Iraqi Christians celebrated Easter dangerously this year. With the rest of the world, they marked the 4,000^th Iraqi death, mourned the abduction and death of a Christian leader, and faced more religiously-motivated attacks.

Earlier this month, church workers found the body of abducted Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho in a shallow grave near Mosul, Iraq. Pope Benedict XVI called the death “an inhuman act of violence” and condemned the war in his Palm Sunday sermon, saying, “Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!” Since Rahho’s death, other Mosul Christians have been kidnapped or attacked, Compass Direct News reports.

Rahho is one of several Christian clerics murdered since the war began. In Mosul last June, armed men killed a Chaldean priest and three deacons. The year before, Father Paulos Iksander was kidnapped and beheaded. According to Nina Shea in National Review, the list of Christians tortured and killed includes children and lay people.

A study by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government found that between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis have died violent deaths since the invasion. BBC News says the war has uprooted over 4.5 million Iraqis, and Christians number among the unsettled. According to French Bishop Marc Stenger, half of Iraq’s 700,000 Christians are fleeing the country. France is granting asylum to 500 Iraqi Christians – a move some say discriminates against Muslims.

Christians experienced discrimination under Saddam Hussein as well, but Shea says as long as the Bush administration doesn’t acknowledge religious persecution, the lot of Iraqi Christians won’t improve:

No policies exist to address their specific needs in Iraq or facilitate their finding refuge abroad. No programs exist to train and support them to police their own villages — more critical than ever now that the military surge has flushed terror northward.

Despite the dangers, Iraqi Christians cling to faith. Mosul still celebrated Easter, and the Daily Progress quotes the daughter of an Iraqi minister: “Even during the worst threats, they still come to church.”

The Jerusalem Post reports that a group of Christian evangelists have been arrested for preaching the gospel in Jordan.

Jordanian security forces arrested eight people, mostly foreigners, after they were caught distributing missionary material to Bedouin families north and east of the Jordanian capital, Amman, the Saudi daily Al-Watan reported.

Can’t have that now, can we? And the Saudis can’t let a story on Christian evangelization pass without spreading some religious libel:

Sources said they were “enticing” impoverished youngsters by paying them money and calling on them to marry foreign girls.

And then there is this winner in the “Understatement of the Day” category:

Evangelism is a practice frowned upon in the Muslim world

The second Islamic caliph, Omar ibn El Khattab, expelled all Christians and Jews from the Arabian peninsula in the 7th Century, implementing a directive issued by Mohammad years earlier. Since then, the official presence of Christianity there has been practically nil and strictly confined to the expat workers who do most of the work in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Only in recent years has there been even a hint of toleration for Christianity. Thus, the announcement that the first Christian church is set to open in Qatar (home to the U.S. military’s CENTCOM) this Easter has provoked intense debate, Middle East Online reports.

Former Qatari justice minister Najib al-Nuaimi has objected to the church on “social and legal grounds” (read: shari’a), and columnist Lahdan bin Issa al-Muhanadi writing in the Doha daily Al-Arab exclaims, “The cross should not be raised in the sky of Qatar, nor should bells toll in Doha.” The new St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church will also house four other Christian denominations, but actual worship services will not be allowed by authorities. Only “collective prayer.”

In what is billed as a “moderate” Muslim country, Roman Catholic priest Pierre Wallez has been convicted in an Algerian court for leading a private prayer service in violation of that country’s new anti-proselytization (read: anti-Christian) law, Religious Intelligence reports.

Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers told Vatican Radio Fr Wallez led a prayer service in a private home on Dec 29, 2006, and had been jailed even though he had not celebrated the Eucharist.

On March 20, 2006 the Algerian Parliament passed Ordinance 06-03 which limited non-Muslim worship to specific buildings approved by the state, banning house churches and other non-registered religious gatherings.

The new law also banned proselytizing, instituting a sentence of up to five years and a fine of £7,500 for those found to have converted Muslims. The code also prescribes a five-year term of imprisonment for anyone who “incites, constrains, or utilizes means of seduction tending to convert a Muslim to another religion; or by using to this end establishments of teaching, education, health, social, culture, training… or any financial means.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to denounce Algeria’s action.

An act so despicable that it needs no further comment. From BosNewsLife:

Rahima Beoa, who was planning to be baptized tomorrow in Cinatuly village in Rangpur district, 248 kilometers (154 miles) northwest of the capital Dhaka, suffered burns on at least 70 percent of her body, local villagers said. Suspected Muslim extremists set her home, made from bamboo and wood, ablaze on January 7, while she and her 9-year-old grand child were sleeping, reported Compass Direct News, a Christian news agency.

The pastor of the local evangelical Isha-e-Jamat (Jesus’ Church) Bangladesh denomination, Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, reportedly said the mob was also upset that Beoa’s daughter and son-in-law, 40-year-old Ashraful Islam, converted to Christianity and about their involvement in evangelistic efforts.

