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Christian convert in Somalia wounded, loses family
(Morning Star News) –A Muslim in Somalia was seriously wounded for putting his faith in Christ this month and lost his wife and five children, sources said.
Mohammad Abdul, 40, survived a knife attack by his Muslim relatives on the outskirts of Kismayo, a port city in southern Somalia’s Lower Juba region, on May 5 after converting to Christianity on March 20. The relatives took his wife and children while he was recovering at a medical clinic, said a source whose name is withheld for security reasons.
“While Abdul was nursing injuries, the Muslims went back to his house and started destroying his house, and the wife and the five children went back with their people,” said the source. “His wife has told him that the Muslims are looking for him, and that therefore he should not go back to them.”
Abdul suffered a deep cut on his head and a fractured hand in the attack. Fearing for his life, he has moved to another city in Somalia, the source said.
After coming to Christ when a Somali pastor residing outside of Somalia visited him with the gospel in March, Abdul began praying and studying the Bible with his family and the Christian leader every evening, the pastor said. When Abdul’s youngest child, 5, mentioned the meetings to a neighbor, his wife suggested the visiting pastor leave for his own safety.
After leaving on April 11, the pastor heard from Abdul that the Muslim relatives were sending him threatening text messages, he said.
“We are now aware that every evening you are praying in the name of Issa [Jesus] as well as reading a corrupted book and not reading the Quran, the holy book sent to Muhammad from Allah,” read one of the text messages, according to the pastor. “If you do not stop this bad way of conducting religious activities, then you risk your life.”
As his wife became more fearful of relatives and withdrew from Christian prayers, Abdul continued alone, he said.
“Two of my children continued sharing with other children the kind of prayers I was making,” Abdul told Morning Star News. “On May 2, my younger son arrived crying that he was beaten by some boys after telling them about my reading the Bible and praying.”
On the evening of May 5 at about 7:30 p.m., the Muslim relatives arrived at his house, he said.
“They were shouting and yelling that they were looking for my head,” Abdul told Morning Star News. “The attackers forcibly entered the house and started questioning me for forsaking Islam and joining a bad religion. My wife and children looked shaken.”
One of his relatives struck him with a sharp knife, he said.
“The children began wailing and crying in a very loud voice, which confused the attackers,” Abdul said. “I then managed to escape through the rear door, bleeding, and slept at one of my relative’s home about 5 kilometers away.”
He requested prayer that God may provide for his family, with whom he still communicates.
Somalia’s constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and prohibits the propagation of any other religion, according to the U.S. State Department. It also requires that laws comply with sharia (Islamic law) principles, with no exceptions in application for non-Muslims.
The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to mainstream schools of Islamic jurisprudence. An Islamic extremist group in Somalia, Al Shabaab, is allied with Al Qaeda and adheres to the teaching.
Al Shabaab or Al Shabaab sympathizers also have killed several non-local people in northern Kenya since 2011, when Kenyan forces led an African coalition into Somalia against the rebels in response to terrorist attacks on tourists and others on Kenya’s coast.
Somalia is ranked 2nd on Christian support group Open Doors’ 2024 World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.
Father Beaten and Loses Family, Home for Becoming Christian
(Morning Star News) – A Muslim in Uganda who put his faith in Christ as the new year began has suffered serious injuries and lost his home and family, sources said.
Tambuze Marijani of Nangi village, Mayuge District sustained a broken leg below the knee and other injuries requiring nearly two weeks of hospital treatment when Muslim relatives beat him on Jan. 4.
On Dec. 31 Marijani attended a New Year’s Eve church service in Bugweri District and, as the new year began, he and 14 others put their faith in Christ, the church pastor said.
Upon returning home, Marijani joyfully told his wife about his conversion, he said.
“I shared with my wife the joy of having received Christ as my Lord and Savior, but instead of my wife sharing in my joy, she was very upset,” Marijani told Morning Star News.
She left the following morning, Jan. 2, and returned on Jan. 3 with an Islamic divorce letter, he said.
“Because you joined a bad religion,” she told him, “you are now an apostate, an infidel and not part of the family – also, you cease to be a member of the Muslim community.”
“That night my wife refused me entry to our bedroom,” he said. “I slept in the sitting room.”
On Jan. 4, while Marijani was working at his farm, he saw his older brother and other relatives arrive at his house at about 1:30 p.m., prompting him to leave the fields and return home, he said.
