by Patrick Goodenough
CNS News

(CNSNews.com) – Ten days after Saudi Arabia's foremost religious leader called for a demolition of all churches in the Arabian Peninsula – in line with a purported injunction by Mohammed – the U.S. government and other allies of the kingdom have yet to react.

Major media outlets also have largely ignored the incident; a Nexis search finds reporting on the issue has been restricted to blogs and opinion columns, including a Washington Times editorial on March 16.

On March 12, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh was quoted in Arabic media reports as telling a visiting Kuwaiti delegation that it was "necessary to destroy all the churches of the region."

Lawmakers in Kuwait are mulling a ban on the new construction of any non-Islamic places of worship in the small Gulf state, and the delegation asked Asheikh for his opinion. The grand mufti, a member of the ruling royal family, is the undisputed Sunni spiritual arbiter in Islam's birthplace.

In his response, Asheikh cited a hadith (a saying or tradition of Mohammed), in which the 7th century founder of Islam was recorded to have said on his deathbed, "There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula."

Saudi Arabia prohibits churches, but other Arab Gulf states do allow limited numbers of non-Islamic places of worship to accommodate mostly foreign believers.

The United Arab Emirates boasts a number of Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and evangelical churches, and Qatar opened its first church in 2008 – a Catholic church whose exterior displays no cross, bell, steeple or signboard.

There are about 500,000 Christians in Kuwait, the vast majority of them foreigners. According to a recent report in the Kuwait Times daily, the number of Kuwaiti nationals who are Christians has dropped, from 300 in 2007 to 150 today.

Despite the relatively large number of expatriate Christians – Kuwait total population is only 2.6 million, a number that includes 1.2 million non-nationals – the report also said there are only eight churches in the country.

Last month a Kuwaiti Islamist lawmaker, Osama Al-Munawer, announced plans to submit a draft law to ban the building of any more non-Islamic places of worship. He and another Islamist lawmaker, Mohammad Hayef, said there were already too many churches, given the size of the Christian minority.

Munawer was initially understood to be calling for existing churches to be demolished, and his comments prompted the country's minister of Islamic affairs to say that doing so would violate the law and damage Islam's image. The lawmaker clarified that he only wanted to prevent additional churches from being built.

Against that background, the Kuwaiti delegation sought the guidance of the top Saudi cleric.

Asheikh's comments were first brought to wider attention by Middle East Forum associate fellow Raymond Ibrahim, who wrote on March 14 that the grand mufti was "not just some random Muslim hating on churches" but a prominent spiritual leader whose words on what Islam teaches are regarded as "immensely authoritative."

Foundation for Defense of Democracies president Clifford May pointed out in a column Thursday that the Kuwaiti delegation seeking the mufti's advice comprised members of a group identified by the U.S. government as a supplier of funds to al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda affiliates including Lashkar e-Toiba.

The Barnabas Fund, a charity that helps Christian minorities in Islamic societies, noted that Asheikh's comments came against a backdrop of intensifying pressure on Christians in the Middle East as a result of the "Arab spring" and growing dominance of Islamist groups.

Last October, Saudi Arabia opened a religious tolerance center based in Vienna, Austria. The establishment of the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue raised eyebrows, given the strict Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam that prevails in the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia made the number three spot on the Open Doors USA's 2012 list of the worst persecutors of Christians, behind North Korea and Afghanistan. Over the past decade, the kingdom has never dropped lower than fourth place in the annual rankings, and has been in second place for seven of those years.

Under the International Religious Freedom Act, the State Department has designated Saudi Arabia as a "country of particular concern" (CPC) for religious freedom violations since 2004.

The designation provides the administration with tools including sanctions and diplomatic pressure to encourage improvements, although both the Bush and Obama administrations waived sanctions in the case of Saudi Arabia.

In its annual report released this week, the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which provides independent advice to the government, expressed concern about the situation, saying that as a result of the indefinite waiver, "the United States has not implemented any policy response to the particularly severe violations of religious freedom" in the kingdom.

