Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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Apollonius
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Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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Conversions from Islam to Christianity - Ibn Warraq, New English Review, February 2016
http://www.newenglishreview.org/Ibn_War ... istianity/



IRAN

Iran is one of the most interesting of all the “rooms” that Garrison studied. He observes that, “Of Iran’s population 64 percent were born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and have little affection for it. While Christianity is growing rapidly in the country, so too are many other worldviews as Muslim Iranians seek a respite from the state religion. It is common to find Iranian young adults walking away from Islam and turning to atheism, secularism, hedonism, drugs, and even ancient pathways such as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.”[18] I shall be discussing Iranian atheists in a later section, but I can personally vouch for Garrison’s latter conclusion. Over the last twenty years, I have given talks to Iranian groups in Paris, Stockholm (Sweden), Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York; they have all been anti-Khomeini, and most have been atheists, and certainly secularists - thus, evidently, their flight from Iran. Garrison also points out, quoting journalist Scott Peterson, “‘hidden behind the mullah’s mask is the most unashamedly pro-American population in the Middle East’. The sentiment was expressed spontaneously after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, when 60,000 Iranians gathered on Tehran’s football stadium dressed in black to hold a candlelight vigil.”[19]

House churches are the most common place for Muslim converts to Christianity to worship. The House Church movement may have, as a conservative estimate, 100,000 followers but “data from interviews with Iranian Christian refugees, and the number of correspondents to satellite Christian television programs give reason to believe that figure could be as high as a few million”.[20]

Garrison refers to Mark Bradley[21] who wrote, “If the figures from the survey carried out by Mohabbat TV were translated nationally, it would mean that 8 million people are interested in Christianity and nearly 3 million would actually want to become Christian.” The German online journal, Deutsche Welle [DW] cites other figures, “It is said that between 250,000 and 500,000 Iranians have converted, though the actual number is impossible to know.”[22]

DW then explains the reasons for conversions, “They are turning away from Islam primarily because they are disappointed in their government, which has tied politics and religion together so as to make them inseparable, and has curtailed many civil rights in the name of Islam.”[23]

Persecution of Iranian Muslim converts to Christianity has led many to flee to the West. The U.K. daily newspaper, The Guardian,[24] describes the journey of these asylum seekers in Germany, mainly Iranian, and occasionally Afghan, émigrés who have given a new lease of life to the religious life of Germany. Many have paid as much as to $30,000 to be smuggled into the country with fake passports. Once in Germany they have usually adopted western names, and have added greatly to congregation numbers in several independent Lutheran, Evangelical and Presbyterian churches. They are now waiting for their baptism ceremonies as they rebuild their lives. The last time Germany saw so many Iranians seeking entry was just after the 1979 revolution. The number of Iranian refugees has doubled every year for the last five years, from less than 1,000 in 2008 to 4,348 in 2012. Official figures from the federal office for migration and refugees confirm this trend. Over 3,500 Iranians were granted asylum last year, and Iran was one of the countries from which Germany saw a steep rise in asylum applications.

The Guardian gives the reasons for this exodus, “Spread across multiple churches and asylum camps, Muslim- to-Christian converts from Iran make up a noticeable population of asylum seekers who say a growing crackdown on Muslim-born Christian converts back home, and disillusion from decades of living under Islamic law, have led them to Germany. Though Iranian converts can be found in The Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, Germany’s economic stability and reputation as a major refugee hosting country has made the European country the most desirable destination.”

In the past most of Iran’s Christians were ethnic Armenians and Assyrians who are allowed to practice their religion freely as long as they did not proselytize. Thanks to Christian satellite television broadcasts, in the last five- to-10 years, Iranian Diasporan Christian pastors have had an enormous influence over their fellow Iranians back home. Even ethnic Armenians and Assyrians have taken to spreading the gospel to their Muslim neighbours. The combined result is that the religion is taking hold throughout Iran. The Guardian tries to give estimates of the numbers involved but, “The underground nature of the Christian conversion movement has made numbers impossible to determine accurately. Estimates range from 300,000 to 500,000 by various sources. Though these statistics cannot be independently verified, converts and pastors both in and out of Iran say the movement is strong and widely spread. Some converts have also been reported to travel to neighboring Armenia to become baptized.”
manolo
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Re: Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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Appollonius,

I'm wondering if replacing one theism with a sibling theism is really a 'conversion'?

