Busted: It's big news in Morocco when missionaries are ferreted out, as was the case when al-Ittihad al-Ichtiraki reported on the seizure of missionary documents in 2006. (Morocco Times / The View From Fez)
Hold your nose and take a load of this: "The grasp of Mohammedanism is great upon the Middle East. No stronger, however, are the tentacles of Islam wrapped around the lives of the people than in Iran, the ancient empire of Persia. From Arabia the long arm of Islam reached like a creeping snake across the desert until it took all the Near East into its fingers."
Grasp. Tentacles. Creeping snake. Those are the words of G. F. Zoeckler, a Philadelphia Presbyterian missionary to Iran in the 1920s.
Or this, from a 1947 book on the Sudan by Edward Morrow (the missionary, not the broadcaster), called Islam Bows: After telling the story of a convert called Abu Musa, Morrow writes, "In the land of Abba Musa there are yet 60,000,000 Mohammedans who have not bowed before the Cross of Calvary as this malam did. While many of these are not in the Middle East, still that portion of Africa, northern and far eastern, which edges the Middle East, stands as a challenge to those who would carry the Gospel of the Cross to this land wherein the shackles of Islam are strong."
Is it any wonder the locals bristle and gag at the thought of missionaries among them? Between you and me, the Christian missionaries, evangelicals especially, sweeping the Arab world (or any world) these days are only a few rungs removed from snake-oil salesmen, gun-runners and neo-cons (when neo-cons were sweeping the Middle East and trying to convert it to Hamiltonian crony-capitalism).
They may be more polite, more subtle than the last century's heavy-handed arrogance of missionaries who felt unbound, but that's by necessity: Arab states are stronger, more policed these days. They've freed themselves from the claws of colonialism and reemerged as garden-variety authoritarian police states, where evangelizing is simply illegal. It's not an improvement. But it's difficult to muster sympathy for missionaries whose impulse is still driven by the 19th century notion that Arabs and Muslims are backward children ("a thankless and impassive race," as Mark Twain described them in Innocents Abroad) who need to be "saved."
So when I hear of missionaries being booted out of an Arab country, I'm of two mind. On one hand, I cheer the boots for doing to missionaries what they deserve, given their presumptions. On the other hand, it's just as true that the Muslim world's various prohibitions on publicly worshiping anything but Islam is equally reprehensible. Anyone should be free to worship whatever religion he or she chooses, publicly or privately. It's no one's business but the individual's. It's especially not the state's business, or that of the imam down the street. Along those lines, missionaries, as aggravating, arrogant and bigoted as they may be, should have equal freedom to roam and convert whom they please--if people are desperate enough, misinformed enough, rebellious enough or dub enough to go along.
That, of course, is not the case, not even in allegedly liberal Morocco, where yet another missionary was thrown out of the country yesterday for, according to Morocco's interior ministry, "openly converting people to Christianity." That one was American. He was seized with a "sizeable amount of proselytisation brochures," according to the ministry, in the town of Imizmiz, some 35 miles south of Marrakech.
Last month five Christian priests were kicked out for evangelizing. Last March Morocco put five European women on a ferry and sent them back to Spain for holding illegal evangelical conversion sessions. Last year Morocco also cut off diplomatic relations with Iran over claims that Iran had sent mini-mullahs to convert Sunnis to Shiitism. Ever vigilant in matters of repressing minorities, Morocco targeted homosexuals, too, in its sweep against Shiites.
Back in 2006 police unearthed documents pointing to the secret presence of evangelists in the country, which prompted The View from fez, a very good blog, to remark (uncharacteristically, I thought), "The general disquiet in Moroccan society about American evangelism appears to be justified. It is time the evangelists realised that respecting each others religious beliefs is important - as is respecting the laws of the country you are living in."
