Barnabas Aid launches campaign for the abolition of the Islamic apostasy law

Islam is a one-way street. You can convert to Islam but you are not allowed to convert from Islam. All schools of Islamic law, shari‘a, agree on this rule and specify the death sentence for an adult male Muslim who chooses to leave his Islamic faith. Most also impose the death penalty on women apostates. The rule was established many centuries ago by Islamic scholars, but even today most Islamic religious leaders and many ordinary Muslim people agree with it.

Hope for Christian children

For many Christian children, in Muslim-majority countries and elsewhere, their hope for the future is diminished by the lack of a proper education. In countries such as Pakistan or India, Christian parents often lack the basic literacy skills that would enable them to gain reasonably paid jobs. As a result they simply cannot afford to send their children to school, and the next generation is unable to pick up the skills that their parents lacked. So families are locked into a vicious cycle of poverty and illiteracy.

A total of 42,627 people put their names to the petition created by Barnabas Aid for our Save Iraqi Christians campaign. On Wednesday 5 November 2008 the British and European signatures were presented to the Human Rights, Democracy and Governance Group and the Iraqi Group of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Barnabas Aid’s International Director, Dr Patrick Sookhdeo. He was accompanied by a senior leader of the Iraqi community in the UK. The Australian signatures were presented to Russell Broadbent MP at the Australian Federal Parliament on Monday 10 November.

1 in 10 Christians live with persecution

These people are our family. While they are the one in ten, we are the other nine. We live with freedoms they are often denied, such as to worship together in public, own a Bible or even repair the roof of the church building.