Though
the subject of the previous and this post was elicited by the Charly Hebdo
violence in Paris, and though I continue in the spirit of the last post, that
Paris incident now recedes into the background while the notion of “pseudo
tolerance” continues as the centre of our attention today.
Freedom
and peace? In Islam? The proof of the
pudding, of course, is the experience
of non-Muslims living under Muslim regimes There are countless books, tomes and
tomes of them, published over the centuries, not the least during our own
decades, about how Islam or its adherents, Muslims, undercut and persecute(ed)
Christians. Today, Pakistan
and the Middle East are prime examples of
fierce persecution.
But destroying a faith community as Islam has done to the
Christian communities of North and Saharan Africa and in the Middle
East, does not always require the violence of the sword. A century
ago, my hero, Abraham Kuyper, wrote the indented paragraphs below in Dutch and
I translated them. The period covered by these paragraphs stretch over a long period
of time—from the early expansion of Islam to Kuyper’s time of 1900. And, really, one could say beyond Kuyper’s
time to include our own, a century later.
Even though Muslims exerted little pressure
on Christians to convert, the social humiliation inflicted on them in the long
run proved to be unbearable. Persecution
steels and stimulates; it fires up a holy enthusiasm and revives heroism, but
never-ending social humiliation depletes energy and leads eventually to total
collapse. Imagine being excluded from
everything prestigious and honourable, constantly to be treated like an
inferior, to be held back at all fronts, to see your family move about with oppressive
inferiority, your children robbed of any future improvement, to be walking
around in shameful clothes day after day. And then, on the contrary, to see
everyone who accepts Islam crowned with honour, helped to advance and gain in
power. This contrast constitutes
life-long torture that at the end becomes too heavy to bear. And then to realize that with only one word
it is possible to throw off this yoke, to be free from the head tax, and to
open for yourself and for your children the path to honour and power. And come to think of it, Islam did not demand
a lot. The kiss [of peace] was offered
as soon as you call upon Allah and His Prophet.
This is the temptation for which entire Christian families, century after
century, have fallen. To be sure, there
has also been courageous resistance and energetic opposition so that whoever
digs deeply into this sad history of nameless suffering will experience
profound admiration for the toughness and the unyielding spirit with which
numerous families preferred this harsh humiliation to denying Christ. But this fire of holy faith could only glow
where faith had sunk deeply into the heart—and that was exactly where the
masses were lacking. For this reason,
the masses gradually moved over to Islam, family after family. As the number of
Christian families in the cities and villages gradually diminished, it became
increasingly difficult for the remnant to hold out. As apostasy of others became the pattern,
your own apostasy seemed less sinful.
And so it was that, with the exception of small remnants, everywhere in
Asia and Africa entire nations were converted
to Islam.
(This is found in a section of a Kuyper book I have translated into
English and published under the title “The Mystery of Islam.” A better title
would have been “The Enigma of Islam.” It
is currently available free of charge as an ebook from < www.lulu.com > as well as on < www.ccel.com >. I expect to republish it
soon on the Kuyperiana page of my website <
www.SocialTheology.com >.)
So, though for
centuries there was a kind of toleration and freedom for Christians, the
restrictions under which they laboured eventually wore many of them out.
It is a similar process
under which today Christians in the West are capitulating to increasing
restrictions, forced privatization and other forms of pressures, especially the
pressure of the local variety of “common sense,” that are producing weariness
and exhaustion among them. In neither
case do these situations represent true freedom and peace. Rather, they
represent a slow strangulation of Christian communities that have lost their
spiritual vigor and continue to succumb to this process, family after family,
individual after individual.
