Is Salman Taseer in his grave because some Christian-owned goats
strayed into Muslim fields in the Punjab region of Pakistan?
Did close
to 100 churchgoers in Iraq and Egypt die because two abused Coptic
Christian wives opted to convert to Islam in an attempt to sidestep
their creed's ban on divorce?
These seemingly absurd sparks ignited two of the
higher-octane bonfires in a new wave in the persecution of minority
Christians across the Islamic world in recent days.
But look closely and it emerges that what is claimed to
have been done in the name of Allah is more often about raw political
power and social control, either exercised by autocratic regimes or
sought by extremist and fundamentalist breakouts - like Osama Bin
Laden's al-Qaeda and its imitators.
Taseer, the provincial governor in Punjab, was gunned
down on Tuesday, allegedly by one of his own security detail, because of
his outspoken defence of Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother of five who
was charged under Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws because of the
terms in which she is alleged to have spoken about the prophet Muhammad
amidst argument with her Muslim neighbours over her wandering goats.
Last October, 58 Christian Chaldeans died and 67 were
injured when Our Lady of Salvation church was besieged in Baghdad.
On
New Year's Day, 23 Coptic Christians died and 79 were injured when
Al-Qiddissin Church in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria was bombed.
The travails of Wafaa Constantine, 53, and Camilla Shehata, 25, were the pretext for these two attacks.
Both married to Coptic Christian priests in remote rural
areas, the women are said to have been arrested by Egyptian police and
handed over to Coptic authorities as they set about converting to Islam,
so that they might use its acceptance of divorce to rid themselves of
their abusive and bad-tempered husbands.
Coptic mouthpieces accused Muslims of abducting the
women.
Muslims countered with claims that the two women - both of whom
disappeared from the public eye - were being held against their will by
the Coptic church.
Citing this seemingly distant dispute in Egypt, the
gunmen went to work in Baghdad … just as others threatened to respond to
the threat last year by a Christian pastor in Florida to mark the
anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the US by burning the Koran.
The regime of the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak,
has done a consistent line in contempt for Washington's pro-forma calls
for reform - and calls by Coptic churches in the US for America's
multibillion-dollar annual aid cheque to Cairo to be conditional on
better rights and protection for Coptic Christians have fallen on deaf
ears.
It is the same in Pakistan - despite pouring in billions
of aid dollars, Washington has been able to extract little by way of
satisfaction of its insistent security demands, much less its polite
calls for social and judicial reform.
Pakistan's blasphemy law was put on the statute books in
the 1980s by a regime that opted for Islam as a binding national force -
and it soon became a tool for settling vendettas and prosecuting
minorities.
Explaining the country's economic, political and social
crises in the absence of sure-footed national leadership and at a time
of bold extremism, the analyst Ahmed Rashid in Lahore offered this
explanation: "We have a very, very severe polarisation in the country -
we have a small minority of extremists and a small number of liberals
speaking out, but the very large silent majority are people who are not
extremists in any way, but are not speaking out''.
In such parlous times it is hardly surprising that
Taseer's murder might be an effective brake on others who would have
contemplated joining his reform campaign. And no one was shocked when
even his most loyal followers spoke only in vague generalities as they
condemned his killing.
That Christians are an easy target is best explained by the circumstances of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
In the first years of the new order, the violence was
Muslim on Muslim - Sunni v Shiite.
But facing a public backlash for the
bloody awfulness they were creating and exposing themselves to
well-armed counterattacks, the insurgents and terrorists turned their
sights on the minority Christians who were without militias or the
political clout to call in defenders.
Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group says
Christians sometimes become targets not strictly because of their
religion so much as a perception that they are surrogates for the
Western countries deemed by extremist groups to be enemies.
Yet, more than 50 dead Christians in the sanctuary of a
Baghdad church is a powerful signal to the world that the new Iraqi
government was not in control of its turf.
That signal becomes even more
powerful because of claims in the Arab and Christian media that US
military forces have abandoned the Christians of Iraq to their very
uncertain fate.
In the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star, the
commentator May Akl wrote: "After surviving millennia of religious and
cultural persecution in its own cradle, Christianity in the Middle East
could face demise at the hands of the Christian West.
In fact, political
alliances sought by Western states and, most importantly, by the US
leverage existential threats against the remaining Christian minorities
in the Middle East. Rescue is not high on the agenda."
The church massacre in Baghdad in October was the
standout in a series of attacks that include the beheading and
mutilation of a priest in 2006 - despite the payment of a ransom; the
abduction of an archbishop in 2008; and the laying of a daisy chain of
bombs outside nine churches and more recently at the homes of 14
Christian families.
By some estimates more than half of Iraq's 1 million-plus
Christians have fled since the fall of Saddam - if not into exile in
Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, then to the relative safety of the Kurdish
north of Iraq.
In an observation that must have provoked discomfort in
Washington, Father Rony Hanna of the Iraqi Chaldean Archdiocese harked
back to the Saddam years: "Security forces were sent to our religious
celebrations to provide us with protection and they did. This is what we
miss most now - being protected."
But the Christian decline is not confined to Iraq.
A century ago, they accounted for 20 per cent of the
population in the Middle East - today the Vatican estimates that
proportion to be 5 per cent and falling in a region in which most
regimes impose limits and restrictions on Christian rituals.
Iran has recently been rounding up Christian missionaries and deadly Christian-Muslim violence has erupted again in Nigeria.
"If this phenomenon continues, Christianity in the Middle
East will disappear," the Reverend Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit in
Beirut, told reporters on the eve of a Vatican conference that discussed
the crisis last year.
"This is not an unreal hypothesis - Turkey went
from 20 per cent Christian in the early 20th century to 0.2 per cent
now. [And the flight from Iraq] could bleed the Church in Iraq dry."
In the early 1950s, 20 per cent of Egyptians were
Christian - today, at just 10 per cent of the population, they are the
region's biggest Christian community but they hold just three of the 508
seats in the parliament.
There was advance warning of the attack on the Alexandria
church on an Islamic website, which Cairo initially blamed on al-Qaeda
but which some Egyptian political analysts speculated might be the work
of locals frustrated by an absence of substantive reform in Mubarak's
30-year reign.
What emerges from the experience of the latest hot spots
is that what is perceived to be a solution often creates a greater
problem - that is, trying to deal with the crisis as a security
challenge that can be dealt with in the short term.
A bare-knuckled crackdown on those who thrive amid the
collapse of their social and political institutions, as in Pakistan, or
the marginalisation and oppression of voices for reform, as in Egypt,
tends to gloss over the reality that the root cause of the problem is
elsewhere.
Papers prepared for last year's Vatican conference were
telling in their avoidance of the George Bush ''they hate our liberty''
credo.
Instead they urged wide-ranging social reform to bring about
democratic secular states, co-operation between churches and a break on
the expansion of political Islam.
Urging a thorough examination of the concept of laicity -
or secularism - to help "eliminate the theocratic character of
government and allow for greater equality among citizens of different
religions", the documents blamed the Christian exodus on political
tension in the region - particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and the ''menacing social situation in Iraq''.
SIC: SMH/AUS