“Nearing my house, I saw people removing bricks from the house,” Marijani told Morning Star News. “As I drew closer, I noticed that they were my relatives: Murshidi Waniyaye, Abdullah Hamba, Abdul Wamadu and several others, including my wife.”
His older brother began insulting him, telling him he was disgrace to the family, he said.
“My younger brother got hold of me, and there and then they began beating me with sticks,” Marijani said. “I screamed and shouted for help, and neighbors arrived and rescued me.”
They rushed him to a clinic in Bwonda, and he later transferred to Mayuge District Hospital, he said. He received treatment for the broken leg, injuries to his back and chest pains before he was discharged on Jan. 16.
His house was rendered uninhabitable, and Muslim relatives have taken his former wife and four children, ages 12, 10, 8 and 7, he said.
“I do not know how I can survive without a family and being homeless,” Marijani said.
Still fearing for his life as he continues to recover, he has gone into hiding. The church paid his medical bills, but he lacks money and doubts that he will be allowed to return to his land. Missing his children, he said he prays he will see them again and that God will help him find a place to stay.
The attack was the latest of many instances of persecution of Christians in Uganda that Morning Star News has documented.
Uganda’s constitution and other laws provide for religious freedom, including the right to propagate one’s faith and convert from one faith to another. Muslims make up no more than 12 percent of Uganda’s population, with high concentrations in eastern areas of the country.
Armenian Turks Convert back to Christianity
By Joseph DeCaro, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News)– Twelve Armenians who were baptized last month in Istanbul were among the many former Muslims who are now openly embracing Christ after their ancestors were forced to follow Islam during the Armenian and Assyrian genocides that killed millions of Christians one century ago.
According to Barnabas Aid, many people who were compelled by Turkish soldiers to become Muslims are now returning to the faith of their grandparents after discovering their Christian roots.
Many Armenians, Assyrians and Ottoman Greeks who converted to Islam to save their own lives were given new Islamic names. Although women were forced to marry Muslim men and children were adopted by Muslim families, many of them still managed to hold on to a remnant of their former faith by secretly passing their Christian traditions on to the next generation.
Although conversions to Christianity have been happening in Turkey for years, renouncing Islam is risky as any apostasy by male adults still carries a death sentence under shari’a.
VOP note: Praising God and rejoicing as our family in Christ grows. Praying for more Muslims to hear the call from our Lord, “You are mine!”
Muslims Embrace Christianity: ISIS Brutality a Turn off to Islam
“I can say only one word about the difference between Islam and Christianity. The difference is between earth and sky and heaven,” Shamo told CBN News. “We are thinking everyday why we are not behaving like the Christians…We really saw a real humanity in their life.”
Spain: “Soon the Muslims Will Be the Kings of the World”
(Gatestone Institute) While Spanish Muslims are busy trying to Islamize Spain, Spanish politicians are busy removing all references to Christianity from public discourse…The requirement which will be enshrined in Spain’s legal code law, represents an unprecedented encroachment of Islamic Sharia law within Spanish jurisprudence.
Spanish police have arrested a Muslim immigrant in Mallorca after he claimed to have been sent by Allah to “kill all the Spanish.”
The arrest follows a series of other Islam-related incidents in recent weeks and months which reflect the mounting challenge that radical Islam is posing to Spain.
In the latest incident, police on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca arrested a German national of Tunisian descent on June 13 after he repeatedly threatened to carry out terror attacks in the name of Allah.
According to Spanish authorities, the man made “constant threats of death and references to being a Muslim” and warned,
“I do not mind dying; if I have to die, I will die, but I will take plenty of others with me.”
The man threatened to blow up a hairdressing academy in the Mallorcan capital of Palma and “kill everyone.”
The man said he had “terrorist friends who could plant bombs” and warned that “soon the Muslims will be kings of the world.”
Spanish police said the man — who had previously been arrested on February 15 for threatening to kill a local policeman — became radicalized after visiting Tunisia in 2012.
On June 12, police in Barcelona arrested five Tunisian jihadists for “inciting Islamist terrorism” after they shared more than 400 videos on social networks of speeches of al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as well as footage of summary executions, terrorist attacks and tutorials on bomb-making.
The Spanish Interior Ministry said the individuals had undergone “strong processes of self-radicalization which led them to embrace the thesis of Salafist jihad.”
