Sheikh Al-Masri describes a Muslim conversion trick

This is from a sermon by Egyptian cleric Mahmoud Al-Masri, which aired on Al-Nas TV on August 10, 2009. I came across it in the comments to a blog post about Taqiyya at Jihad Watch. The video does seem to confirm the claim that Islam teaches that deception is clever and good if it is deployed in the service of Islam. It ends with Al-Masri saying "This was a nice trick by this good Muslim."



To me, the story was morally repugnant. Even if we eliminate the anti-semitism and the threat of death parts, the basic idea of tricking someone into converting is vile to me. I don't think a Christian would be comfortable with having converted someone under such false pretensions. It goes against my basic understanding of the meaning of Christianity.

I wondered if this was a rogue cleric and if posting this video would be like posting a video of Fred Phelps and using it to make a point about what Christians think. So I was googling trying to find out more about Mahmoud al-Masri and found a comment at Israellycool that says that in this video Al-Masri is reciting a poem by Ali Zayn El Abidin ibn Hussein ibn Ali ibn Abi Taleb, the great grand son of Mohammad. If that is true, then this sort of trickery that is repugnant to Christian morality really is part of Islam.

masked gunman kills Russian priest who converted Muslims to Christianity

The New York Times carried a Reuters report this morning that began :

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A masked gunman entered a church and murdered a Russian Orthodox priest who had received death threats for converting Muslims to Christianity and criticizing Islam, prosecutors and church officials said Friday.

The killing could threaten delicate relations between the powerful majority Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin, and the country's growing Muslim minority of about 20 million.

The gunman approached priest Daniil Sysoyev, 34, in St Thomas Church in southern Moscow Thursday night, checked his name and then opened fire with a pistol, a spokesman for the investigating committee of the Prosecutor-General's office said.

"The main theory is that religious motives are behind the crime," spokesman Anatoly Bagmet said.

Sysoyev had been previously threatened for his preaching to Muslims:

"I have received 10 threats via e-mail that I shall have my head cut off (if I do not stop preaching to Muslims)," Sysoyev stated on a television program in February 2008, according to Interfax. "As I see it, it is a sin not to preach to Muslims."

Kiril Frolov, the head of the Orthodox Experts Association, told Interfax news agency "Father Daniil ... has been periodically receiving e-mails which said he will be treated as 'infidel' if he did not stop polemics with Muslims," .

Russia is home to Europe's largest Muslim community and Islam is the country's second-biggest faith, something which Sysoyev was highly critical of Islam:

"Islam is far from being a religion in the way we understand it," he said in one of his video lectures posted on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJNPSyh4zFk&feature=related).

"Islam can be rather compared with projects like National Socialism or the Communist party seeking to create God's kingdom on Earth using humanly instruments," he added.

He also wrote books including "An Orthodox Response to Islam" and "Marrying a Muslim," in which he advised Russian women against taking a Muslim partner.

Read it all here.

Hat Tip: Women Against Shariah

Egypt: Conversion from Islam Threatens Social Order

Compass Direct has an interesting brief article on the status of the case of Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary, the man who sought to have his official government identity card changed to reflect his conversion to Christianity. The good news is that the lawyers are hopeful:

In the dilapidated office here of three lawyers representing one of Egypt’s “most wanted” Christian converts, the mood was hopeful in spite of a barrage of death threats against them and their client. At a court hearing on May 2, a judge agreed to a request by the convert from Islam to join the two cases he has opened to change his ID card to reflect his new faith. The court set June 13 as the date to rule on Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary’s case, and lawyer Nabil Ghobreyal said he was hopeful that progress thus far will lead to a favorable ruling.

