Persecution of Christians in Iraq
Horrifying reports of Christian persecution regularly come out of the Middle East. Iraq, for example – which is still experiencing great turmoil – had one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. There were over 1.5 million professed believers (in the widest sense) there some decades ago, but now, in the wake of persecution, over 75% of them have left the country.
Many examples could be given but perhaps an account of the treatment meted out to one 30-year-old Iraqi Christian woman reveals the extent of the persecution. Rita Habib Ayyoub was kidnapped, beaten, raped and held by her Jihadi captors for three years before being rescued last November by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Rita comes from the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq – where ISIS nearly wiped out the indigenous community.
In an interview she gave details of the horrors she endured from her kidnappers: “When ISIS invaded . . . my father and I were kidnapped by the terrorists. They took us to a hospital in the city of Mosul. They split up the women and the men. I haven’t heard anything about my father since.” Many did escape, but others disappeared. It was believed that most of those who disappeared were killed, but some have unexpectedly been rescued.
Rita continues, “The terrorists changed my name to Maria. . . . In the hospital in Mosul, we women were subjected to the most degrading abuse. Three children from my people were with me, and I witnessed them being sold to emirs (ISIS leaders) in Mosul. I was sold to Abu Mus’ab al-Iraqi. In his home, there was also a girl from Sinjar named Shata . . . she was only 14 years old.” Reta adds that the emir, Abu Mus’ab, enjoyed torturing them in other ways. She recalls, “He made us watch videos with terrorists slaughtering non-Muslims. In one of them, they were beheading Shata’s brother”.
After six months Reta found that Abu Mus’ab “got tired of her” and wanted to get money by “selling her off”. She says, “He sold me to another terrorist, and I was transported to Raqqa, Syria. But he did not keep me . . . he sold me to a third terrorist, a Saudi named Abu Khalid al-Saudi.” The cruelty continued in his household, where Reta was routinely beaten severely by the terrorist’s first wife, and the quest to forcefully convert her to Islam began.
She states, “Abu Khalid was married to a woman from Morocco. I was beaten and tortured by her every day. She would not give up until I was bleeding, from my head, for example. They made me read the Quran and threatened to kill me if I did not convert to Islam.” A few months later, she was sold again: “After four months in Raqqa, I was transported to Abu Kamal, on the border between Syria and Iraq. I was there for a year and four months, then I was moved once more, this time to the village outside of Deir ez-Zur.” Mercifully, in Syria, she was rescued by the SDF.
This tragic case reveals the sin and cruelty perpetrated by ISIS on one woman. Such cruelty is being replicated countless times across regions controlled by ISIS. It should cause us to pray earnestly for those who are persecuted and also pray that God would protect us, unworthy as we are as a nation, from the destructive activity of evil men.
KHM
Use of “Thee” and “Thou” in Prayer
The earliest recorded Scottish prayers and addresses to God are probably those in works such as Patrick’s Places (written in 1527), Gau’s Right Way into the Kingdom of Heaven (1533), Archbishop Hamilton’s Catechism (1552), and Knox’s History (which he started writing in 1559). All the recorded prayers in these books use the singular form “thee” in addressing God, rather than the plural “you”. In this, they were following the practice of the Greek and Hebrew originals in the Bible, and also the Latin Vulgate, with which all these writers were familiar.
The same works show that, in daily speech, the “thou” form was occasionally used, especially in more religious contexts, but that the “you” form was normal. Knox invariably addresses his correspondents as “you” in his letters; and the assassins of Cardinal Beaton in 1546 address him as “you” when they are trying to force his door but as “thou” when they are warning him to prepare for death. Thus from the very beginning, when English (or Scots) displaced Latin as the language of religion, the people of Lowland Scotland were addressing the Most High as “thou”, but one another ordinarily as “you”.
This uniform practice continued until the twentieth century, when the modern-language versions of the Bible abandoned the “thou” form, and some people changed their prayers accordingly. This change has not brought any advantage to the Church. Instead, it has brought division, confusion, increasing conformity to the world, and loss of contact with the religious heritage of the past. As at the Tower of Babel, when the godly kept their language and their heritage, but the rest were deprived of their native tongue and lost their heritage with it, so it has been with the introduction of modern versions of the Bible.
Those that embraced them soon complained that they – or the mythical “man off the street” – could not understand the old language, and that they found the old Reformed and Puritan writers too difficult to read. Their religion, accordingly, had to be adjusted to the modern world. Those that retained the old practice thought that these complaints of incomprehension were imaginary, or vastly exaggerated; and they continue to think so now in 2018 when the “man off the street” is as likely to be African, Chinese, or South American as to be ethnic British, and yet seems to have no great difficulty with the old English language.
The Israelites kept their Hebrew Scriptures “unmodernised” for 800 years from Moses to Jeremiah, although doubtless their language changed in that time. With the rich heritage that God has given to British Christianity, we should not be ashamed to follow the same pattern. DWBS