August 2017 Persecution Magazine (2 of 4)

neighbors, you are dirty and ruined. No one
will want to marry you. Eventually, beaten
down to nothing, overwhelmed with pain,
grief, and shame, you finally say the words
they have demanded, but that you never
could have imagined you’d say. . .“There
is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the
messenger of Allah.”
Then, in a final act of tragedy, you’re
forced to marry your rapist and spend your
life in service to him.
Your parents, upon learning about your
disappearance, run to the police to register
a complaint and press charges.
They know who kidnapped you because
multiple bystanders witnessed the abduction
and are now talking about it. In fact,
your kidnapper has bragged about his new
trophy. It should be an open and shut case.
But the police ignore your parents.
They delay investigations, and falsify
evidence. Sometimes they participate in
your abuse since, like your abductor, they
are Muslims, and in their eyes, once you’ve
confessed the shahada (“There is no god but
Allah”), you are a Muslim for life. Your rapist,
in their eyes, has saved you from being
an infidel.
This case is unfortunately not fictional,
but is a composite of several cases.
Tragically, it is in fact a regular occurrence.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of
girls and women experience a similar
hell each year.
There are differences in the cases – the
Chibok girls, for example, were kidnapped
in a group of almost 300 girls instead of
individually – but the terror, torture, and
tragedy doesn’t change.
From Pakistan to Nigeria, India to
Egypt, the kidnapping, rape, forced conversion
and marriage of Christian girls has
been going on for more than a thousand
years, but these cases are escalating.
The media rarely reports accurately on
disappearances and forced conversions and
that opaque reporting makes it difficult to
gather data on the scale of forced conversions;
yet as a persecution ministry, we
hear enough accounts from broken parents
to paint a gruesome picture of what occurs.
Our hearts break for these girls and their
families as most of them, once abducted,
are lost to their families forever. Some do
escape and we help protect them, aid them,
or seek legal remedies.
But most of them are remembered only
by their cries as they are taken forever.
Christian girls in fundamentalist Muslim
countries are at risk for kidnapping, rape, and
forced marriage/conversion. In the following
pages, you will read firsthand accounts of real
victims and their families that ICC interviewed.
From the three-year long wait for the
return of the Chibok girls (pg. 18) to the lost
girls of Egypt (pg. 22) and Pakistan (pg. 24),
you will learn how systemic injustice (pg. 26)
and radical Islam (pg. 28) contribute to and
undergird this most heinous form of persecution.
You will also see how we aid the few that
do escape and work proactively to empower
Christian girls and young women so they are
not vulnerable (pg. 32) and can live long and
safe lives as they would choose.
Maryam Mushtaq made international headlines when, like so many others, she was stuffed in a van on her way home from class.
PERSECU ION.org
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN CONCERN
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