אֱמֶת הַפַּרְשָׁן

The Persecution That Doesn’t Make the Headlines I am a Muslim convert to Christianity. I lived for 15 years as a Christian believer in Morocco, much of that time in what we called the underground church. Listen carefully, because this is what “moderate Islam” looked like for us: Morocco is considered one of the most moderate Muslim countries. That is true compared with Mauritania and Libya, where converts from Islam face the death penalty, or Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Pakistan, where converts face imprisonment, torture, intimidation, or severe persecution. But here is the reality of “moderate” Morocco. We gathered secretly in homes every Sunday because churches were for foreign Christians, not Moroccan converts. We sang in low voices so the neighbors would not hear us. We arrived two at a time to avoid suspicion. If anyone asked, we pretended it was simply a gathering of family and friends. We baptized converts in bathtubs. I was baptized in a bathtub myself. A missionary and a few Moroccan Christians were the only people present. We kept our house churches small, usually fewer than twenty people. When they became too large, we split them. Christmas and a few special occasions were exceptions. Police raided Christian gatherings, confiscated Christian materials, dragged believers to police stations, interrogated them, threatened them, and humiliated them with vulgar language. Our children had to go to school and study Islam and memorize the Quran even though their parents were Christians. We could not freely give our children Christian names. The government did not need to write “Christian names are forbidden” in bold letters. The authorities simply refused to register them. Our marriages were treated as Islamic marriages under Sharia because the Moroccan state refused to recognize us for what we actually were: Moroccan Christians. A Moroccan Christian woman could not simply marry a foreign Christian man as a Christian. He had to establish before the authorities that he was Muslim because, according to the government, she was still a Muslim. The state decided our religion for us. Even death did not end it. When a Moroccan Christian died, he was buried in a Muslim cemetery under Islamic rituals because the government still considered him Muslim. I remember one Moroccan Christian who died in Tangier. We had to do the impossible to get his body to Ceuta so he could receive a Christian funeral. Imagine having to smuggle your religious identity across a border just to be buried according to your own faith. We could not establish our own legal Moroccan churches. We could not get permission to build even one church for Moroccan converts. Our house churches were illegal gatherings. We lived at the mercy of the police. Any meeting could be raided. Any neighbor could report us. Foreign Christians had churches. Moroccan Christians had secrecy, whispers, living rooms, bathtubs, police interrogations, and fear. And then Muslims lecture the West about “Islamophobia.” Spare me. 1/2