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| Muslims Leaving Islam in Droves |
| 2008-04-04 |
| Pope Benedict’s choice to publicly baptize the most prominent Muslim in Italy, Egyptian-born Magdi Allam, highlights a quiet worldwide exodus from Islam. In recent years, millions have moved on. With this high-profile action, Pope Benedict demonstratively blesses this massive conversion from the highest levels of the Church. Interviewed by al-Jazeera in 2006, Ahmad al-Qataani, leader of the Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, explains the decline: Islam used to represent … Africa’s main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non-Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150 million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century.Allam’s public baptism came just ten days after the body of Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of Mosul, Iraq, was found in a shallow grave after being kidnapped by al-Qaeda February 29. The ceremony came just three days after an al-Qaeda tape threatening the pope and condemning cartoons of Mohammed. Muslims who convert to other religions or abandon religion entirely are subject to a standing order of death for apostasy. The baptism of Allam is an act of defiance in the face of Islamic threats. The baptism of Allam also comes in the midst of papal “dialogue” with Muslims. The dialogue began unpromisingly with the catcalls from Islam and its secularist allies which greeted the now-famous September 20, 2006, papal address at the University of Regensburg. In October, 138 Islamic leaders presented the pope with “A Common Word Between Us and You” — nailed by critics as a craftily written call for conversion. On March 4, Pope Benedict approved formation of a permanent “Catholic-Muslim forum” scheduled to meet in November. And now he has thrown his own call for conversion into the discussion. Islam’s secularist allies were quick to echo Muslims, calling the baptism “provocative.” While accepting the Islamic death penalty for apostasy as a given, they complain the pope’s action could set back dialogue. While the secularists wring their hands, Allam writes that his mind “has been freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimizes lies and deception, violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission to tyranny, permitting me to join the authentic religion of Truth, Life, and Liberty. … I realize what I am going up against but I will confront my fate with my head high, with my back straight, and the interior strength of one who is certain about his faith.” Allam, author of numerous books and deputy editor of Milan’s Corriere della Sera, joins a list of converts from Islam which includes many other public intellectuals and millions of average people from all over the world. This is more than the normal flow between two large religious communities. Islam can point to little in the way of recent conversions. Its claim to be the world’s fastest-growing religion stems mostly from the high birth rate in Islamic countries, whose infant mortality rates have been cut by the introduction of Western medicine. Christian growth is based on adult conversion. As leading Christian evangelist Wolfgang Simpson writes, “More Muslims have come to Christ in the last two decades than in all of history.” Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000. One Iranian religious scholar believes youth are abandoning Islam because it is identified with the corrupt Iranian government. Now the Iranian Majlis (parliament) is debating the death penalty for conversion. After years of al-Qaeda war on Iraq, a similar phenomenon is growing. The New York Times March 4 reports: “After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.” A high school girl tells Times reporters: “I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us. Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.” A 19-year-old man says: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.” A Baghdad law professor explains that her students “have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them.” A 24-year-old female college student says, “I used to love Osama bin Laden. Now I hate Islam. Al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.” In southern Russia the same pattern is emerging. According to Roman Silantyev, executive secretary of the Inter-religious Council in Russia, freed from atheist control, two million Muslims converted to Christianity. Repulsed by bloody terrorist attacks, those living in areas such as Beslan have converted to Christianity in the greatest numbers of all. As many as 100,000 have converted to Christianity in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. After decades of Islamist war, evangelicals report thousands of sub-rosa converts in rural areas of Kashmir. Says one churchgoer: “I am interested in this religion. I hate violence. I hate fundamentalists in Islam. I come here to seek peace.” An Indian newspaper headline reads: “Urban Muslim Youth Out to Junk Faith.” Following decades of terrorist rule, Palestinians are being quietly converted, holding in-home services to avoid detection. Says one evangelist: “I’ve been working among these people for thirty years, and I promise you I’ve never seen anything like this.” Islam is also losing adherents in areas where Islamist harassment is heavy on the streets. The London Times estimates 15% of Muslims living in Western Europe have left Islam — 200,000 in the UK alone. Those who leave often face harassment, threats, and attack. The mufti of Perak, Malaysia, estimates about 250,000 people have abandoned Islam, making formal application for apostasy to the state — a right allowed to Malaysian citizens who are not ethnic Malays. Says he: “This figure does not include individuals who don’t do solat, doesn’t fast and breaks [sic] all the tenets of Islam.” Borrowing from the communist playbook, Malaysia operates “reeducation camps” for any ethnic Malay found guilty of apostasy. Unsurprisingly, ethnic Malays are at the bottom of the economic ladder in Malaysia. In a letter published in Corriere della Sera on Easter Day, Allam points out the pope “sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a church that until now has been too cautious in the conversion of Muslims … because of the fear of being unable to protect the converted who are condemned to death for apostasy. “Thousands of people in Italy have converted to Islam and practice their faith serenely. But there are also thousands of Muslims who have converted to Christianity who are forced to hide their new faith out of fear of being killed by Islamist terrorists.” Allam describes Islam as a system for taking and holding power. Threat of violence is its enforcement mechanism. Allam also points out: “Beyond … the phenomenon of extremists and Islamist terrorism at the global level, the root of evil is inherent to a physiologically violent and historically conflictual Islam.” So it is not coincidental that Muslims are abandoning the faith as U.S. and coalition soldiers smash al-Qaeda in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Islamist terrorists and street thugs are beginning to look impotent. Appeasement-oriented opinion explains Islamic violence as a response to Western policy. For them, reality is incomprehensible. But in a 1998 ABC News interview with John Miller, Osama bin Laden explained his motivation: Allah had given the jihadis victory over one superpower (the USSR) and Allah would grant them victory over the other. But a decade later it is not coming to pass on the battlefield. The defeat of the Islamists puts the lie to the claim that Allah will cause the infidels to desire submission. As a result, the Islamists’ ability to intimidate their captive populations is weakened. More and more it is Muslims who no longer desire submission to Islam. