ion when properties were attacked. The violence erupted after a Christian husband tried to defend his wife from sexual harassment at a bus terminal. There has also been a big increase in the number of Christian women and girls who have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam, with any subsequent renunciation of Islam treated as apostasy which is punishable by death under the Maliki school of sharia which is dominant in Egypt. This is a growing problem for Christian minorities in a number of Islamic countries, including for example, Pakistan. However, in Egypt it has significantly increased since the start of the Egyptian revolution this year.
In Syria there is very real fear among the Christian minority that the Assad regime will be replaced by a radical Islamist government. These fears have been fuelled by pressure put on them and threats made by Islamists to take part in the uprising. For example, Adnan al-Noor a leading Syrian sheikh issued a warning, which many Syrian Christians understood to be directed at them, that all opponents of the revolution will be “torn apart, chopped up and fed to the dogs”. Syria has a Christian population of around 2 million making up approximately 10% of the population, although that number has been significantly increased recently by an estimated 350,000 Iraqi Christian refugees who have fled what is now effectively religious cleansing in central and southern Iraq.
In Morocco an Islamist party won the largest share of vote in elections conceded by King Mohamed in an attempt to avert an Arab spring revolution similar to Tunisia and Egypt’s. However, although there will now be an Islamist prime minister the King of Morocco will still have the final say on government policy relating to defence and religion.
In Iraq where the rule of the secular Ba’ath party has been replaced by a fragmenting coalition of religious parties, the past year has seen ever increasing attacks on Iraqi Christians and churches particularly in the central region. The specific targeting of Christians appears to be designed as a form of ‘religious cleansing’ to eradicate non Muslims from Iraq and has resulted in approximately two thirds of Iraq’s 1.4 million Christian population fleeing as refugees to neighbouring countries such as Syria and Jordan. This religious cleansing is a rare case where some Islamist understandings of sharia differ significantly from those of the classical schools of sharia. The latter base their understanding of sharia on medieval interpretations of the Qur’an which grant Christians dhimmi status (i.e. second class citizens who must pay the jizya tax), while Islamists base their understanding of sharia on their own interpretations of the Qur’an.
In Sudan the Sudanese civil war was essentially about the predominantly Arab and Islamic North trying to impose sharia on the mainly Christian and Animist South. On 9th July, in a rare sign of hope in the struggle against the imposition of sharia, South Sudan became independent as the world’s newest country. However, its long term security will always be an issue as sharia dictates that once an area has at any point in history once been subjected to Islamic law and government it becomes an act of ‘defensive’ jihad to fight to reimpose Islamic government and the enforcement of sharia.
Meanwhile in North Sudan on 12th October President Bashir announced government plans to adopt a completely Islamic constitution with sharia as the main source of national law. Already, some Christian pastors in the North have been warned not to hold services on pain of death. While women, including Christian mothers with young babies have been put in prison for not following sharia requirements such as being fully veiled and having a male escort when in public, a situation horribly reminiscent of Afghanistan under the Taliban when many widows with no male family left alive were arrested and imprisoned as they begged for food on streets.
There has also been an increasing issue of religious cleansing taking place in North Sudan with President Bashir having announced 