The bad news is this government report:

At the same time, El-Gohary’s lawyers termed potentially “catastrophic” for Egyptian human rights a report sent to the judge by the State Council, a consultative body of Egypt’s Administrative Court. Expressing outrage at El-Gohary’s “audacity” to request a change in the religious designation on his ID, the report claims the case is a threat to societal order and violates sharia (Islamic law). “This [report] is bombarding freedom of religion in Egypt,” said lawyer Said Faiz. “They are insisting that the path to Islam is a one-way street. The entire report is based on sharia.”

HatTip: Women Against Shariah

Iran: Death for Bloggers Promoting Christianity

Iran imposes the death penalty for "spreading mischief in the land", a reference to the Quran 5:32. This verse is interpreted to apply to those who encourage conversion from Islam to Christianity. Leaving Islam for another religion is considered "Apostasy". According to Farsi Christian News Service, two Christian bloggers were entrapped and arrested in Isfahan on February 4th. The target of the entrapment operation seems to be bloggers rather than Christian converts as other family members were not arrested.

This Aljazeera video from March 24th acknowledges that bloggers in Iran who encourage conversion to Christianity are in danger of the death penalty for their activities.



Hat Tips to Nova Scotia Scott and Islam in Action

Libya: 4 Christian Converts Detained and Tortured

International Christian Concern is reporting:

Libyan intelligence officials have detained and tortured four Christians for converting from Islam. The Christians have been imprisoned for the past seven weeks in Tripoli, Libya's capital.

Libya's External Security Organization appear to be responsible for the detention and torture of the Christians. The families have been barred from visiting the converts by security agents. It is believed that the converts are under severe physical and psychological pressure to force them to reveal the names of other Christian converts.

The leader of Libya, Mouammar Kadhafi believes that the Bible has been falsified to remove the references to predictions of the Prophet Mohamed. Afrique en Ligne reports that Kadhafi spoke during a commemoration ceremony for the birth of the Prophet Mohamed, claiming that:

Quran showed that there did not exist any differences between Islam and Moses and his closest followers because they were Moslems.

“If they had lived during the era of Mohamed, they would have believed in him. Likewise, there is no problem with Jesus and the other prophets, all of them being Moslems and Mohamed the seal of the prophets," Kadhafi said.

He said the discord was “between us and those who refused to follow Mohamed who is the messenger of the Jews, Christians and the entire mankind”.

Afrique en Ligne reports that Kadhafi also claimed that Islam had not been spread by force. I would add that he forgot to mention that Islam holds its religious adherents by force, at least in Libya.

Let's call him on this. Go to International Christian Concern and see their ideas for calling and writing to get these converts released.

Hat Tip: Women Against Shariah

Egypt: Islamic lawyers urge death sentence for convert

Islamic law requires death for apostates, although the Quran only says that apostates will suffer death in the next world:

In Islamic law (sharia), the consensus view is that a male apostate must be put to death unless he suffers from a mental disorder or converted under duress, for example, due to an imminent danger of being killed. A female apostate must be either executed, according to Shafi'i, Maliki, and Hanbali schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), or imprisoned until she reverts to Islam as advocated by the Sunni Hanafi school and by Shi'a scholars.

This is a real problem for converts to Christianity in Muslim countries. For example, a recent report at Compass Direct News begins:

In the latest hearing of a Muslim-born Egyptian’s effort to officially convert to Christianity, opposing lawyers advocated he be convicted of “apostasy,” or leaving Islam, and sentenced to death.

More than 20 Islamic lawyers attended the hearing on Sunday (Feb. 22) in Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary’s case to obtain identification papers with Christianity designated as his religious affiliation. Two lawyers led the charge, Ahmed Dia El-Din and Abdel Al-Migid El-Anani.

“[El-Din] started to talk about the Quran being in a higher position than the Bible,” one of El-Gohary’s lawyers, Said Fayez, told Compass. “[El-Din said] people can move to a higher religion but not down, so people cannot move away from Islam because it is highest in rank.”

Memos submitted by opposing lawyers asserted that cases such as El-Gohary’s form part of a U.S. Zionist attack on Islam in Egypt, that Christianity is an inferior religion to Islam and that Copts protect and defend converts from Islam at their own peril.

