Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Read Free Page A

never be minimized. But the overthrow of, say, the North Korean regime could well end the persecution of Christians there almost overnight—just as the fall of the Soviet Union saw Christians’ persecution come to a quick close in Russia. This is because the persecution of Christians in non-Muslim nations is almost always rooted in a secular ideology and tied to a particular political regime. On the other hand, Muslim persecution of Christians is perennial; it transcends any one regime. It is part and parcel of the Islamic religion and the civilization born of it—hence its tenacity. Thus the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world is not only a widespread phenomenon that has horrific effects on large numbers of human beings across the globe; it is also a discrete phenomenon, deserving of attention in its own right.

FROM EMULATION TO CONTEMPT
     
    What happened? If in the “Golden Age” leading up to the middle of the twentieth century Muslims were increasingly emulating the West, exactly when and why did this stop? What caused the trend to reverse and start speeding in the opposite direction?
    That Muslims have turned away from the West and back toward Islam is no secret. Of course there were always Muslims who still clung to the Islamic way, the Sharia, 22 but in the early twentieth century it seemed obvious that they were on the wrong side of history. The future clearly seemed to belong to Westernization and secularization. And yet by the 1970s, there was no denying that Islam had returned in a very big way. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 symbolizes resurgent Islam in the American mind. Bearded and morose mullahs, chief among them the Ayatollah Khomeini, characterizing America as the “Great Satan,” became so popular among the Iranian people that they overthrew the secularist Reza Shah. Up until this event, the overwhelming majority of Western scholars had been convinced that the Westernization of the Muslim world was nearly complete, that Islam was an all but spent force, at best a cultural heritage for nominal Muslims. Instead, by the 1970s, “Islam is the solution” became the new clarion call of the Muslim world.
    Why this change took place—why Muslims abandoned Western ways—is much less understood. Of course any such large historical movement has many causes. Ironically, however, one crucial factor (often missed) was the continued Western influence on Muslims—but now in a novel and negative direction: just as Muslims had earlier learned respect for the West and sought to emulate it in varying degrees, so roughly around the middle of the twentieth century, Muslims began to have contempt for the West and turned away from it, back to their own heritage and Islamic identity. Muslims reverted, and increasingly continue to revert, to the Islamic way in all things from the mundane to the momentous, from the details of Islamic dress to the patterns of Islamic intolerance of Christians that had marked the centuries of Islamic history before the anomalous “Golden Age” for Christians.
    And where did Muslims, especially beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, learn to despise the West? The same place they had originally learned to respect the West—that is, from the West itself. It is no coincidence that the return of “Islamic fundamentalism,” as it was called in the 1970s, followed close on the heels of the cultural revolution that took the West by storm beginning in the 1960s. Muslims learned contempt for the West from the new culture of sexual licentiousness, moral relativism, godlessness, and even Western self-hatred that flooded Western societies in the 1960s, though they had roots going back decades earlier. These things were all tolerated or even celebrated in the mainstream of Western society. Yet such licentiousness and moral relativism proved intolerable to Muslim societies that had admired and emulated the West when it was still characterized by moral restraint. Muslims definitively rejected