Paul Marshall

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World watches as Sufi singer awaits death in Nigeria -- for lyrics said to be 'blasphemy'

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World watches as Sufi singer awaits death in Nigeria -- for lyrics said to be 'blasphemy'

This much is clear: Kano State authorities in northern Nigeria accused the Sufi Muslim singer Yahaya Sharif-Aminu of circulating social-media messages containing lyrics they said attacked the Prophet Muhammad.

 What did the song say? It's impossible to find direct quotations, although his accusers say he sang praises for his Sufi faith and, thus, spread false teachings about Islam.

 Did Sharif-Aminu actually send those WhatsApp messages? Again, it's hard to separate facts from rumors backed by mob attacks.

But this much is clear: Sharif-Aminu was found guilty of blasphemy in 2020 by a regional sharia court and sentenced to death by hanging. He remains imprisoned, while human-rights activists around the world -- including the European Union parliament -- keep urging his release and the end of blasphemy laws.

"You're not sure, in many of these cases, what the person is actually accused of doing or saying because key people are afraid to discuss the details," said scholar Paul Marshall, who teaches at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and lectures around the world. He is the coauthor of "Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide," with Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

The result is a deadly puzzle. Anyone who shares facts about blasphemy accusations may then be accused of spreading blasphemy. Depending on the time and location, any public opposition to blasphemy laws may be considered an act of blasphemy.

Meanwhile, the definitions of "apostasy" and "blasphemy" keep evolving when used in cultures as different as Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, India and parts of Africa controlled by Islamic State leaders and its sympathizers, Marshall explained.


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New podcast: When the Taliban cracks down, will all the victims be worthy of news coverage?

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New podcast: When the Taliban cracks down, will all the victims be worthy of news coverage?

There’s no question that the botched U.S. efforts to evacuate at-risk people in Afghanistan is the big story of the hour, the day, the week and for the foreseeable future — especially if this turns into a grand-scale hostage nightmare.

But who is at risk? What kinds of people are trapped inside the new kingdom of the Taliban?

That was the subject that dominated this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). And as you would expect, host Todd Wilken and I were especially interested in the role that religion has been playing in this story — if journalists are willing to cover that angle.

So who is at risk? Here is a typical wording, care of an Associated Press update:

The Kabul airport has been the focus of intense international efforts to get out foreigners, Afghan allies and other Afghans most at risk of reprisal from the Taliban insurgents.

With the Taliban controlling the Afghan capital, including the airport’s outer perimeter, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that U.S. citizens are able to reach the airport, but were often met by large crowds at the airport gates.

But, wait. What about the news reports that U.S. forces cannot help U.S. citizens avoid Taliban checkpoints in order to reach the airport, while British and French military personnel are doing precisely that for their own people? That’s a very hot story right now, with U.S. diplomats and the White House saying that the can work with the Taliban to ensure safety.

So let’s pause and flesh out some of the details in that AP phrase about who is at risk, as in “foreigners, Afghan allies and other Afghans most at risk.” Who is most at risk, right now?

* Obviously, American journalists have every right to focus on risks to American citizens.

* In particular, we can assume that Taliban activists are tracing Americans who have led or worked with NGOs, religious aid groups, churches. Then there are the Western-style think tanks, schools, medical groups, etc.

* Obviously, there are the thousands of Afghans who cooperated with and even worked for the U.S. government, U.S.-backed Afghan military units and the kinds of “foreign” organizations mentioned in the previous item.


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With the Taliban takeover, world Islam -- and the press -- have much at stake in the future

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With the Taliban takeover, world Islam -- and the press -- have much at stake in the future

The return of Taliban rule after 20 years will likely produce the typical mayhem and murder when a regime suddenly collapses. Longer-term, immense challenges face the people of Afghanistan under the "Islamic Emirate" and, externally, the takeover will intensify a host of international military, security, political and humanitarian problems.