El-Gohary is not the only convert in danger:

But he also has received text messages, he said, of encouragement from other Muslim-born converts too fearful to take a similar stand.

“Everyday I get calls from people who have converted but are secret,” said El-Gohary. “They ask me every day about what is happening, because it affects their future.”

I highly recommend you read it all.

The Barnabus Fund has started a campaign to abolish the Islamic apostasy laws. They say:

The Islamic apostasy law also stands in stark contrast to Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published sixty years ago this month, which states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief...”

Please go to their website and sign the online petition. It reads:

We call on our national government to support all efforts by Muslims to have the apostasy law abolished, so that Muslims who choose to leave their faith are no longer liable to any penalty but are free to follow their new convictions without fear, in accordance with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Hat Tip Women Against Shariah

Saudi Arabia: Christian Convert in Danger of Execution

Compass Direct News reports:

Five months after the daughter of a member of Saudi Arabia’s religious police was killed for writing online about her faith in Christ, Saudi authorities have reportedly arrested a 28-year-old Christian man for describing his conversion and criticizing the kingdom’s judiciary on his Web site.

Saudi police arrested Hamoud Bin Saleh on Jan. 13 “because of his opinions and his testimony that he had converted from Islam to Christianity,” according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI). Bin Saleh, who had been detained for nine months in 2004 and again for a month last November, was reportedly being held in Riyadh’s Eleisha prison.

On his web site, which Saudi authorities have blocked, Bin Saleh wrote that his journey to Christ began after witnessing the public beheading of three Pakistanis convicted of drug charges.

[Bin Saleh was a blogspot blogger and his website was christforsaudi.blogspot.com Although this is blocked now, The Jawa Report had provided this link to an English translation from the Google cache.]

Shaken, he began an extensive study of Islamic history and law, as well as Saudi justice. He became disillusioned with sharia (Islamic law) and dismayed that kingdom authorities only prosecuted poor Saudis and foreigners.
“I was convinced that the wretched Pakistanis were executed in accordance with the Muhammadan laws just because they are poor and have no money or favored positions, which they had no control or power over,” he wrote in Arabic in his Dec. 22 posting, referring to “this terrible prejudice in the application of justice in Saudi Arabia.”

The article goes on to give some details about Bin Saleh's readings into Sharia Law and into the Bible. Then:

After reading how Jesus forgave – rather than stoned – a woman condemned for adultery, Bin Saleh eventually received Christ as savior.

The article explains how the Sharia Law provides for the death penalty for conversion from Islam (apostasy) and for blogging about it (blasphemy):

With the Quran and sayings of Muhammad (Sunna) as its constitution, Saudi Arabia enforces a form of sharia derived from 18th-century Sunni scholar Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab that calls for the death penalty for “blasphemy,” or insulting Islam or its prophet, Muhammad. Likewise, conversion from Islam to another faith, “apostasy,” is punishable by death, although the U.S. Department of State’s 2008 International Religious Freedom Report notes that there have been no confirmed reports of executions for either blasphemy or apostasy in recent years.

The earlier killing of the daughter of a member of Saudi Arabia’s religious police who was killed for writing online about her faith in Christ is described at the end of the article:

In August 2008, a 26-year-old woman was killed for disclosing her faith on a Web site. Fatima Al-Mutairi reportedly had revealed on Web postings that she had left Islam to become a Christian.

Gulfnews.com reported on Aug. 12, 2008 that her father, a member of the religious police or Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, cut out her tongue and burned her to death “following a heated debate on religion.” Al-Mutairi had written about hostilities from family members after they discovered she was a Christian, including insults from her brother after he saw her Web postings about her faith. Some reports indicated that her brother was the one who killed her.
She had reportedly written an article about her faith on a blog of which she was a member under the nickname “Rania” a few days before her murder.