"USCIRF has concluded that U.S. policy in Saudi Arabia does not adequately prioritize issues of human rights, including freedom of religion or belief," the report said.

by Lawrence J. Haas
Real Clear Politics

Did you read about Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, and his call this month to "destroy all the churches of the region?"

You might think that's big news – big enough to garner some attention from America's leading media – especially because the Grand Mufti is among the Muslim world's leading authorities. He is President of the Supreme Council of Ulema [Islamic scholars] and Chairman of the Standing Committee for Scientific Research and Issuing of Fatwas, according to the Middle East Forum's Raymond Ibrahim.

A Kuwaiti delegation had asked the Grand Mufti about a Kuwaiti parliament member's call for the "removal" of churches in his country, later clarified to a ban on new ones. In response, the Grand Mufti called it "necessary to destroy all the churches of the region." He reportedly relied on the famous tradition, or "hadith," that the Prophet Mohammed ruled on his deathbed, "There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula."

But, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today apparently didn't find it newsworthy. It was relegated to conservative media (e.g., Washington Times, FOX online), Muslim-focused websites, and lots of blogs.

However appalling, mainstream media reticence to cover that news is understandable in one sense. Its coverage would force public discussion of dicey issues that challenge the political correctness that all-too-often pervades our thinking about relations between the West and the Muslim world.

We'd have to ask the inconvenient question of whether the Grand Mufti's call is but one element of a "war on Christians" across the Muslim world.

And if we did that, we'd have to ask whether such intolerance, and the violence against Christians that has swept Muslim-dominated nations in recent months, reflects a fringe element or more mainstream attitudes.

Consider the events of recent weeks (as drawn from the monthly compilation that Ibrahim categorizes under "Muslim Persecution of Christians"):

"Half of Iraq's indigenous Christians are gone due to the unleashed forces of jihad," he wrote. Many fled to Syria where, alas, "Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation's modern history."

Meanwhile, 100,000 Christian Copts have fled Egypt since Hosni Mubarak's downfall unleashed Islamic forces, while 95 percent of Christians have left northern Nigeria where the Islamist group Boko Haram has been slaughtering them. The group announced recently that it's planning a "war on Christians" in the coming weeks to, a spokesman said, "end the Christian presence in our push to have a proper Islamic state."

Elsewhere of late, a dozen armed Muslim men stormed a church in Pakistan, seriously wounding several Christians; armed men ransacked a church in Algeria after threatening and attacking the pastor and his wife repeatedly since 2007; and 50 Palestinian Muslims stoned Christian tourists on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

Muslims attacked one pastor with acid and shot another in Uganda; Al-Shababb Muslims beheaded a Muslim convert to Christianity in Somalia (marking the third such beheading there in recent months); and Iran sentenced a Christian convert to two years in prison, arrested as many as 10 others while they met to worship at a home, and is preparing to execute a pastor for refusing to renounce Christianity.

One person who is not afraid to term the violence a "war on Christians" is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Somali Muslim who fled to the West, served in the Dutch Parliament, wrote the controversial film "Submission," and lives in hiding in the United States due to her views about Islam.

"We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Springs's fight against tyranny," she wrote in a February 6 piece for The Daily Beast. "But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway – an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke a global alarm."

Hirsi Ali is a polarizing figure, so we shouldn't be surprised that her piece drew fire from such individuals as Joyce Dubensky, CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, and John Esposito, Founding Director of Georgetown University's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

Yes, they agreed, anti-Christian violence in Muslim lands is real. But, they said, Christians are not the only minorities who face attack, nor is Islam the only religion with fundamentalists who espouse violence. Phrases like "war on Christians," they said, are inflammatory and overblown.

With violence against Christians mounting across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – with thousands dead and millions fearing they may be next – this seems like an issue that deserves some attention.

Unfortunately, America's top newspapers find it too hot to handle.

Lawrence J. Haas was Communications Director and Press Secretary for Vice President Al Gore. He writes widely about foreign and domestic affairs.