But much is also at stake for world Islam, a crucial aspect that the media have tended to slight thus far, as tmatt has already observed here at GetReligion. Journalists may be witnessing a new phase in what Georgetown University expert John Esposito has called a long-running "struggle for the soul of Islam."

The fallout could last for years, or even a generation, because it will be highly difficult to again dislodge Taliban control — from within or without. Though plans are unknown, Afghanistan’s rulers may well reimpose harsh practices that had provoked widespread condemnation (without, however, losing religiously freighted diplomatic recognition by Saudi Arabia). And they could again provide a strategic national sanctuary from which terrorists could target innocent civilians in the despised West.

The key, of course, is that all this would be proclaimed as God's will, enacted in the name of Islam and for its benefit. The Taliban announce religious zeal for a strict construction of Islam's dominant Sunni branch in their very name, which derives from "student" in the Pashto language.

Militant movements that include the Taliban have achieved special appeal for youthful Muslim devotees and some government backing. They have variously claimed religious sanction for destruction of historic artifacts, torture, mutilation, beheading and stoning to death, execution without trial, kidnaping for ransom, forced marriages and sexual slavery, drug trafficking and thievery, killing of envoys and charity workers, and persecution not only of Christians and Jews and Yazidis but even moreso of fellow Muslims who dissent (see scholar Paul Marshall’s book “Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide“). Not to mention banning music and movies, kites and dolls.

The most severe consequences have fallen upon Muslim girls and women, not merely put under strict clothing mandates, but denied human rights, education beyond age 10 or careers outside the home.


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Plug-in: Double standard? Treatment of Boulder suspect's faith raises tough question

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Plug-in: Double standard? Treatment of Boulder suspect's faith raises tough question

Another week.

Another mass shooting.

Another 21-year-old suspect.

Last week's news coverage of Robert Aaron Long, charged in the deaths of eight people — including six women of Asian descent — at three Atlanta-area spas, focused on his ties to a Southern Baptist congregation.

Long's arrest sparked a barrage of stories and columns on evangelical theology, racism and "purity culture," including a Religion News Service op-ed headlined "Blaming Christians for the Atlanta shootings isn't persecution, it's prosecution."

On the other hand, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa's Muslim background has figured less prominently — so far — in reporting on the suspect in Monday's massacre that claimed 10 lives at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.

In profiling the suspect, some major news organizations haven’t mentioned his religious affiliation at all. RNS has emphasized concerns that Alissa's arrest might ramp up "Islamophobia" and spark hate crimes as Muslims gather in congregational settings. (It’s a familiar storyline, going at least back to 9/11.)

"I think there definitely is a double standard," said Warren Smith, an evangelical who serves as president of the independent charitable giving watchdog MinistryWatch.com.

Smith, a longtime investigative reporter, offers this advice for covering a mass shooting: Stick to the facts. Avoid speculating on the gunman’s motives. Focus on the victims and the helpers.

"The perpetrator’s story will have an opportunity to come out in the legal process,” Smith said. “Let coverage of that process be the place where the perpetrator’s story is told factually, dispassionately, empathetically."

But the facts, not a double standard, are the reason for the different emphases in the Georgia and Colorado cases, said a journalist friend who is reporting on the Boulder massacre.

"The big difference to me is that police investigators brought up the 'sex addiction' question quickly and directly in Atlanta, which led people to seek where that guilt came came, which led to religious background," my friend said.


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Disturbing news trends in Turkey: What if Hagia Sophia returns to being a mosque?

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In recent years, Orthodox Christians around the world have watched as headlines kept appearing on obscure websites that mainstream journalists rarely visit.

Rumors grew that the famous Hagia Sophia sanctuary in Istanbul — a 6th Century wonder of Byzantine Christianity — would once again be claimed as a mosque, after decades of protection as a neutral-ground museum. Gradually, the rumors turned into symbolic actions by the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggesting that this strategic move might become a reality.