An earlier report of Bin Saleh's arrest was published by The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.

Hat Tip Women Against Shariah

An Atheist on Christian Conversion in Africa

Matthew Parris does not believe in Christianity, but he know a lot about it. And he is amazingly honest, even when what he thinks or sees does not support his ideology. In 2003, although he is a gay man, he wrote a column on why God would not approve of gay bishops. Now in his latest column in The Times, he has written on why he believes Africa needs Christianity.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Parris takes the risky step of criticizing tribal group think:

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Read it all here.

Hat Tip to Titus One Nine and to Karen B in comment #3.

Aquinas Visits Yugoslav Abortionist in Dream, Converted to Life

This doctor says he was visited twice in dreams by a figure who identified himself as "Thomas Aquinas". Remember, Thomas Aquinas is the one Nancy Pelosi and other pro-abortion Catholics use to claim that there has been a difference of opinion among Catholics regarding the beginning of life.

Catholic News Agency

MADRID (CNA) — The Spanish daily “La Razon” has published an article on the pro-life conversion of a former “champion of abortion.” Stojan Adasevic, who performed 48,000 abortions, sometimes up to 35 per day, is now the most important pro-life leader in Serbia, after 26 years as the most renowned abortion doctor in the country.

“The medical textbooks of the Communist regime said abortion was simply the removal of a blob of tissue,” the newspaper reported. “Ultrasounds allowing the fetus to be seen did not arrive until the 80s, but they did not change his opinion. Nevertheless, he began to have nightmares.”

In describing his conversion, Adasevic “dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas,’ the man in his dream responded. Adasevic, educated in communist schools, had never heard of the Dominican genius saint. He didn’t recognize the name”

“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked Adasevic in his dream.“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,’ St. Thomas told him. “Adasevic awoke in amazement and decided not to perform any more abortions,” the article stated.

“That same day a cousin came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend, who wanted to get her ninth abortion—something quite frequent in the countries of the Soviet bloc. The doctor agreed. Instead of removing the fetus piece by piece, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a mass. However, the baby’s heart came out still beating. Adasevic realized then that he had killed a human being,”

After this experience, Adasevic “told the hospital he would no longer perform abortions. Never before had a doctor in Communist Yugoslavia refused to do so. They cut his salary in half, fired his daughter from her job, and did not allow his son to enter the university.”
After years of pressure and on the verge of giving up, he had another dream about St. Thomas.

“You are my good friend, keep going,’ the man in black and white told him. Adasevic became involved in the pro-life movement and was able to get Yugoslav television to air the film ‘The Silent Scream,’ by Doctor Bernard Nathanson, two times.”

Adasevic has told his story in magazines and newspapers throughout Eastern Europe. He has returned to the Orthodox faith of his childhood and has studied the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.

“Influenced by Aristotle, Thomas wrote that human life begins forty days after fertilization,” Adasevic wrote in one article. La Razon commented that Adasevic “suggests that perhaps the saint wanted to make amends for that error.” Today the Serbian doctor continues to fight for the lives of the unborn.

Hat tip to Jackie at Stand Firm

Global Blasphemy Laws?

This op ed piece from the Christian Science Monitor says that the special session of the UN being held this week was initiated by Saudi King Abdullah to develop a global law to punish blasphemy and apostasy.

The UN session is designed to endorse a meeting of religious leaders in Spain last summer that was the brainchild of King Abdullah and organized by the Muslim World League. That meeting resulted in a final statement counseling promotion of "respect for religions, their places of worship, and their symbols ... therefore preventing the derision of what people consider sacred."

The lofty-sounding principle is, in fact, a cleverly coded way of granting religious leaders the right to criminalize speech and activities that they deem to insult religion. Instead of promoting harmony, however, this effort will exacerbate divisions and intensify religious repression.

Such prohibitions have already been used in some countries to restrict discussion of individuals' freedom vis-à-vis the state, to prevent criticism of political figures or parties, to curb dissent from prevailing views and beliefs, and even to incite and to justify violence.

