Persecution in the Middle East and How to Respond

“For us, it was a total shock,” said Sucilla Prabhu, an Indian Christian. Her eyes were bright with intensity as she described the night of her husband’s arrest on July 19, 2001. The couple had lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for over fifteen years, and were within days of leaving the country when their lives were changed forever. “At midnight,” she said, “they came and knocked down the door.”

“They” are the Mutawwa’in, the Saudi religious police. Fourteen of them entered the Prabhu home under cover of darkness and ransacked the house, confiscating books and Bibles. Sucilla and her husband Isaac were shoved into separate rooms and interrogated for nearly four hours. “They took [almost] all of the Christian literature,” Isaac said, but “God blinded their eyes so that they left the Arabic Christian material.”

In public, the Saudi government claims to allow Christians and other non-Muslim groups to meet and worship in private, but in practice they actively arrest, interrogate, and torture those who take the supposed liberty to meet. The State Department International Religious Freedom Report on Saudi Arabia states that the government “recognizes the right of non-Muslims to worship in private; however, it does not always respect this right in practice and does not define this right in law.” The Prabhus experienced this fluctuating policy firsthand.

For years the couple had been involved in Christian activities in Saudi Arabia. Working quietly with a core group of Christians from the Nigerian, Eritrean, and Filipino communities within the kingdom, they had banded together an effective prayer and ministry movement. The Mutawwa’in had secretly watched it all develop-and now they were cracking down. The officials cornered Isaac during an extensive interrogation. “Who else is involved in this Christian group?” they demanded to know. “I am the only one,” Isaac insisted. But the police responded, “If you don’t tell, we will beat you in front of your wife.”

IMPRISONED FOR CHRIST
Mercifully, the officials did not have the time to carry out their threat; a superior officer called just as they had placed Sucilla in front of her husband to view the beating. Isaac was dragged off to prison that night, and Sucilla had time to make just one phone call to inform friends that he had been taken. It was the beginning of a months-long struggle for Sucilla, along with the other wives in their group whose husbands were eventually imprisoned. As a woman, she was not permitted to drive in the strict Islamic country. Through the long and lonely hours of each day, she was faced with the constant reality of her husband’s imprisonment. While Sucilla was eventually able to visit her husband in prison, the guards refused to pass packages from her on to him.

Isaac’s experience was not only bleak but terrifying. “I was placed in [a] glass room with no water, with chains on my hands,” he said. The police tortured him to extract the names of several other church leaders. He faced harsh interrogation and repeated abuse. But, he says, “because of God’s grace I got through.”

The Christian group was shaken to the core after Isaac’s arrest. Daily they waited for news of who would be taken next. When Dennis Moreno, a Filipino Christian who worked closely with the group, heard of Isaac’s arrest, he wasted no time in preparing for his own. He paid the bills, put water in the tank, and hid his Bibles and Christian videos. “After the last bill was paid,” he said, “the secret police came for me.”

Dennis Moreno was handcuffed and arrested in front of his family on August 29, 2001. Others were arrested around the same time. Ibrahim Mohammed, an Ethiopian Christian, was arrested on August 19, as were Keborom, an Eritrean believer; Makbeab, an Ethiopian; and Benjamin, a Nigerian. Officials put Benjamin in chains in front of his family. His wife, desperate at the thought of her husband’s imprisonment, cried and begged the officials not to arrest her husband. But they dragged him to prison in spite of her weeping. The sweep of arrests continued, with Ministry of the Interior officials ransacking the private homes of Christian families and hauling believers off to prison.

After periods of solitary confinement, many of the Christians, including Isaac, Dennis, and Benjamin, were placed in the same prison: a massive, filthy room where, due to overcrowding, there was barely room to stand. There was no roof over the building, so the dust storms from the desert stung their faces and rain showers left the men covered in muck. The little meat that they were offered was frequently served raw. Along with the sub-human living conditions came the constant threat of beatings and torture.

September 11, 2001, came during the men’s imprisonment. Locked in a political prison in Saudi Arabia, they had no idea of the tragedy taking place in the United States. But on the 12th, they looked outside. “I saw people rejoicing, jubilating,” Benjamin, the Nigerian Christian, recalled. “And then the next day they brought us food,” added Dennis. “There was a celebration. There was a lot of food.” That Saudi officials and guards celebrated the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans is one key example of the hostility with which Americans (and by association, Christians) are regarded in predominantly Islamic countries across the Middle East.