Alex.
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Torchwood
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Re: Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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manolo wrote:Appollonius,

I'm wondering if replacing one theism with a sibling theism is really a 'conversion'?

Alex.
Yes it is, relatively. While the doctrines are equally absurd and there are some nasty Christian cults, mainstream Islam (both Sunni and Shia) is much nastier and more intolerant than mainstream Christinaity these days (it was once the other way round, but that was centuries ago).
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Apollonius
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Re: Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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Torchwood wrote:
manolo wrote:Appollonius,

I'm wondering if replacing one theism with a sibling theism is really a 'conversion'?

Alex.
Yes it is, relatively. While the doctrines are equally absurd and there are some nasty Christian cults, mainstream Islam (both Sunni and Shia) is much nastier and more intolerant than mainstream Christinaity these days (it was once the other way round, but that was centuries ago).





Someone who pays close attention to the details cannot agree that Islam was once more tolerant than Christianity. It would be more correct to say that it was at certain times and places in the past more tolerant than the way Christianity was practiced at certain times and places.



One repeatedly hears about the great tolerance of Muslims in al Andalus, for example, but this is a myth, perpetuated above all by journalists who read an article somewhere.


It is a curious fact that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of books about ancient Egypt, and only a very few which cover the history of Islamic Egypt.

Recently I read The Cambridge History of Egypt. Volume 1, Islamic Egypt 640-1517 edited by Carl F. Petry (Cambridge University Press, 1998). The authors paint a picture of discrimination at all times punctuated by frequent periods of outright persecution.
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Apollonius
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Re: Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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Alex,


To an atheist or agnostic or even to someone outside the Middle Eastern / European cultural areas Christianity and Islam appear similar.


Personally, I follow Franz Rosenzweig on this and regard Islam as a parody of Judeo-Christian thought.




Christian, Muslim, Jew: Franz Rosenzweig and the Abrahamic Religions
- David P. Goldman, First Things, October 2007
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007 ... muslim-jew


Franz Rosenzweig is widely regarded as one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the past century. Best known for The Star of Redemption, published eight years before his death in 1929 at the age of forty-three, he began a new kind of dialogue between Judaism and Christianity when he argued that the two faiths complement each other: Christianity to propagate revelation to the world, and Judaism to “convert the inner pagan” inside each Christian.

Less often mentioned, however, is Rosenzweig’s analysis of Islam, a religion he regarded as a throwback to paganism. Indeed, Rosenzweig predicted a prolonged conflict of civilizations between Islam and the West. “The coming millennium will go down in world history as a struggle between Orient and Occident, between the church and Islam, between the Germanic peoples and the Arabs,” he forecast in 1920—in part because Islam is “a parody of revealed religion,” while Allah is an apotheosized despot, “the colorfully contending gods of the pagan pantheon rolled up into one.”

Rather than three Abrahamic religions, Rosenzweig saw only two religions arising from the self-­revelation of divine love, with Islam as a crypto-pagan pretender. He was no Islamophobe, observing that Islam during certain eras evinced greater tolerance and humaneness than Christian Europe. But he was emphatic that truly foundational differences distinguish Judeo-Christian religion from Islam. ...
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Re: Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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When it comes to Christianity and Islam, it matters little* what Rosenzweig and Spenglerman believe.

In Islam, change will have to come from within, as it did in the nations wherein Christianity was dominant.

*Less than zero, actually.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Torchwood
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Re: Conversions from Islam to Christianity

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Apollonius wrote:
One repeatedly hears about the great tolerance of Muslims in al Andalus, for example, but this is a myth, perpetuated above all by journalists who read an article somewhere.
Ah, the Convivencia, the modern politically correct trope, in reaction against those good Catholic monarchs bringing the true cross to the Heathen. Real history is a bit more muddled and complex.

Back in the 11th and 12th century, there was a genuine tolerant coexistence on both sides, not confined to Spain (the Normans in Sicily were the same). The emirates of Al Andalus were easy going, cultured and also divided and weak, and got their arses wupped by Castile. So they acceded to the puritanical and intolerant rule of those Moroccan desert Berbers, the Almoravids, and their even more fanatical successors, the Almohads, who pushed back the frontier. The Christians learnt from this, including intolerance,and paranoia was sweeping Catholicism anyway, because of the rise of the Cathars next door in Languedoc. The power of Al Andalus was broken by the Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.

So tolerance and intolerance were part of a two way street, long predating Ferdinand and Isabella.
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