If this analysis is correct it will give UN sanction to the complaints from India that Christians disparage Hindu gods with their conversion materials. And it will give sanction to Islamic countries for prohibiting conversion and punishing apostasy from Islam with death.

H/T Little Green Footballs

Widow Hears Voice of God in Bangladesh

Hosea 6:6 shared this from his parish listserve:

As many of you know, I recently returned from a month in Bangladesh and India, working with people of many faiths on religious freedom issues. I also had the privilege to fellowship with and teach people from the indigenous churches.

To give you a brief glimpse, I visited Orissa, India, where since August Hindu extremists have killed dozens of Christians, burned over 4,000 churches and homes, and driven some 25,000 into hiding in the jungle. Police have been helpless to overcome the violent mobs and in some cases have been complicit in the attacks. The extremists continue to tell Christians they must convert to Hinduism if they want to return home, and many who remained in their villages have already been forcibly “converted” to Hinduism.

The Hindu extremists claim that the violence is due to aggressive Christian evangelism that destroys local Hindu culture, and so the Indian government has said one of its responses to the violence will be to enforce existing anti-conversion laws aimed at curbing Christian mission work. Despite all these difficulties, one Indian Christian leader told me that he remains confident: “Ultimately there will be justice. God will prevail. People will know the truth.”

In Bangladesh, a Muslim-background woman told me that she and her adult children converted to Christianity after her husband died. After many years they are still the only Christians in their village of 100 Muslim families. In the beginning, the villagers pillaged and destroyed her small store, beat her, shunned her, and even threw feces at her door. She was thinking one day of where she could go to escape when she heard the Lord tell her to stay put: “If you leave, the people will not receive the light.” So she stayed. When her neighbors came and mocked her, she thanked them. That was in 2005. Today there is a meeting of seekers in her home every Friday night.

This is how the Kingdom of God is growing in the most challenging circumstances— with love, obedience, and faith. Thank you for your prayers for me while I was gone. I’ve learned a lot and hope to share more with you this Sunday after service.

In His grace,
Angela

I see similarity to the case of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was ready to give up and leave Birmingham because of the threats on his life. It was then that he heard the voice in his kitchen telling him to "Preach the Gospel, stand up for truth, stand up for righteousness". Through out his life he credited that night as exceptional and the source of his courage. In both cases the person was ready to give up and leave the hostile situation when they heard the voice of God encouraging them to stay to spread the gospel.

Hanged for Being a Christian

Very sad article by Alasdair Palmer in the Telegraph begins:

Eighteen years ago, Rashin Soodmand's father was hanged in Iran for converting to Christianity. Now her brother is in a Mashad jail, and expects to be executed under new religious laws brought in this summer. Alasdair Palmer reports.

A month ago, the Iranian parliament voted in favour of a draft bill, entitled "Islamic Penal Code", which would codify the death penalty for any male Iranian who leaves his Islamic faith. Women would get life imprisonment. The majority in favour of the new law was overwhelming: 196 votes for, with just seven against.

Further down we learn:

Rashin Soodmand is a 29-year-old Iranian Christian. Her father, Hossein Soodmand, was the last man to be executed in Iran for apostasy, the "crime" of abandoning one's religion. He had converted from Islam to Christianity in 1960, when he was 13 years old. Thirty years later, he was hanged by the Iranian authorities for that decision.

Today, Rashin's brother, Ramtin, is also held in a prison cell in Mashad, Iran's holiest city. He was arrested on August 21. He has not been charged but he is a Christian. And Rashin fears that, just as her father was the last man to be executed for apostasy in Iran, her brother may become one of the first to be killed under Iran's new law.

Not surprisingly, Rashin is desperately worried. "I am terribly anxious about him," she explains. "Even though my brother is not an apostate, because he has never been a Muslim – my father raised us all as Christians – I don't think he is safe. They assume that if you are Iranian, you must be Muslim."

