Speaking at the opening of the first session of the ninth synod of the Diocese of Osun (Anglican Communion) at Saint Andrew’s Anglican Church, Ada, [Governor Rauf] Aregbesola said the recent noise of purported plan to Islamise Osun was a ruse aimed at creating religious disharmony with a view to getting a state of emergency declared on the state.

The Governor said: “I believe so strongly that the Federal Government and security agencies deserve our prayers at this time. Instead of plotting mischief and fomenting trouble in a peaceful state like Osun here, they need to take a grasp of the depth of the security challenges facing the nation.

“Some evil people are bent on blowing the nation apart, and the security agencies seem to have no clue on how to tackle this menace.”

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Hopes that Arab Christians can enjoy full recognition in their countries’ post-revolution politics appear to have suffered a setback. The political parties that have swept to power in Egypt and Tunisia are attempting to define their nations in narrow ethno-religious terms ”“ as Islamic with sharia as the principal source of law. In Tunisia, for example, the constitution explicitly prohibits Christians from fielding candidates in the presidential election.

Attacks against Coptic churches and Christians in Egypt have increased during and since the revolution, and Arab Christians have allegedly been attacked in Syria. This has led to much soul-searching in the Arab Christian community, whose numbers and political influence have dwindled significantly over the past two decades owing to significant bouts of emigration.

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Prelate of the Methodist Church, Dr. Sunday Ola Makinde, has described as ”˜careless and unguarded statement’ the comment made by American government that years of neglect and poverty led to the insurgence of Boko Haram sect in Nigeria.

Speaking at the weekend during the launch of a book titled “Women as Teachers and Character Moulders” written by Mrs. Ezinne Elizabeth Abimbola Makinde at Hoare’s Memorial Methodist Cathedral, Yaba, Lagos, the prelate declared the premises on which such a statement was based as poor research that lacks every credibility.

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As war looms between Sudan and South Sudan, Christians of southern origin living in Sudan fear retribution from its Islamic government.

As of April 8, at least half a million ethnic southerners (the majority of whom are Christian) living in Sudan are now considered foreigners if they have not registered for citizenship. Officials in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, gave southerners another 30 days to register or leave the country.

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The Nigerian religious sect Boko Haram had been sporadically attacking police stations and people for years with machetes and sometimes guns to create an Islamic state in its corner of Africa’s largest nation.

Then, in 2010, the group exploded into violence with suicide bombings, car bombs and coordinated assaults, months after an al-Qaeda leader in Algeria disclosed that the terror group had decided to help the Nigerian radicals….

“This new Jihadist nexus in Africa” is a rising danger that the West has yet to fully comprehend,” said Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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The mother of a 6-month-old girl has been wrongly jailed for more than a month, as Pakistani authorities have failed to file a charge sheet within the mandatory 14-day period against the young Christian woman falsely accused of “blaspheming” the prophet of Islam, her attorney said.

Shamim Bibi, 26, of village Chak No. 170/7R Colony, in the Fort Abbas area of Bahawalpur district, was charged under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s “blasphemy” statutes after neighbors accused her of uttering remarks against Muhammad. She was arrested on Feb. 28.

Speaking ill of Muhammad in Pakistan is punishable by life imprisonment or death under Pakistan’s internationally condemned blasphemy laws.

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Father Alfons Marzou shuffles across a complex that is home to sisters for the Catholic Missionaries of Charity, whose nuns provide medical care and food to impoverished children living amid heaps of garbage.

“Look around,” Marzou says, motioning to the filthy streets outside the walls where families live among refuse for resale in what is known as Garbage City.

Little has improved for these people in the year since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Marzou says, “The situation is bad in so many ways.”

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At least 38 people have died in a car bombing in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, officials said.

Many others were injured in the attack, which took place when officials stopped the vehicle as it approached a church.

Just hours afterwards, a bomb exploded in the central city of Jos, injuring several people.

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Two fighters from the Islamist group Boko Haram were killed in a shootout Monday that reveals mounting frustration among residents of northern Nigeria with the group’s campaign of violence.

