammed is going to present his ideas and criticise Western societies, ideas you see in the current literature by radical Muslims, why they think the Western woman is a slave of advertising and fashion, and the working woman has got the worst of both worlds.”

Before we finish, I can’t resist asking this highly educated African-born American who hails from the opposite side of the political spectrum what she thinks of US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

“I think he is very smart,” she says. “I don’t think it matters that he has, in his very short career, a left-liberal record. I think that just shows consistency. I think he can win but it’s very important what he says now that he is going to do. National security is vital. It’s one thing to say that you are going to talk to your enemies, but then what?

“And on the economy, it’s not a good time, it’s never a good time, to talk about putting up taxes, but especially now when the cost of living is so high.”

Prophet faces a polemic | The Australian

By JOHN CHRISTENSEN
For The Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/01/08

During lunch 18 months ago, Dr. Ben Johnson had an epiphany as Dr. Aisha Jumaan, a Muslim, spoke to him about her faith and her experience of God.

“It came to me that this woman loves and worships the same God I do,” says Johnson, a Christian. “I had this sharpened awareness that in that moment she was in touch with God, just as I was. It was a dawning and an awakening, and it was liberating because it liberates you from standing on a pedestal and looking down on someone else.”

Jessica McGowan/AJC

(ENLARGE)

Ben Johnson is a former minister who retired in 2000 after nearly 20 years as professor of Christian spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur.

Jessica McGowan/AJC

(ENLARGE)

Ben Johnson (left) and Raymond Witham meditates at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center.

It also inspired Johnson to take on a life-changing mission.

At a time when many Christians, including some in his own church, were openly hostile towards a religion they believed advocated terrorism and was at war with the United States, Johnson initiated a dialog aimed at bringing Christians and Muslims together.

He has conducted a series of lectures and small-group gatherings at which more than 500 Muslims and Christians have shared their faith with each other. Not, Johnson hastens to point out, to convert anyone: “Just to understand each other.”

Sunday Johnson will present another lecture, “Beyond 9/11: Christians and Muslims Together — A New World Vision” at Shallowford Presbyterian Church in Atlanta with a vision clear in his mind.

“The dream,” he says, “is that we can find a way to bridge the chasm between Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists and make Atlanta a model city. That over the next year or two, we can develop an interfaith immersion program.”

Johnson is a former minister who retired in 2000 after nearly 20 years as professor of Christian spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur. A towering man from southern Alabama, he calls himself “a soft evangelical. I ask questions and listen rather than telling people what they ought to do or believe.”

He adds, “I’m the most unlikely candidate for becoming a spokesperson about Islam.”

But after several months of retirement, Johnson realized he was depressed. “Life had a dull edge,” he says. “I wondered who I was now that I wasn’t a teacher, preacher, traveler or speaker.”

The depression was about dying. “I had started life well,” he says. “Now I wanted to finish it well.”

Contemplative prayer and the works of Trappist monk Thomas Merton revived him. “When you listen to God,” Johnson says, “you get beneath the dogma and creeds to the essence of what religion is about. It’s about God in human beings in human consciousness.”

Among his insights was that the 21st century would be a religious century, and the key would be relationships between two-thirds of the world’s population: 2.5 billion Christians and 1.5 billion Muslims.

“A voice in my head said, ‘And you don’t know anything about Islam.’ Which was true. I have five degrees, four of them theological, and other religions had never been taught seriously to me.”

He began reading Islamic texts and works on comparative religion, and he asked to meet a Muslim. A church friend introduced him to Dr. Jumaan, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control who is from Yemen.

While there are differences in their faiths — Muslims regard Jesus as a prophet, for example, but not divine — Johnson found that they nevertheless arrived at the same conclusions: God is compassionate, omniscient and ubiquitous.

“Everything about my faith is rooted in the stories my two grandmothers told me,” Jumaan says. “No one formally taught me to pray. As a child, I had the question, ‘What is God like?’ My grandmother answered, ‘That is like a drop in the ocean trying to understand what the ocean is like.’ This is something I feel with my heart — God is present in everything. God is all around us.”

In March of 2007, Johnson gave four lectures on Islam at Shallowford Presbyterian Church, expecting 30 to 40 people to attend. The room overflowed with humanity – 176 in all, and nearly one-third of them Muslims.

“My mouth was very dry,” Johnson says. “There were a couple of imams (Muslim clerics), and I’m thinking they know all this stuff and I’m stumbling around in it.”

Attendees met in small groups after each lecture to discuss their faiths, and the series concluded with a potluck dinner that attracted 250 people.

“We had a pastor and an imam describe how they came to the faith that gives their lives meaning,” Johnson says, “And we asked people to talk at their tables about how their faith came to them.”

Last September, Johnson gave three more lectures at Wieuca Baptist Church in Buckhead which led to the creation of 20 small groups with Muslim and Christian co-coordinators. They meet at least once a quarter to share faith experiences and visions for the future.

“I don’t think just knowledge about [another] faith is any good,” Johnson says. “You’ve gotta meet someone who is of the faith, who is speaking out of conviction and out of experience to really feel what Islam is like.”

Plemon T. El-Amin, imam of the Masjid of Al-Islam in East Atlanta, says Johnson “puts Muslims at ease, because he’s mastered the broad, historical perspective of Islam, but also some of the nuanced details.”

As for a Christian speaking about Islam, El-Amin says, “People are more open to learning a new perspective from someone they respect. Ben is not trying to convert anyone, but to inform people and build understanding.”

“When I heard him talk about Islam, I thought, ‘We need him!’” says Jan Swanson, coordinator of the interfaith group World Pilgrims. “Many Christians are fearful of Islam, so they put up barriers. They trust Ben, so they are willing to take the first step and listen for understanding.”

Johnson says Dr. Jumaan is “like a daughter” now, and he and his wife, Nan, visited her this summer in Yemen. He also participates in a contemplative prayer group that includes a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist and a Jew.

“If you sit in silence, you can get deep enough into your faith that it touches another person,” he says. “The reality is that at the core we’re all the same.”

What surprises him most, he says, is that “in my 76th year I would be passionate about getting Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus together. Nothing in my history would point me in this direction. This is not my dream. I think it’s the spirit of God.”

— Melissa Aberle-Grasse contributed to this article.

Pastor learns about Islam, tries to bridge gap with Christians | ajc.com