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #15 I agree w/ya Phil - the bedouin tribalism of the middle east is still strong there & pre-dates the arival of islam by a thousand years - they just married up the whacky mohammad cult w/the pre-modernity/late B.C. mind-set. |
| Posted by: Broadhead6 2008-04-04 22:39 |
| #14 Moose, here's another way to look at it. Christianity is the religion of modernity and middle class aspiration. The roots of Christianity as we know it is northern Europe where what we call the modern world originated and developed. So, rather than Islam causing societies to be backward, it's the other way round. Backward societies remain Muslim. Introduce modernity and people want a religion suitable to a modernizing world and that's christianity. Although Budhism and Hinduism, generally non-prosletyzing religions, seem to adapt to modernity quite well. Observant, middle class Hindus I know, regularly make jokes about their religion. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2008-04-04 20:43 |
| #13 rjschwarz: It was more than Islam. It is a war to preserve barbarism against civilization. In this case, Islam is just the face of barbarism; but the conflict is older than Islam. Civility offers "the better way" than barbarity, as judged by *everyone*. Thus people leave barbarity and try to become civilized. Only those who are invested in barbarity try to resist this stampede. They do so by intimidating or trying to intimidate those on the side of barbarity to stay there. But that doesn't work. The only thing that will preserve barbarity is for civilization to be utterly destroyed, so that there is no choice. The great irony of Islam was in its origins, *it* represented civility, compared to everything else around it. And it never got it through its head that it is no longer "the best" or the efficient way, that appeals to people. If you listed to them, you will hear their bafflement as to why *anyone* would choose anything other than Islam. Because Islam is the better way. It has always been the better, most civilized way. There is no better, no gentler, way to treat women, for example. Beating them is kindness compared to slaughtering them for no reason. But even they are realizing that Islam is no longer civil. In fact it is primitive, violent and crude. The only supporters it has left are those that are invested in it, and those they can force to remain in it. And that is why Muslims are leaving it in droves. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-04-04 19:15 |
| #12 Gener speaking, yet another reason for the ISLAMIST "HIDDEN IMAM/MAHDI" TO SHOW UP IN THE NAME OF GOD-ISLAM, BY AND FOR THE SAKE OF SAME. The ISLAMIST SWORD no longer points at both the US-West + Russ-China/Asia > THANKS TO DUBYA + US SUCCESS/ENTRENCHMENT, OSAMA BIN LADEN IS NOW POINTING IT SOLELY AT THE LATTER. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-04-04 19:02 |
| #11 I'd heard someone once say that Al Queda started the war because they realized Islam was losing and felt that a clash of civilization might bring back the faithful. Interesting in light of this type of report. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-04-04 16:29 |
| #10 is this another crusades |
| Posted by: sinse 2008-04-04 16:00 |
| #9 #4 Reverent Tom always just around the corner. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-04-04 15:16 |
| #8 Invade their countries. Kill their leaders. Convert their people to Christianity. Works for me. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2008-04-04 14:31 |
| #7 Onward Christian Soldiers |
| Posted by: Woodrow Slusorong7967 2008-04-04 13:48 |
| #6 DarthVader: I know that just among the Anglicans in Africa, they can't build churches fast enough and have to have outdoor services for the converts. Some of their dioceses have doubled or tripled in size and their Archbishops have to continually ordain new bishops and priests. Ironically, the split in the Episcopal church in the US is forcing many wealthy white congregations to become African missionary churches. They then send large amounts of money to their African Archbishops when they need money most. Africa either is becoming or already is the largest Anglican communion in the world. The Catholics, Evangelicals and other Protestant denominations are also being flooded with new members, most converts from Islam. Saudi Arabia has been tracking Islamic growth around the world, and their only significant new growth is by births, not conversions. Yet at the same time they are losing adults at a tremendous rate. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-04-04 13:17 |
| #5 Sorry. I was responding to john frum's post about African population. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-04-04 12:32 |
| #4 Population growth may be projected, but between the various wars and deadly diseases ravaging the refugees, and the other diseases like malaria and AIDS apparently pandemic in the rest of the continent, how likely is it that the graphs of projected and real population never intersect? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-04-04 12:26 |
| #3 I think cracks are showing in Islam's base, however I don't believe "Droves" are leaving the faith. If the west stood up to Islam and refused to be intimidated by it, maybe. Maybe it would convince the fence sitters or people who are "Fed up" with Islam to leave, but they aren't gonna do that unless they think they can leave safely. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2008-04-04 12:19 |
| #2 When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people From wikipedia "The total population of Africa is estimated at 888 million (as of 2005). It has doubled over the past 28 years, and has quadrupled over the past 55 years (UN estimates [2]). Population is projected to reach one billion by 2015" |
| Posted by: john frum 2008-04-04 11:38 |
| #1 I don't know what to make of this. I spoke recently to a Persian emigre (living in CA) who said that among his associates, nearly all had abandoned Islam for Christianity. However, during the rest of our conversation, he said all kinds of contradictory nonsense so I wasn't sure anything he said was reliable. |
| Posted by: mhw 2008-04-04 11:09 |