An item in today’s newspaper reads as follows:

An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be charged with converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under the country’s Islamic sharia laws.

The defendant, Abdul Rahman, 41, was arrested last month after his family accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada said. Rahman was charged with rejecting Islam.

During the one-day trial last week, Rahman allegedly confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity 16 years ago while working as an aid worker for a Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

This is a very serious charge. The prosecution is going for the death penalty unless Abdul Rahman converts back to Islam.

But wait a moment… aren’t we still being told by the Islamic apologists that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance? That is the story that Mr Javed Khan, the president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ, was trying to tell us a couple of weeks ago. He also said that Islam does not preach violence. Killing someone for choosing a different religion is not violence? Refusing to allow someone to choose their own faith is showing tolerance?

Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada clarifies this for us as follows:

“We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law. It is an attack on Islam.”

Outlawing any other religion is not the same as being against any other religion?
Someone converting to Christianity is an attack on Islam?

Yes, it is very much clearer now.
Why didn’t Mr Javed Khan say it like that in the first place?

And a message to all other Christians who are free to choose their own faith…
Please remember Abdul Rahman in your prayers, that he stays faithful to the end, and that the end is not that which his captors have planned for him.
The rest of us may have difficulties thrust upon us by critics of Christianity within our own free cultures, but they do not come anywhere near the kind of persecution that many suffer daily and hourly elsewhere on this planet. The price for some is far greater than many of the rest of us will ever have to pay. Let us never forget the persecuted church, nor forget that we have been told to pray for our enemies also.