Grace under fire | 15 January 2011

Almost 20 years ago, Samuel Huntingdon forecast a ‘clash of civilisations’.

Almost 20 years ago, Samuel Huntingdon forecast a ‘clash of civilisations’. In the past few months, this clash has become outright war.

Christian minorities, who have lived peacefully in Muslim countries for generations, are finding themselves subject to increasingly violent persecution. Churches are being attacked in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Indonesia and the Philippines. The recent assassination in Pakistan of a Muslim politician who defended a Christian woman sentenced to death for ‘insulting’ Islam was particularly shocking.

Pakistan has had blasphemy laws since its inception, but never before have they been used to persecute Christians. The Church of England has had a bishop in Lahore since 1877 to minister to Pakistan’s three million Christians, but only now has this become a dangerous mission. The victims are not just Christians. In the last two years, the Muslim world has sought to expel most minorities. The Sufis and Ahmadis in Pakistan feel just as anxious as the Christians. The Baha’i in Iran have long been persecuted, while the West turns a blind eye.

What we are witnessing is a growing, violent, worldwide intolerance. Pakistan’s steadily more aggressive application of its blasphemy laws has been mirrored by an ominous enthusiasm for religious registration laws in many countries, from Serbia to Uzbekistan. Europe knows only too well what manner of evil can spring from a mania for registration.

President Sarkozy put it succinctly a few weeks ago. ‘We are witnessing a wicked kind of religious cleansing,’ he declared.

It’s all too easy to imagine what might happen next. Persecution will lead to counter-attacks which could spark a civil war. A civil war will claim far more lives than any straightforward battle between nations. When communities separate, bloodshed is seldom far behind. One of the most murderous events in postwar history was the partition of India, in which nearly a million lives were lost.

The casualties in any forthcoming conflict will almost certainly be largely Christian. A recent report suggests that Christians now account for three-quarters of the world’s persecuted religious minorities.

So what to do about it? The problem is so varied and so widespread that it seems impossible to imagine a political solution. It is not a state but a religion that is threatened, so how to respond? Christians can turn to the police — but in many countries the police have other priorities. Churches can hire security guards; that was the precaution adopted by the Church of Christ in Maiduguri, Nigeria. But the guard was killed on Christmas Eve by an al-Qa’eda-inspired Islamic sect, along with a pastor and two choir members who had been practising for a late-night carol service.

Of all the Christian leaders worldwide, the Pope has been the most outspoken about the suffering of Christian minorities — little wonder, as the Vatican is constantly fed reports from his dioceses worldwide. His Christmas homily may have seemed inappropriately macabre: ‘This child has ignited the light of goodness in men and has given them strength to overcome the tyranny of might,’ he said, quoting Isaiah. ‘But at the same time, the rod of his oppressor is not yet broken. Boots of warriors continue to tramp and the garment rolled in blood still remains.’ But his words proved all too apt when a suicide bomb killed 21 Coptic Christians in Egypt days later. When the Pope condemned the attack, Cairo recalled its envoy to the Holy See in protest at what they saw as ‘meddling’.

The 7th of January is Christmas day for the Coptic church and, given the violence of the preceding month, many were braced for another tragedy. What happened next is an extraordinary event which went unreported in the British press. As Egypt’s Christians made their way to mass, they found they had protection: hundreds of Egyptian Muslims who, in protest at the jihadis’ agenda, had come to offer themselves as human shields by gathering outside the church. The front pew of a church in the Cairo district of Omraneya was filled with Muslims taking a stand against terror.

The pictures from that night are extraordinary. Muslim men and women risked their lives so that their Christian neighbours could worship. They held placards, chanting ‘one people, one blood’ as church bells rang. Amongst them was Amr Khaled — the moderate Muslim televangelist interviewed in The Spectator last month. A new symbol was born in that time: a cross inside a Muslim crescent, which is displayed by thousands of young Egyptians — both Muslim and Christian — on their Facebook page.

Tales of religious persecution in the Muslim world are likely to abound this year. The struggle for religious tolerance may well become the defining conflict of the decade, and the best chance of defeating this evil lies with those brave Muslims who are prepared to risk their lives for their Christian neighbours. All power to them.