The arrests were part of Operation Carthage (Operación Kartago), a nationwide, year-long effort to “neutralize” so-called lone-wolf jihadists as well as Islamists with combat experience returning from conflict zones in Syria, Yemen and Somalia.
Shortly after the arrests, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz announced that the government would seek to amend the Penal Code to make it a crime of terrorism 1) to give or receive “passive training” by means of “proselytization in prisons” for those serving sentences for crimes of jihadist terrorism, and 2) for imams to “indoctrinate” in mosques or on the Internet or by travelling to Islamist training camps abroad.
Díaz said the legal change is necessary because although Spanish law already makes it a crime of terrorism to “indoctrinate,” prosecutors have found it difficult to prove that those who are involved in terrorism-related training are personally committed to carrying out actual attacks.
Spanish judges have long been accused of using the ambiguous legal framework to justify the lenient treatment of suspected terrorists. For example, four of the five individuals arrested in Barcelona were released from jail on June 14 after a judge decided that keeping them in preventative detention constituted “excessive” punishment.
On June 5, police in Barcelona arrested a Pakistani immigrant after he attacked the bodyguard of local politician with a metal rod. The politician in question was Alberto Fernández Díaz, the leader of the center-right Popular Party in Barcelona who also happens to be the brother of Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz. The Pakistani, whom police describe as being a “radical Islamist,” was shouting chants of “for Allah!” while carrying out the attack.
On May 24, police in the Basque city of Bilbao arrested a 44-year-old Muslim immigrant from North Africa after he raped and cut the toe off a 25-year-old female social worker. According to local police, the man tied the woman to a chair and gagged her with a curtain after she told him he would be evicted from an apartment building for violating the housing rules.
On May 10, police in Gibraltar deported to Spain a Turkish member of Al-Qaeda who entered the British territory illegally. Cengiz Yalcin had been arrested in Spain in August 2012 along with two Chechens for plotting to drop explosives from remote-controlled airplanes onto a shopping mall in Gibraltar during the 2012 London Olympics.
A police raid of Yalcin’s apartment in 2012 yielded enough explosives “to blow up a bus.” The raid also yielded three motorized para-gliders and a video in which Yalcin is filmed flying a large remote-controlled model airplane.
Spanish investigators said they suspected the cell was testing a remote-controlled airplane as a potential bomber. The video footage showed the aircraft — about three meters, or nine feet, long — being maneuvered into a descent during which two packages were dropped from both of its wings.
The three suspects , however, were quietly released on bail in March 2013 after a judge in Madrid ruled that there was insufficient evidence to keep them in custody.
In April, it was revealed that up to 60% of Moroccan immigrants in Spain are unemployed and living off the Spanish social welfare state. According to the Barcelona-based Friends of Morocco Association (ITRAN), many Moroccans in Spain do not know the language “despite having lived here for many years…they are uneducated and qualified only to work in construction, farming and restaurants. The ghettos are becoming larger, the various government administrations are guilty of a remarkable neglect and now the excuse is that there are insufficient financial resources.”
Also in April, an Islamist group known as the Moroccan Ghosts [fantasmas marroquíes] hacked a local government website in Huelva, a town in southern Spanish region of Andalusia.
The hackers uploaded an apocalyptic image showing the Spanish flag in flames with the words: “By attacking your websites we are going to destroy your economy.” The text continued, “You have always believed that our silence in relation to your continual mortal errors towards the kingdom of Morocco and the great Moroccan people is due to fear.” The message continued with a call for Islamic terrorism, and warned Europe and Spain that they will be the targets of a series of attacks that will turn into their “worst nightmare.”
The message also included innumberable references to Al-Andalus, the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France that were occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492.
Many Muslims believe that the territories they lost during the Christian Reconquista of Spain still belong to them, and that they have every right to return and establish their rule there.
While radical Muslims are busy trying to Islamize Spain, Spanish politicians are busy removing all references to Christianity from public discourse.
In May, the Socialist government running the northern Spanish region of Asturias passed a new law that prohibits schools from using “religious terms” when referring to the Christmas and Easter holidays.
In an effort to “avoid offending the sensibilities” of Muslims students, teachers and pupils in Asturias classrooms will now have to refer to Christmas as “winter holidays” and Easter as “second term holidays.”
In February, Spain acceded to the demands of the Islamist government in Morocco by agreeing that Moroccan children adopted by Spanish families must remain culturally and religiously Muslim.
