Iraq’s Mandaeans ‘face extinction’
Until I read this article, I had never heard of the Mandaean religion - a religion currently being wiped out in Iraq by Islamic extremists.
I meet Luay. He is too scared to be identified and does not want to use his full name.
He was dragged off the street by armed men and forcibly circumcised - a practice not allowed in the Mandaean religion.
He is 19 and is now unlikely ever to find a bride from his own faith.
Worse, he was forcibly converted. That means in the eyes of those same extremists if he now declares himself Mandaean he is apostate.
That makes him a traitor to Islam, who may be murdered. He says he will not be safe in any Muslim country.
It doesnt get any more barbaric than this. It does make me wonder whether fundamentalism in Islam can ever really be tamed. Or if it’s actually possible, it’s going to take a very long time, possibly centuries. Iraq used to have about 2 million Christians at one point, but they were almost all eventually driven out. Christians use to exist in their millions in other middle eastern countries as well, but they were driven out of there over the course of the last century. Same story for Jews as well. The derangement against them goes way beyond the usual historical animosities into something completely pathological.
I know we’ve seen a similar situation in Northern Ireland, although that was driven more by politics and less by religion, and Iraq is like Northern Ireland on steroids. To find a similar parallel of the same scale with Christianity, you would have to go back to the religious wars of the 1600s.
We can only hope for the sake of the middle east, that the religion gradually becomes more tolerant as time progresses - much in the same way Christianity and other religions did.
If that doesn’t happen, then us folks in the West are gradually going to pull out of the middle east as we become less dependent on oil and the place will be left to rot. Eventually it will be nothing more than Muslims fighting Muslims and nobody will care about it. It will be another ‘Africa’ where blacks are killing blacks every day of the week, but because whites are not involved in the killing, it doesn’t make the headlines.