IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Convert From Islam To Christianity
The Sunday Times of London published an interview by Dominic Lawson of a woman who goes by the name “Hannah Shah,” the author of a book called “The Imam’s Daughter.” She has good reason to hide her identity – her father, a Pakistani-born imam, gathered a mob together to hunt her down and kill her after she converted to Christianity:
[The imam] is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her. …
Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!” …
Lawson asks why “Hannah” didn’t go to the police. She didn’t think they’d believe her or would provide effective assistance. Here’s why:
When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.”
Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.”
Lawson wants to know what “Hannah” thought when Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested that Sharia law should replace British civil law to settle financial, marital and other disputes amongst Muslims:
“I was horrified. … By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.”
Finally, “Hannah” tells Lawson why she converted to Christianity - even though it might be a death sentence:
“The Islam that I grew up knowing and reading about doesn’t offer me love. That’s the biggest thing that Christianity can and does offer. I sense that I belong and am accepted as I am – even when I do wrong there is forgiveness, a forgiveness which Islam does not offer.”
[Hat Tip: OpinionJournal.com, March 16, 2009]
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