Muslim deserters threatened over Joining Christianity
Pastor Dale Morgan
Muslim deserters threatened over Joining Christianity*
Last Updated: 2:13am GMT 10/12/2007
When Sofia Allam left the Muslim faith for Christianity, the response
from her family was one of persecution and threats. Alasdair Palmer
explores the dangers facing Islam's apostates
Sofia Allam simply could not believe it. Her kind, loving father was
sitting in front of her threatening to kill her. He said she had brought
shame and humiliation on him, that she was now "worse than the muck on
their shoes" and she deserved to die.
Sofia Allam received death threats after leaving the Muslim faith for
Christianity
Religious persecution of the kind Sofia suffers is increasingly common
in Britain today
And what had brought on his transformation? He had discovered that she
had left the Muslim faith in which he had raised her and become a Christian.
"He said he couldn't have me in the house now that I was a Kaffir [an
insulting term for a non-Muslim]," Sofia - not her real name - remembers.
"He said I was damned for ever. He insulted me horribly. I couldn't
recognise that man as the father who had been so kind to me as I was
growing up.
"My mother's transformation was even worse. She constantly beat me about
the head. She screamed at me all the time. I remember saying to them, as
they were shouting death threats, 'Mum, Dad - you're saying you should
kill me… but I'm your daughter! Don't you realise that?'?"
They did not: they insisted they wanted her out of their house.
After three weeks of bullying, and just before her parents physically
threw her out, Sofia left. "They put their loyalty to Islam above any
love for me," she says, her voice faltering slightly.
"It was such a shock. I remember thinking when they brought all my
uncles round to try to intimidate me - all these men were lined up
telling me how terrible a person I was, how the devil had taken me - I
remember thinking, how can this be happening? Because this isn't Lahore
in Pakistan. This is Dagenham in London! This is Britain!"
Religious persecution of the kind Sofia suffers, however, is
increasingly common in Britain today. It is hard to get an accurate
notion of the scale of the problem, not least because very few of the
people who leave Islam are willing to complain to the police about the
way they are treated.
"Intimidation is very widespread and pretty effective," says Maryam
Namazie, a spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She
believes that many of the deaths classified as "honour killings" are
actually murders of people who have renounced Islam.
"I get threatened all the time: emails, letters, phone calls," she says.
"When I returned home this afternoon, for example, there was a death
threat waiting for me on my answering machine…" She laughs nervously.
"A lot of them aren't serious, but occasionally they are. I went to the
police about one set of threats. They took a statement from me but that
was it - they never contacted me again."
That treatment is in sharp contrast to the seriousness with which the
Dutch and German police responded when members of the Council of
Ex-Muslims in those countries made complaints to the police about death
threats.
"The heads of the Dutch and German organisations are today both living
under police protection," Ms Namazie explains.
Last week, it was reported that the daughter of a British imam was
living under police protection, after receiving death threats from her
family for having left Islam.
But it is not only extreme Muslim families that believe it is their
religious duty to threaten, and even kill, members who renounce the
religion.
"My father could not be described as an extremist," insists Sofia, who
is now 31. "We read the Koran and prayed regularly together, but he
never insisted on my wearing Islamic dress and he was quite happy that I
went to the local comprehensive, which was all girls, but not by any
means dominated by Muslims."
There were conflicts when Sofia's parents tried to arrange a marriage
for her at the age of 18, but they seemed to accept her decision to
continue her education.
"They even let me go away to university," she explains. "I appreciated
how difficult it was for them to grant me that freedom, and I was very
grateful for it. In the event, though, I only lasted three months - I
just got so homesick that I had to come back to Mum and Dad."
Sofia got a job in a hotel and quickly became a manager. Her interest in
Christianity was entirely self-generated. She acquired a Bible, which
she hid in her bedroom. But four years ago, her mother found it.
"She confronted me one morning with, 'Are you still a Muslim?' I had to
tell the truth: I didn't think I was. From that moment on, she basically
disowned me. My father was shocked and saddened. But the reality was
that my parents behaved to me as if they thought it would be much better
if I was dead."
Most leading Muslims in Britain are unequivocal in their denunciation of
British Muslim parents who threaten to kill their children for leaving
Islam.
Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), says that it is
"absolutely disgraceful behaviour… In Britain, no Muslim has the right
to harm one hair of someone who decides to leave Islam."
Inayat Bunglawala, also a spokesman for the MCB, insists that such
behaviour in Britain is "awful and quite wrong. The police should crack
down on it."
And yet a significant portion of British Muslims think that such
behaviour is not merely right, but a religious obligation: a survey by
the think-tank Policy Exchange, for instance, revealed that 36 per cent
of young Muslims believe that those who leave Islam should be killed.
There is considerable support, from the Koran and other sacred Islamic
texts, for that position - which may explain why, out of the 57 Islamic
states in the world today, seven have a legal code that punishes Muslims
who leave the religion with death.
That number may soon increase: Pakistan is currently considering a Bill
that would make apostasy a capital crime for men and one carrying a
sentence of imprisonment for women.
As it is, ordinary Pakistanis take the law into their own hands and kill
Muslim apostates. The same thing happens in Turkey where, earlier this
year, two people were killed for "having turned away from Islam".
Patrick Sookhdeo was born a Muslim, but later converted to Christianity.
He is now international director of the Barnabas Fund, an organisation
that aims to research and to ameliorate the conditions of Christians
living in countries hostile to their religion.
He notes that "all four schools of Sunni law, as well as the Shia
variety, call for the death penalty for apostates. Most Muslim scholars
say that Muslim religious law - sharia - requires the death penalty for
apostasy.
"In 2004, Prince Charles called a meeting of leading Muslims to discuss
the issue," adds Dr Sookhdeo. "I was there. All the Muslim leaders at
that meeting agreed that the penalty in sharia is death. The hope was
that they would issue a public declaration repudiating that doctrine,
but not one of them did."
The reluctance to condemn sharia law is widespread. I asked Mr
Bunglawala, for instance, to condemn the Islamic states that imposed the
death penalty for apostasy. He did not do so, merely commenting that "it
was a matter for those states".
Given the acceptance by some that Muslim religious law does indeed
require that apostates be killed, it is hardly surprising that many
ordinary Muslims think that it is their religious duty to carry out that
punishment - or at least to threaten it.
"There can't be freedom of religion in Britain while so many British
Muslims take that attitude," Sofia says. "It frightens me, because
attitudes have hardened over the past decade."
Still, won't her parents eventually just recognise that she has chosen
to change her religion? Won't they, in 10 years' time, accept her back?
"No," Sofia says, her eyes full of tears. "That will never happen. I
know it. They will never accept me the way I am."