Her brother's situation has ominous echoes of her father's fate. Rashin was 14 when her father was arrested. "He was held in prison for one month," she remembers. "Then the religious police released him without explanation and without apology. We were overjoyed. We thought his ordeal was over."

But six months later, the police came back and took her father away again. This time, they offered him a choice: he could denounce his Christian faith, and the church in which he was a pastor – or he would be killed. "Of course, my father refused to give up his faith," Rashid recalls proudly. "He could not renounce his God. His belief in Christ was his life – it was his deepest conviction." So two weeks later, Hossein Soodmand was taken by guards to the prison gallows and hanged.

Read it all here.

H/T to Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans at Get Religion

Hindu Threat to Christians: Convert or Flee

Front page story in the New York Times today on Christians in India being forced to convert to Hinduism:

BOREPANGA, India — The family of Solomon Digal was summoned by neighbors to what serves as a public square in front of the village tea shop.

Borepanga has been rocked by weeks of religious violence.

They were ordered to get on their knees and bow before the portrait of a Hindu preacher. They were told to turn over their Bibles, hymnals and the two brightly colored calendar images of Christ that hung on their wall. Then, Mr. Digal, 45, a Christian since childhood, was forced to watch his Hindu neighbors set the items on fire.

“ ‘Embrace Hinduism, and your house will not be demolished,’ ” Mr. Digal recalled being told on that Wednesday afternoon in September. “ ‘Otherwise, you will be killed, or you will be thrown out of the village.’ ”

USA Today has already published a rebuttal from the Times of India:

Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa, a BJP politician who runs the South Indian state, blames Christian groups for the violence.

"While Christians and Hindus have co-existed peacefully in the state, there have been unconstitutional and illegal efforts by some Christian organisations such as 'New Life' to forcibly convert or to induce conversion to Christianity," he says, according to The Times of India, adding: "Efforts of such organization include publishing booklets like 'Satya Darshini' in which Hindu gods and goddesses were denigrated. Our constitution provides for freedom of religion but does not permit forcible or induced conversion."

But I don't think booklets denigrating Hindu gods is a "forced conversion" in the same league with threatening to kill people. Actually, this response to the situation only serves to confirm the danger to Christians.

Death Sentence for Conversion to Christianity

George Conger is reporting that Iran is in the process of passing a law that imposes a death sentence on Muslims who convert from Islam to another faith:

The Iranian parliament has passed the first reading of a bill that imposes the death penalty on Muslims who convert to another faith. By a vote of 196 to seven, with two abstentions, the Majlis passed the “Islamic Penal Law” bill on Sept 9.

The law, which will now be referred to committee for final drafting and possible amendment, mandates the death penalty for male adult Muslims who convert to another faith. Women converts are to be jailed for life. Those who practice witchcraft will also be condemned to death.

The law’s reach extends beyond the borders of Iran, and gives the government the authority to enforce the death penalty on any Muslim anywhere in the world who leaves the faith. While Iranian Islamic law, or Sharia law, provides for the execution of converts, the “Islamic Penal Law” would see these sanctions added to the country’s civil laws.

Read it all.
Hat/ Tip to Midwest Conservative Journal

Founder of NARAL Speaks on the Greatest Mistake of His Life

H/T to Northern Plains Anglicans

Putting Recent Events in Perspective: Nightmare for Christian Converts in India

In a refuge camp for displaced Christians in Ghumusar Udayagiri, India, a pregnant woman recounts her nightmare:

Hearing the chanting women march by, Shyamala wiped her nose with her unwashed sari. She started to cry, again. Her feet are swollen and bloody, her stomach heavy. And she has a recurring nightmare.

"I am falling and falling down a big ditch. I see my newborn baby below me," she said, weeping. "And it is dead."

This article in Monday's Washington Post is a must read.

