Middle East’s well-kept secret revealed when Jihad met the Virgin
BEIRUT, Lebanon – It’s a well-kept secret of societies such as Lebanon where large numbers of Christians and Muslims live cheek-by-jowl, working together, socializing together, sometimes even marrying each other, that there’s often more conversion from one faith to the other than anyone is prepared to acknowledge publicly.
For Muslims who embrace Christianity, it’s an especially delicate proposition, since they run the risk of being declared an apostate and suffering reprisals – sometimes from extremist groups but often from their own families, where they might be shunned, disinherited, even physically attacked.
Such realities, however, don’t mean conversion doesn’t happen, and sometimes in surprisingly large numbers.
One Lebanese Catholic, for instance, told me this week that a priest friend has been ministering in the central part of the country for six years, and over that arc of time he’s had more than 300 conversions from Islam to Christianity.
Many Lebanese Catholics have stories to tell of conversions they personally witnessed, or in which they played a role. Both for poignancy and sheer irony, however, few stories pack the punch of one told by a corporate CEO my colleague Inés San Martín and I met last week.
(The CEO asked that his name not be used, not because he fears consequences for himself, but he doesn’t want to put his family or business in harm’s way.)
During a 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s homegrown Shi’ite militant movement, this CEO was running an NGO helping displaced persons in a region of the country where bombardments by Israel were a daily affair.
Read more at Crux – https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2017/10/15/middle-easts-well-kept-secret-revealed-jihad-met-virgin/