The two came into the Sheka neighborhood of Kano on a motorcycle, shooting bullets into the air, according to an eyewitness who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “People in the area summoned courage and nabbed them. As they were planning to hand them over to the police, gunmen came from nowhere and shot them instantly to death,” the witness said.

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Members of the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnati Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, also known as Boko Haram, may have concluded arrangements to engage the security operatives in Kaduna State in a free for all. They have warned residents to flee all security formations in the state.

In a letter distributed in Kaduna, the sect said it is ready to fight security operatives in the state and warns residents whose houses are located near military, police, SSS as well as prison formations to relocate with immediate effect to avoid being victims of the planned attack.

Confirming the report, the state police commissioner, Mohammed Abubakar, said: “Yes, we are aware of it… that unless their people are released from detention, if not they will come and stage attacks. We are aware of that one. We have strategized and are waiting for them….

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Hindu and Christian representatives say forced conversions to Islam have become the latest weapon of Islamic extremists in what they call a growing campaign against Pakistan’s religious minorities, on top of assassinations and mob intimidation of houses of worship. The groups are increasingly wondering if they still have a place in Pakistan.

“It is a conspiracy that Hindus and Christians and other minorities should leave Pakistan,” says Amar Lal, the lawyer representing Kumari in the Supreme Court. “As a minority, we feel more and more insecure. It is getting worse day by day.”

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The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other perceived supporters of the Nigerian government.

Now it has an ominous new front: a war against schools.

Public and private schools here have been doused with gasoline at night and set on fire. Crude homemade bombs ”” soda bottles filled with gasoline ”” have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children.

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Two nuns in Upper Egypt faced “unimaginable fear”–with one later hospitalized over the emotional trauma–when 1,500 Muslim villagers brandishing swords and knives trapped them inside a guesthouse last week and threatened to burn them out.

The next day, the assailants frightened children at the school; attendance has since dropped by more than a third.

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Burned-out rubble is all that’s left of Christian shopkeeper Abskharon Suleiman’s appliance store in the northern Egyptian village of Sharbat. His home was destroyed as well as shops owned by his adult children ”“ all targeted because they are Christians.

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Everyone willing to follow the Lord is supposed to have listened in some way to this seemingly imperious command: “Come!” a command which implies an act of faith, referred to sometimes as the “leap of faith.” As it is clear from the Scriptures, what we are able to see is not faith, as the biblical faith is defined as : “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” We have to decide “in spite of”’, in order to experience the power of God. But we need to remember that everything must be done according the Word of God. Peter did not experience the possibility to walk on water because he decided to leave the boat but because of the Word, the Command of the Lord.

The Word of God tell us to “expect to suffer hardship” and dishonor for the sake of His Name. Our Christian confession is not acceptable if we ignore this statement, if we do not manifest the patience of the Lord in our sufferings. Anybody ignoring it will be ashamed in that day.

Let us remember that sometimes the leap of faith leads us towards some impasses. Just as the Word led the sons of Israel leaving Egypt toward the impasse of the Red sea. These impasses are midway between promises of God and their fulfillments and they challenge our faith. Believers are to accept these challenges as a part of their spiritual course. The Son was challenged at Calvary in the hardest way, as it is written in the Scriptures….

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…[Middle Eastern Christians] share of the region’s population has plunged from 20% a century ago to less than 5% today and falling. In Egypt, 200,000 Coptic Christians fled their homes last year after beatings and massacres by Muslim extremist mobs. Since 2003, 70 Iraqi churches have been burned and nearly a thousand Christians killed in Baghdad alone, causing more than half of this million-member community to flee. Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Iran, where last month Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani was sentenced to death. Saudi Arabia outlaws private Christian prayer.
As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they’ve inhabited for centuries.

The only place in the Middle East where Christians aren’t endangered but flourishing is Israel. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, its Christian communities (including Russian and Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Armenians and Protestants) have expanded more than 1,000%.

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Tensions remain high in an Egyptian village where as many as 5,000 mostly Islam and that Christians had kidnapped her, the church priest told Compass.” Salafi Muslims went on a rampage over a false rumor that a church was holding a girl against her will in order to convert her back to Christianity.

