If the test of the Arab Spring was its treatment of minorities, it has failed. Hopes that the region was poised to make the transition to liberal democracy have proved to be premature, trampled under the boots of the ethno-religious cleansers. The old-style corrupt despots have metastasised into even older-style Islamist xenophobes. The Arab world, already judenrein, now seems determined to slough off its Christian minority.
A few weeks ago, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Amdullah, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, responded to a question posed by a visiting Kuwaiti delegation. Would sharia permit churches to exist in their emirate? The sheikh’s response was categorical. Kuwait is part of the Arabian Peninsula, he said, and ‘therefore it is necessary to destroy all the churches of the region’.
The Sheikh based his ruling on a Hadith which recorded the Prophet’s deathbed declaration that, ‘There are not to be two religions in the Peninsula’, a command that has been interpreted to mean that only Islam may be practised in the region.
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