Conversions to Christianity have been happening fast among impoverished tribal communities in Kandhamal, a remote district with few links to the outside world or state services. The Christian population here, largely made up of traditionally nature-worshiping ethnic groups, has swelled from 6 percent in 1971 to 27 percent today, according to government census data.

The sad result is a growing violent backlash by Hindu's demanding the Christians convert to Hinduism. The Christians fear that they will be killed if they leave the refuge camp to return to their village and do not convert back to Hinduism.

The nightmare makes sense in a very real way as the woman is fearing the death or herself and her newborn baby. But on a metaphorical level, the baby may represent the new self who adheres to the new religion. Thus, the fear of the death is of the newborn faith.

Pray for the strength of faith for these martyrs.

Hat tip to Mollie at Get Religon

A Lesson in the New Gender Reality: Sarah Palin is Not a Woman

Hmmm, the woman who wrote The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was (2005) and Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture
has now written that Sarah Palin is only pretending to be a woman. Professor Wendy Donniger denies Sarah Palin is a woman:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

Wendy Doniger
Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago’s Divinity School
Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. The “On Faith” panelist also teaches in the University’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. She also serves on the University’s Committee on Social Thought. Doniger’s research and teaching center on Hinduism and mythology, with courses in the latter focusing on cross-cultural themes. Her courses in Hinduism cover a broad spectrum, including mythology, literature, law, gender, and ecology. After training as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham, Doniger earned two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard and Oxford Universities. Before moving to the University of Chicago in 1978, she taught at Harvard, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of California at Berkeley. She has served as president of the American Academy of Religion and of the Association of Asian Studies. She holds four honorary degrees and serves on the International Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia Britannica and on the board of Daedalus. In 2000, she was recognized by PEN Oakland for excellence in multi-cultural non-fiction for Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1998). That same year she received the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize for her work on myths about sex: The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000). Doniger has authored more than 20 other books, including translations of Sanskrit texts, among which are The Rig Veda: An Anthology (1981); Laws of Manu(1991) [with Brian K. Smith], and Kamasutra(2002) [with Sudhir Kakar]. She also wrote The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was (2005) and Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture [with Howard Eilberg Schwartz]. Close.

Wednesday Morning Heart Warm -- From Basic Instinct to Cross Bearer

I love a good conversion story:

Joe Eszterhas' latest book is a shocker, but not the kind that made him rich and famous.

The upcoming release from the man who penned dark thrillers such as Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge tells the story of his spiritual conversion and his newfound devotion to God and family.

In Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith, to be published Sept. 2 by St. Martin's Press, Mr. Eszterhas describes how his life got turned around during the summer of 2001.

He and his second wife, Naomi, had just moved from Malibu to a suburb of Cleveland - where he had grown up; she was from nearby Mansfield. They felt Ohio would be a better, more wholesome place to raise their four boys (he had two grown children from his first marriage).

A month after the move, Mr. Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer. Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic removed 80 percent of his larynx, put a tracheotomy tube in his throat, and told him he must quit drinking and smoking immediately.

At age 56, after a lifetime of wild living, Mr. Eszterhas knew it would be a struggle to change his ways.

One hot summer day after his surgery, walking through his tree-lined neighborhood in Bainbridge Township, Mr. Eszterhas reached a breaking point.

"I was going crazy. I was jittery. I twitched. I trembled. I had no patience for anything. … Every single nerve ending was demanding a drink and a cigarette," he wrote.

He plopped down on a curb and cried. Sobbed, even. And for the first time since he was a child, he prayed: "Please God, help me."

Mr. Eszterhas was shocked by his own prayer.

"I couldn't believe I'd said it. I didn't know why I'd said it. I'd never said it before," he wrote.

But he felt an overwhelming peace. His heart stopped pounding. His hands stopped twitching. He saw a "shimmering, dazzling, nearly blinding brightness that made me cover my eyes with my hands."

