The Qur’an says “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). However, what constitutes “compulsion” is in the eye of the beholder. The institutionalized subjugation of the dhimma, with its regular humiliation and harassment, from which one can be freed for the simple price of converting to Islam, is not considered compulsion. Remember Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the journalists who were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam — even though their conversions were obviously coerced, their captors made them say that they were converting freely, and the captors probably believed that themselves. After all, the journos could have chosen to be killed instead.
“Each year 1,000 Pakistani girls forcibly converted to Islam,” by Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, December 28, 2020 (thanks to David):
KARACHI, Pakistan — Neha loved the hymns that filled her church with music. But she lost the chance to sing them last year when, at the age of 14, she was forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam and married to a 45-year-old man with children twice her age.
She tells her story in a voice so low it occasionally fades away. She all but disappears as she wraps a blue scarf tightly around her face and head. Neha’s husband is in jail now facing charges of rape for the underage marriage, but she is in hiding, afraid after security guards confiscated a pistol from his brother in court.
“He brought the gun to shoot me,” said Neha, whose last name The Associated Press is not using for her safety.
Neha is one of nearly 1,000 girls from religious minorities who are forced to convert to Islam in Pakistan each year, largely to pave the way for marriages that are under the legal age and non-consensual. Human rights activists say the practice has accelerated during lockdowns against the coronavirus, when girls are out of school and more visible, bride traffickers are more active on the Internet and families are more in debt.
The U.S. State Department this month declared Pakistan “a country of particular concern” for violations of religious freedoms — a designation the Pakistani government rejects. The declaration was based in part on an appraisal by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that underage girls in the minority Hindu, Christian, and Sikh communities were “kidnapped for forced conversion to Islam… forcibly married and subjected to rape.”
While most of the converted girls are impoverished Hindus from southern Sindh province, two new cases involving Christians, including Neha’s, have roiled the country in recent months.
The girls generally are kidnapped by complicit acquaintances and relatives or men looking for brides. Sometimes they are taken by powerful landlords as payment for outstanding debts by their farmhand parents, and police often look the other way. Once converted, the girls are quickly married off, often to older men or to their abductors, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
Forced conversions thrive unchecked on a money-making web that involves Islamic clerics who solemnize the marriages, magistrates who legalize the unions and corrupt local police who aid the culprits by refusing to investigate or sabotaging investigations, say child protection activists.
One activist, Jibran Nasir, called the network a “mafia” that preys on non-Muslim girls because they are the most vulnerable and the easiest targets “for older men with pedophilia urges.”
The goal is to secure virginal brides rather than to seek new converts to Islam. Minorities make up just 3.6 percent of Pakistan’s 220 million people and often are the target of discrimination. Those who report forced conversions, for example, can be targeted with charges of blasphemy.
In the feudal Kashmore region of southern Sindh province, 13-year-old Sonia Kumari was kidnapped, and a day later police told her parents she had converted from Hinduism to Islam. Her mother pleaded for her return in a video widely viewed on the internet: “For the sake of God, the Quran, whatever you believe, please return my daughter, she was forcibly taken from our home.”
But a Hindu activist, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of repercussions from powerful landlords, said she received a letter that the family was forced to write. The letter claimed the 13-year-old had willingly converted and wed a 36-year-old who was already married with two children.
The parents have given up….
mortimer says
In ten years, it will be 10,000 kidnappings and forcible conversions. Mohammed decreed forcible marriage/conversions.
“Marry one for the religion” (i.e. for conversion) – Sahih Bukhari 7 62 27
revereridesagain says
But the Left wants to make sure we foot the bill for “gender studies”!
Beneath the Veil of Consciousness says
1000 kidnappings and rapes a year and the globalist “leaders” of the West insist on ignoring all of this and importing and funding the nightmare. Now that the tentacles of this social cancer has spread into the political body of most Western countries, what does a clown like the Muslim mayor of Londonistan have to say of this ongoing human atrocity?
Crickets.
mortimer says
1,000 is only the number that is counted. There are hundreds of these abductions and rapes not counted.
In Saudi Arabia, a gang-rape victim was punished with 200 lashes. That’s the insane illogic of Islam that Western libtards and globalists ignore.
gravenimage says
So true, Mortimer. Often the families are told their daughter will be murdered if they so much as file a police report.
Infidel says
I’ve said this ad nauseum, but once again… all non-muslims in Pakistan should hightail it out of there. And in India, state governments are now putting together laws that would fry muslims legally if they tried pulling off those stunts in their states. So far, just 2, but counting!
gravenimage says
Agreed, Infidel. All those non-Muslims who can get out of Pakistan should just go.
Ade Fegan says
“You have your religion and I have mine ” and “there is no compulsion in religion”
Have about as much spiritual value and saying “sod off and mind your own business”
Especially given the context .. i.e. muhammad had hardly any followers at the time and was pissing of those around him by preaching his largely plagerised version of religion … These verses are just the utterances of a coward who will soon change his tune when he has enough followers to reign tyranny on everyone who doesn’t buy his personal brand of bullshit .. But they are still the least unpleasant verses in the utterly vile quran .. if that counts for anything
gravenimage says
Pakistan: Each year, 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are forcibly converted to Islam
………………….
Yes–this is horrifying, and is part of the genocide against non-Muslims in Pakistan. There are few still surviving there at this point.
They are often kidnapped, raped, and then threatened with the murder of their families if they resist. And–as noted–the Pakistani police and courts often claim that these conversions were voluntary. Just horrifying.
OLD GUY says
Islam the big LIE, what a crock of shit islam is.
Infidel says
WAS!!! You have the same issue as US foreign policy pundits – can’t recognize that the world has changed since the 80s
Debaprasad Chatterjee says
Mr. Spencer,
Please write about this- Hindu temple destroyed in Pakistan
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/30/mob-tears-down-hindu-temple-and-torch-holy-shrine-in-pakistan
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/hindu-temple-demolished-in-pakistans-khyber-pakhtunkhwa-province/articleshow/80029459.cms
I wish you a happy sylvester and new year.