Recently there was this headline at OrthoChristian.com (all caps in the original headline, along with alternative spelling “Agia”):

‘TURKISH LEADER CALLS TO PAINT OVER SERAPHIM IN DOME OF AGIA SOPHIA, CONVERSION TO MOSQUE REPORTEDLY ALREADY UNDERWAY

The question, of course is this: Is this a news story? Other questions flow out of that: Is this a “religious” media story? Is it a “conservative” media story? One more: Is it a story for hard-news media in Europe, but not America?

Meanwhile, it would be hard — from the Orthodox point of view (I have twice visited Hagia Sophia) — to offer a more distressing overture than the top of that latest OrthoChristian.com report::

As Turkish officials await the court hearing on the possibility of converting the world-famous Agia Sophia Museum back into a mosque, preparations for the change are reportedly already underway.

In this vein, the leader of the Saadet Partisi Islamist political party, Abdullah Sevim, called for Turkey to immediately take action and paint over the faces of the seraphim in the dome of the 6th-century Orthodox cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum, reports the Orthodoxia News Agency.

“There’s no need to wait for the decision of the State Council. We’ve already purchased the lime,” Sevim wrote on his Twitter page, calling everyone to join in a Muslim prayer to be held at Agia Sophia by President Erdogan.


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Podcast: Will preachers fighting 'shelter in place' rules create a church-state disaster?

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For several weeks now, churchgoers — and journalists — have been waiting to see what would happen at Easter, Passover and Ramadan.wisely,

We don’t have all the answers, yet. But it’s clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, Christians in North America and around the world will be observing Holy Week and Easter at home, watching small teams of clergy and musicians celebrate the holiest rites of the Christian year while striving to follow the fine details of “shelter in place” orders.

In my own church — Eastern Orthodoxy — we will celebrate Pascha a week after Western Easter. Clergy in the Diocese of the South (Orthodox Church in America) just learned that our Archbishop Alexander has (I believe) set strict standards (.pdf here) for his parishes all across the Sunbelt. People will stay home through it all — Holy Week and Pascha — watching five-person teams of clergy and chanters do as many of the long, ancient rites as they can. Click here for Rod Dreher’s poignant post on that, which includes:

Did you know that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the one built over the site where Jesus died, was buried, and was resurrected, has been closed for the first time since … the Black Plague, in the 14th century? The right way to see this is that we Orthodox Christians are being asked to make an absolutely extraordinary sacrifice for the life of the world — so that this plague which has killed, and will kill, so many, and will have reduced so many to poverty, can be defeated. As the old-school Catholics like to say about sacrifice, we should, “offer it up” as an extreme sharing of Christ’s passion. We will know in a way we never have the meaning of the crucified Jesus’s words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

All of that loomed in the background as “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

For the most part, we tried to look past that story and down the road at the long-term legal implications of other religion-beat headlines caused by the coronavirus crisis.

I am referring to the small number of evangelical Protestants who have been rebelling against government orders to “shelter in place.” Julia Duin and I wrote about the coverage of some of these cases here (“About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague“) and then here (“All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that“).

What happens if — as some are planning — clashes between a few churches and state officials end up in court?


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All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that

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Rare is the day when I do not receive some kind of email linked to the following issue.

I will use “evangelicals” in this equation, since that is the most common religious flock mentioned in these missives. You also see this equation play out with “Catholic voters,” “Jews and Israel,” “New Yorkers,” “Democrats” (and “Republicans”) and lots of other niches in public life.

It is one thing to say that “evangelicals” are doing such and such or are responsible for a specific trend/event that is in the news. Think about that recent New York Times headline — now tweaked — that read: “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.”

Making blanket statements of that kind — about evangelicals, Jews, journalists or any other group — requires either (a) massive amounts of solid reporting or some combination of (b) ego and/or (c) hatred.

Frequently, journalists need to carefully look at the evidence and add words such as “most,” “some” or even “a few.” They may need to limit their judgmental statements to certain zip codes or subgroups of a larger whole (there are many kinds of Baptists, for example).