PERSECUTED, BUT NOT ABANDONED
Even in prison, the men held communion and sang songs of praise. Family members put their trust in God and tried to carry on as best they could. Though shaken, the Christian fellowship was not daunted because of the arrests of their leaders; they were faithful through the fire. Throughout the Middle East many groups such as these exist. Often they have no building, no pews, perhaps no pastor. But they are the Church of the Middle East: a living, breathing organism struggling to grow across an arid land of persecution.

It is dangerous to be a Christian not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Egypt and many other countries across the Middle East. Just ask Gasir Mahmoud, an Egyptian whose conversion to Christianity sparked the fury of his adoptive Muslim father. After admitting that he had converted to Christianity from Islam two years earlier, 30-year-old Gasir Mahmoud’s life took a turn for the worst. His father had him forcibly locked in a psychiatric ward where he was tortured and given heavy doses of unlabeled “medication.” His supervising doctor taunted him about his conversion to Christianity. “You won’t get out of here until you change your mind,” she told him.

While Gasir Mahmoud was eventually released due to international pressure, the outlook for Christians in Egypt and across the Middle East is still a grim one. Earlier this year Muslims set fire to a Christian community center in Upper Egypt after overhearing prayers from an all-night church service. Other incidents of abuse against Egyptian believers include detainment, torture, and the kidnapping of Christian girls.

Algeria’s Christian community once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but has now been reduced to less than 11,000 believers. Harsh restrictions recently passed in the Algerian government drastically limit the freedom of Christians in the country. Unregistered house churches will be forced to close, and Christians will face prison time for distributing any type of literature or audio-visual material that could “shake the faith of a Muslim.” Meanwhile, terrorism has been shaking the Christian community for some time. Algeria’s Islamic Armed Group specifically targets Christians, with the goal of eradicating them from the country.

STRUCK DOWN, BUT NOT DESTROYED
It’s important to realize that, while we often hear that “persecution causes the Church to grow,” and that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” these assertions are not always correct. The Middle East is a prime example of the opposite phenomenon. For decades the fires of persecution have purged the Middle East of its Christian inhabitants, shrinking the Christian population drastically. In Lebanon, for instance, Christians once comprised 50 percent of the population but are now reduced to 35 percent. Moreover, they make up 3.5 million of the 5 million Lebanese living in the West.

Due to the rise of radical Islam across the Middle East, the birthplace of Christianity is becoming a graveyard of Christians. They are discriminated against, marginalized, and ultimately compelled to flee the country. Churches are burned, Christian women are raped, and believers endure other attacks launched against them. Governmental restrictions are placed on Christian houses of worship, limiting construction and repairs.

Yet in spite of the difficulties they face, the Christian community in the Middle East remains firm in faith. I sat across from Dennis, Prabhu, and Benjamin, just a few of the courageous men who had endured imprisonment during the 2001 raids in Saudi Arabia, and for hours listened to their firsthand stories of imprisonment, abuse, and ultimately release. I could scarcely believe the courage and hope that I saw in them. Sucilla summed it up well: “When God allows some problem in your life, He gives you the strength to withstand.” Dennis Moreno went a step further, saying that because of all that God had taught him during his imprisonment, he highly recommended the experience. “Everyone should go to prison!” he chuckled.

ONE BODY
What can seem puzzling is the calm-even joyful-reaction of some Christian believers to the persecution that they are experiencing. Instead of the desperate cries for help that we might expect, we sometimes hear only, “God is helping me to endure this.” Does their acceptance of the situations absolve us from our obligation to help them? Of course not. What God wants to do with the difficult times in the life of His Church and individual believers is up to Him. He is the One who creates “streams in the desert” and brings good out of evil. It is not upon us to preserve through inaction the evil atmosphere in which God is able, by His miraculous power, to achieve good.

Rather, He calls us to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Proverbs 31:8), and to “remember those in prison as if [we] were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if [we ourselves] were suffering” (Hebrews 13:3). Our response to a believer’s suffering is completely detached from their response. Theirs is a call to endure, while ours is a call to remember them in prayer, and to act on their behalf.

Wherever we live in this world, regardless of our nationality or culture, we are the Church, the body of Christ. And as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 12:26, “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” These words are a call to freely identify ourselves with those who are suffering in the body of Christ. Let’s reach out to them, and become a part of their lives today.

by Kristin Wright

Kristin is the founder of Stand Today, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about persecuted Christians worldwide.

From BreakPoint, August 8, 2006, reprinted with permission of Prison Fellowship, www.breakpoint.org