The agreement obliges the Spanish government to establish a “control mechanism” that would enable Moroccan religious authorities to monitor the children until they reach the age of 18 to ensure they have not converted to Christianity.
The requirement, which will be enshrined in Spain’s legal code, represents an unprecedented encroachment of Islamic Sharia law within Spanish jurisprudence. The move also represents a frontal assault on the freedom of religion or belief, which is protected by Article 16 of the Spanish Constitution.
Spanish Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón’s decision to make Spanish law comply with Islamic Sharia law has generated considerable controversy. But it remains to be seen if any lawsuits emerge to challenge what some are calling the “Islamization” of Spanish jurisprudence.
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group.
Christians should be concerned. This very well may lead to further persecution.
Yemen’s Forgotten Christians
by Raymond Ibrahim
Gatestone Institute
January 29, 2013
When one thinks of Yemen—the impoverished Arab country that begat Osama bin Laden and is cushioned between Saudi Arabia and Somalia, two of the absolute most radical Muslim nations—one seldom thinks of Christians, primarily because they are practically nonexistent in such an inhospitable environment. In fact, most tallies suggest that Yemen’s entire non-Muslim population is less than one percent.
However, a new Arabic report discusses the existence of Christians in Yemen, and their plight—a plight that should be familiar by now, wherever Christian minorities live under Muslim majorities.
Unofficial statistics suggest that there are some 2,500 indigenous Christians in the nation, practicing their faith underground, even as hostile tribes surround them. According to human rights activist, Abdul Razzaq al-Azazi, “Christians in Yemen cannot practice their religion nor can they go to church freely. Society would work on having them enter Islam.”
He added that, as in most Muslim countries, “the government does not permit the establishment of buildings or worship places without prior permission,” pointing out that Roman Catholic officials, for example, are currently awaiting a decision from the government on whether they will be allowed to construct a building and be officially recognized by the government in Sana.
A convert to Christianity—an apostate from Islam whose life is forfeit and who naturally prefers to remain anonymous, going by the pseudonym, “Ibn Yemen” (Son of Yemen)—expressed his fear of increased pressure on Christians, especially since the “Islamists now represent the dominant political faction, following the Arab Spring and the protests that brought the fall of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.” He added that even though the old regime “was not Islamist, Christians were still subjected to persecution and scrutiny by the police apparatus under that regime. Authorities did not allow us to practice our religion openly or allow us to build a private church, all because of Islam’s apostasy law. What do you think it will be like now that the Islamists are in power?”
Accordingly, and as another Christian interviewed in Yemen indicated, Christians pray underground in the members’ houses on a rotational basis—not unlike the days of Roman persecution of Christians, when the latter worshipped in underground catacombs. Along with Yemen’s indigenous Christians, there are also some 15,000-25,000 non-native Christians living in Yemen, mostly refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, where the persecution of Christians is often even worse than in Yemen, especially Somalia, where Al-Shabaab (“the Youth”) behead Muslim apostates to Christianity on a regular basis. Such Christian refugees from Africa often change their names to Muslim names to avoid harassment in Yemeni society.
Some Christian organizations and institutions do exist, mostly foreign ones, including the American Baptist Mission, which runs Jibla Hospital and the Church which provides services to the poor, orphans, and imprisoned women. These work primarily to serve the community, not facilitate Christian worship. Likewise, another study confirmed the previous existence of five churches in the southern city of Aden, three of which were Roman Catholic, one Anglican, and the fifth of unidentified affiliation: three of those five churches which were built during the British occupation of southern Yemen, were neglected and left to crumble; the fourth became the property of the government; and the fifth was turned into a health facility.
The story of Yemen’s Christians is a microcosm of the story of Islam’s Christians, as it wholly conforms to the current pattern of oppression for Christians under Islam: things were better for Christians—for religious freedom in general—in earlier eras under Western influence; as the Muslim world, which for a while was Western-looking, continues returning to Islam, the things of Islam, its “way,” or “Sharia”—in this case, hostility to non-Muslim worship and apostates—returns; and, as the “Arab Spring” has done elsewhere, Islamists now dominate Yemeni politics, bringing to mind the apostate Ibn Yemen’s apt question: “What do you think it will be like now [for Christians] that the Islamists are in power?”
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
VOICE OF THE PERSECUTED 