With that in mind, consider the following New York Times story that — #WAITFORIT — deserves some praise for not putting all evangelicals and even megachurch pastors in the same boat during the coronavirus crisis. And, yes, I am returning to an important topic that was just addressed by our own Julia Duin. Here’s the double-decker Times headline: “

Florida Pastor Arrested After Defying Virus Orders

The sheriff of Hillsborough County said the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, a Pentecostal pastor, endangered the lives of his parishioners by holding services on Sunday.

Yes, that preacher — again. Here is the overture:

MIAMI — Before the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, the pastor of a Pentecostal megachurch in Florida, held two church services on Sunday — each filled with hundreds of parishioners — lawyers from the sheriff’s office and local government pleaded with him to reconsider putting his congregation in danger of contracting the coronavirus.


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That wave of attacks on churches in Indonesia: Is the 'moderate' Muslim news hook gone?

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If you asked typical American citizens to name the world's largest Muslim nation, in terms of population, most would probably pick a land somewhere in the Middle East -- not Indonesia.

However, if there is one fact that many Americans do know about Islam in Indonesia, it is that most Muslims in this sprawling and complex nation practice a "moderate" form of the faith (whatever that "moderate" label means). This has allowed believers in various faith groups to live in peace, for the most part.

Thus, terrorist attacks in Indonesia linked ISIS are big news -- at least in the American news outlets that continue to offer adequate coverage of international news. Sadly, an ominous cluster of attacks this past weekend in Indonesia probably received little if any attention in most American newspapers.

The New York Times, of course, was a notable exception. Here is the lede in its report:

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- A wave of deadly bombings on Sunday and Monday and evidence of more planned have shaken Indonesia just ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, with entire families -- including children -- carrying out suicide attacks against Christian worshipers and the police.

The troubling discovery Monday of completed bombs in a housing complex outside Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, came a day after members of a single family carried out three attacks against separate churches in the city around Mass time, killing seven people.

The use of the word "Mass" implies that the attacks focused on Catholic congregations, when the reality was more complex than that -- since Pentecostal and traditional Protestant churches were targeted, along with Catholic sanctuaries. In other words, the attacks were aimed at all Christians (and police), not just Catholics.

But that was not the main issue here. The Times report quickly reminded readers:

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, practices one of the most moderate forms of Islam in the world, but still has a homegrown terrorism problem


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About that Mike Pence speech: Are solid facts available on global persecution of Christians?

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From time to time, your GetReligionistas pause to remind readers that they should not blame reporters for the headlines that appear with their stories.

Sad, but true: There is nothing unusual about seeing a solid news report that gets messed up, for readers, by an inaccurate or misleading headline.

But what should we say when a story has a solid, focused headline, but the story's actual contents leave much to be desired?

Consider the Washington Post report about the speech last week by Vice President Mike Pence at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians. I have no problems with the simple headline here: "Pence: America will prioritize protecting Christians abroad."

The key word is "abroad." And the top of the story -- obviously the source of the headline -- gets straight to some of the basics.

Vice President Pence sought on Thursday to reassure Christian leaders looking for the White House to focus more on the plight of persecuted Christians abroad.
“Protecting and promoting religious freedom is a foreign policy priority of the Trump administration,” the vice president said during a morning address at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians being held this week in Washington. Pence spoke to an audience who are grateful for the Trump administration’s statements of support for that cause but who are starting to question when the administration will take more concrete action.
Advocacy on behalf of people persecuted for being Christian is a topic “of enormous importance to this administration,” Pence said. Turning to speakers at the conference who were there to share their personal stories of persecution abroad, he said: “You have the prayers of the president of the United States. The suffering of Christians in the Middle East has stirred Americans to action, and it brings me here today.”

So far, so good. But if you read the rest of this story its pretty apparent that the Post team thinks that the American political angles in this story are way more important than the evidence that lots of Christians are dying around the world.


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