Read the whole Toledo Blade article here.

H/T to Mollie at Get Religion

Too Many Conversions in Algeria

Transfigurations has a post on crackdowns on Christianity in Algeria with links to two articles. I found it interesting that the crackdowns appear to motivated by concerns over the growing number of converts to Christianity. The articles give very different estimates of the number of converts: 10,000 according to the Crosswalk article and 30,000 according to the CNSNews.com article. However both articles attribute the growth in converts to the Christian broadcasting on satellite television and radio.

The article by Patrick Goodenough on CNSNews.com says:

The vast majority of Algeria's 33 million people are Sunni Muslims, but the number of indigenous Christians is growing, thanks in part to the reach of Christian satellite television and radio.

Barnabas Fund estimates that there are around 30,000 mostly Protestant evangelical Christians in Algeria today, up from several hundred in the early 1980s.

Many of the Christians are in Algeria's north-eastern Kabylie region, home to ethnic minority Berbers. Most of the churches shut down in recent months are in Tizi Ouzou, a city in the Kabylie region.

Tizi Ouzou is the focus of much of the negative attention on Christians in recent months.

Algerian media have reported on a security services clampdown on campuses in the city and elsewhere, where they claim foreign students are proselytizing.

Christians are accused of adopting various means to lure Muslims to convert, including offers of money, gifts and "the use of African Christian girls to attract male students," according to reports in the national daily Echorouk newspaper.

The article from Crosswalk by Michael Donovan says:

Christian leaders believe that the increased persecution comes less because Islamists are growing in power than because Christians converts are increasing in number, thanks to Algerian church planters and Christian satellite TV.

“They are afraid about what God is doing in Algeria,” said Bouchama, the France-based Algerian televangelist.

Protestant church planters have been active in recent years, claiming to launch dozens of churches as they travel and find converts already present in many towns thanks to Christian radio and satellite TV. Conservative estimates put Algerians Christians at 10,000 strong, largely concentrated in Kabylie where the non-Arab populace has proven more receptive to Christianity.

Protestants first established a foothold in Kabylie in the 1980s and grew in number through the 1990s while the government was occupied with domestic terrorism. While terrorist attacks continue in Algeria, relative to the ’90s concerns have begun to subside just as evangelism efforts have doubled the Protestant presence in Arab areas outside of Kabylie.

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Iraninan Converts to Christianity: Dreams, Visions, Signs and Wonders

Greg Griffith at Stand Firm posted a very interesting article from Fox News today about converts to Christianity in Iran. Greg's focus is on the growing crack down. But for me, the interesting part of the article comes after the part Greg selected. I am interested in the growing number of conversions.

The article ends just when it is getting interesting:

Marshall said these restrictive policies may be creating a backlash among Muslims. “There are indications that with the deep unpopularity of the regime that people are turning away from Islam,” he said.

“Seeing Muslims converting to Christianity is directly threatening to an Islamic regime,” said Moeller.

He compared these small groups of converts to early Christians living under the yoke of the Roman Empire, who met in secret and whose beliefs were “dependent on dreams, visions, signs and wonders.”

Because Bibles are rare in Iran and teachings are not "as dependent on the Bible as Evangelical Christianity in America is,” said Moeller, there is a “real lack of scriptural foundation."

But despite the growing pressure from the state, worshippers continue to practice, and Moeller said the house church system seems to be growing.

“We’ve got confirmed reports of groups of Muslim convert believers doubling in size in the last six months,” he said.

That's my bold on "dreams, visions, signs and wonders". There are many theologians (e.g. John MacArthur's book Charismatic Chaos) who believe that dreams, visions, signs and wonders were only for biblical times and the early church. But powerful dreams continue to be reported by a subset of converts and in this example.

It is sad that these people are do not have much access to the Bible. And awe inspiring that they are converting to Christianity despite the threat of death. I guess we should not be surprised that the Holy Spirit finds a way to reach them.
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