When it comes to missionaries and laws against them, it's difficult to say what's more reprehensible: the missionary impulse or the laws that suppress them. Curiously, it's in the more open and religiously free societies of the Middle East, among them Lebanon, Israel and to some extent Egypt, that missionaries have had the better impact if the schools, universities, hospitals, orphanages and (if memory serves) occasional newspapers they founded are the legacy they may be judged by. More repressive countries (the majority of the Middle East, Morocco among them) have less to show for their furtive missionaries, but partly because they show them the boot and the door instead of giving them the chance to be less than aggravating. The Lebanon model is the better way.
See Also:
- Morocco Targets Shiites and Homosexuals
- Mohammed VI and Censorship in Morocco
- 9/11 Reconsidered: Terrorism, Religion and Martin Amis
- Lebanon Edges Away from Identifying Religion on ID Cards
- Sarkozy Defends Islamophobia
Comments
You need to do better at reading between the lines of government communications! Do you really know what happened? Citing a 90 year old comment and applying it to today’s context is probably unhelpful. Do you know if the people in question shared this point of view?
Pierre
One thing that doesn’t come out in the press is that these recent incidents in Morocco you referred to involved meetings for training Morocco believers in Christ, many of which had been believers for years – especiallly the incident involving the women’s meeting. Of course, the Moroccan authorities will never admit to this and always play the proselytization card. While the 5 women were being invited to leave, all the Morocco women without exception testified firmly to the faith in Jesus Christ. 20 years ago that might not have been the case, but we’re living in a new era.
A PS to my post yesterday. I am one of those ‘m’ people who lived in Morocco 20 years ago. The 2 quotes you began with are interesting, but not very helpful for the discussion as they come from a very different era and don’t resonate with me or anyone I know. I went to Morocco as did others not motivated by pride or superiority but rather by a strong sense of calling and lack of fairness… – ‘calling’ in the sense that I believed that I was in possession of a life changing message that I couldn’t just keep to myself – ‘fairness’ in the sense that while my country allowed for the full exchange of ideas and freedom to follow one’s conviction to extent of even changing faith, Morocco and most lands where Islam is dominate doesn’t allow that exchange and uses the state to enforce this. What would you do in a situation like that?
A helpful analogy is to think of missionary work as people motivated the belief that they are carrying the cure to a deadly human virus and want to make that cure available as widely as possible. This is not done by using material gain as a way to pressure or manipulate others (as is often claimed), but rather one does whatever is possible to get that viral cure out into the marketplace of ideas in a way that is understandable both culturally and linguistically.
Good !!!! Kick out the christians from Muslim lands. As a Muslim convert from christianity, Muslim nations do not need to be subjected to helenized version of Jesus’ original message. The truth is more important than an individuals right to proselytize a false religion
ouch, as a missionary in the middle east.. that hurts. snake oil salesman?
you forget that there are native Christian groups in most of these countries that are being suppressed. Morocco with their Berber church even…
Islam says that all apostates should be killed. Christianity is not a plague.
Johnny, that’s a good point about native Christians, and I agree, Christianity is not a plague (at least not so much anymore: it’s an unfortunate comparison, Christianity and the plague, considering the millions who died in the Americas after Christian missionaries introduced the plague there), and Islam’s edict against apostates is ridiculous, but that’s what you get when religion is allowed to dictate policy in any way at all. The answer isn’t to eliminate one religion or another, it’s to eliminate all religions from the public sphere and let them be what they want to be in the private sphere.
I wonder if the difference in approach between countries like Syria, Lebanon and Jordan and Morocco is that these countries have Arab Christian populations?
The Catholic church in Morocco has characterised the recent evangelical conversion efforts as irresponsible and misguided. Islam is to be respected and in Morocco is a great unifying force for the country. It puts western religions to shame.
I remember going to mass in Algiers a few years back and finding arab christians in the congregation and Archbishop Tessier even using some arabic in some of the prayers. This is not the situation in Morocco.
I think the article is very informative. However, Pierre would be far more effective at communicating if he stopped continually putting down religion…once or twice I can understand but a lot of decent people follow a religion and appreciate freedom of religion and discussion amongst faiths or people without faith.
Point well taken Daoud. Thank you.
Praise the Lord, we have our Moroccan cyber church at
http://www.MoroccanChurch.org
Please pray for us!