Elizabeth Eldridge of the Washington Times reports today that Malaysian authorities have begun confiscating Christian children’s books under orders from the Internal Security Ministry headed by Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi because they contain images of Moses and Abraham, alledgedly in violation of shariah law. Christian leaders in the country, however, say that the move is part of a larger campaign by Muslims in the government to chip away further at the rights of all religious minorities there, which account for 40 percent of the population. Last month government officials there prohibited a Catholic newspaper from using the word “Allah”, the common word historically used for “God”, because officials ruled that only Muslims were permitted to do so.

No word whether the Malaysian government will in the future also prohibit Christians from using the capital letter “A” or begin seizing copies of the equally blasphemous new VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, because shariah courts have ruled that singing animated vegetables are prohibited from wearing pirate clothes.

Journal Chretien reported over the weekend that a Christian worker, Sajeed Williams, of the Shelter Now relief agency was murdered in Peshawar, Pakistan. According to the report:

Williams was married ; the couple has an 18-month old daughter. He was office manager for Shelter Now in Peshawar.

The organization runs two projects in the country - a fish farm and a building project for 105 schools, which were ruined during the earthquake that shook Pakistan in 2005. Shelter Now has been active in Pakistan for nearly 25 years. Since 1988 the Christian organization has also been involved in projects in neighboring Afghanistan.

Revelation 6:10

Christians worldwide begin 2008 with eyes on their brothers and sisters in Pakistan, taking sides on the controversy surrounding Benazir Bhutto. Some say her assassination is a serious setback to religious freedom, while others believe her candidacy was irrelevant to the real needs of the persecuted church in Pakistan.

Christians are a marked minority in the hard-nosed Islamic country, making up 2.5 percent of the 165 million, mostly-Muslim population. Sections of the Pakistan Penal Code condemn non-Muslim “blasphemers” to imprisonment and death.

Nasir Saeed, United Kingdom coordinator for the Centre of Legal Aid Assurance and Settlement (CLAAS), hoped Bhutto’s leadership in the non-Muslim Pakistani People Party (PPP) would allay intense religious persecution in Pakistan: “She was the most enlightened and moderate politician and struggled hard to bring real democracy to the country. The Christian minority in Pakistan has suffered a great loss and now fear that they will never be able to replace Ms. Bhutto of whom they held great hopes for an end to fundamentalism and persecution.”

Critics like Imaduddin Ahmed counter that it’s false to idealize Bhutto as a promoter of free democracy. Ahmed argues that Bhutto’s participation in Pakistan’s “affected elections” aligned her with the country’s infamously oppressive government and “yanked the rug from under the feet of those who pushed for a semblance of democracy.”

Some Christians doubt that a scandal-ridden political figure like Bhutto can address the true needs of the Pakistani church. Kevin Kimball, 23, a Washington native who recently returned from four months in the city of Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwestern province, told WoW that Christians and Muslims alike seemed “disappointed with government in general”.

Kimball, who spent time teaching English to Muslim students, said Pakistani youth are hungry for leaders: “If the next generation doesn’t have any one to teach them there just won’t be any progress.”

Although the efforts of individuals do not garner as much attention as the spotlight campaign of a political figure like Bhutto, Kimball believes they are ultimately more effective: “The real solution is to give courage back to Christians.”

Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute and a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom reports (”A Creche without Christians“) on the findings of a new survey, which finds that Middle Eastern Christianity is being squeezed hard in the global struggle between Islamic totalitarianism and Western freedom and democracy. The survey findings aren’t encouraging for Christians living under Muslim rule:

The new religious survey, Freedom in the World, produced by the Center for Religious Freedom shows that while some Muslim governments do respect religious freedom, none are to be found in the Middle East. Israel is the only “free” country, and their Christian numbers are increasing.

The survey ranks Jordan, Oman, Morocco, and Lebanon as “partly free.” Here the Christian populations are either miniscule and largely foreign, or, in the case of Lebanon, shrinking precipitously from majority to about a third of the population in recent decades.

The rest of the region is further down the freedom scale. In Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, and Tunisia there are virtually no indigenous Christian communities left, though some converts there carry out religious lives in the catacombs and expats quietly hold services. In Saudi Arabia, religious intolerance is official state policy.

After 14 centuries living under Islamic occupation, Christianity in the region is near extinct.

Coptic Christians in Egypt were targeted in a series of attacks throughout the country last week, according to Reuters. More than a dozen shops were burned in addition to one church front. In a note of irony, Reuters reporter Aziz El-Kaissouni claims, “Christians account for up to 10 percent of the population of Egypt and relations between them and the Muslim majority are usually harmonious.” But the fact is that Christians in Egypt are considered sub-citizens in their own country and live in a state of constant fear from violence inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist Islamic groups, and an official government policy of indifference towards acts of religious-inspired (Muslim) terror.

Elsewhere in the Middle East this weekend, a Roman Catholic friar, Fr. Adriano Franchini, was stabbed in Izmir, Turkey, AsiaNews reports. Christians in Turkey are on edge ever since the brutal slaying of Fr. Andrea Santoro while he was conducting services in his church in Trabzon last year. The Armenian Evangelical Christian editor of a Turkish newspaper, Hrant Dink, was assassinated on the streets of Istanbul a few months later, followed by the torture and murder of three Protestant bible publishers in Malatya last April. Details have emerged in the ongoing trial of the accused suspects in the Malatya massacre that implicate local Turkish officials in the slayings.