Dismissing media reports of 20,000 rioting Muslims, sources told Compass that between 2,000 and 5,000 hard-line Muslims, most of them from the Salafi movement, last month harassed Christian villagers in Meet Bahsar in the Nile Delta, attacked a church building in a misguided effort to “save” the girl, damaged a priest’s house and then destroyed his car.

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A suicide car bomber has killed at least three people at a church in the troubled central Nigerian city of Jos, sparking reprisals by Christian youths.

Witnesses said the suicide bomber drove his car into the prominent Church of Christ during morning prayers.

The radical Islamist sect Boko Haram later said that it carried out the attack.

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Police discovered the body of a 79-year-old Christian woman killed in northeast Nigeria, with a note in Arabic left on her chest reading: “We will get you soon,” a witness said Thursday.

The slaying raises religious tensions in Nigeria as a radical Islamist sect increasingly targets Christians in its bloody attacks. While police said they knew of no immediate suspects in the killing, witnesses blamed the attack on the sect known as Boko Haram, which has been blamed for killing at least 305 people this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.

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Church leaders in Wakefield have secured Foreign Office funding to bring a Pakistan delegation of lawyers, police, imams and priests on a peace mission to Britain to share good practice and help heal rifts between Muslims and Christians.

Three imams, three priests, three police officers and three lawyers from Pakistan – close to the village where Christians were burned to death in 2009 – arrived in London on Sunday for a five day fact-finding tour there and in Yorkshire to learn more about how crimes are investigated, our judicial system, share good practice of interfaith work and how to build bridges between faiths.

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The West looks with great concern towards North Africa, with the changes in the countries marked by the so-called “Arab Spring”. This has led to the downfall of totalitarian regimes which once seemed untouchable! All this is about very complex movements, not only in the societies where it happens, but also involves struggles regarding international interests. Will the populations be able to “control the situation” and direct the changes to their common good? The situation is very complex. These very young democracies have entrusted the power to parties of Islamic matrix, and have come out with new realities causing alarm, especially among the youth, and in the Christians locally. One only needs to look at the results of the last elections in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco (a country not rocked by the Arab Spring but advancing seriously on the paths of reform through the will of King Mohammed VI).

These scenarios lead us to look at Islam and its spread in North Africa, taking into account the fact that the Christian presence goes back to six centuries before the birth of Islam, and that the Christian communities (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant) are part and parcel of the local social fabric, a significant part of the cultural richness of the Countries and of the Region, and cannot be considered as a “foreign” body, or a “presence” affiliated to “something” western, as often seen by fundamentalist Islamic movements, motivated by ignorance or political interests!

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What is the Anglican position on the issue?

The Anglican position is very clear. We stand on upholding the sanctity of human life. We condemn in totality the terror called Boko Haram. And that we denounce it because it denounces human worth by what it is doing. We are in a democracy where people are free to practice their religion anywhere they are. So we stand on that. That Christians or people of other faith anywhere should be allowed to practice their own faith, provided they do not infringe on other people’s faith, which I know the Christians would not.

Are you satisfied with efforts the Islamic leaders and governors of the north have made to curb the menace of Boko Haram?

well! I don’t know of the efforts they have made so far. But what I do know is that it is there. This people live with them. They know them. They can fish them out, but they are not doing it. By so doing, they are obstructing the course of justice. As such they are not contributing to the well being of Nigeria. This is because people are doing certain things that are evil, and you know them. Like in Ekpoma here, if people are doing certain things we know them. And so, you see arrest being made. But when you shield them, like the man who escaped, is that not a case of protection? That is a case of protection. This thing is happening in the north. There is governance in the north. All of the governments are represented in the north. They cannot say they don’t know them. If they say they don’t know them, it means they are not doing their work.

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We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway””an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries….

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Residents here on Friday will mark the second week under curfew and caution since Boko Haram terrorists stormed the city’s center, setting off multiple bombings and gun assaults that residents say killed at least 200 people.

The attacks have been followed by sporadic episodes of explosions, gunfire, and kidnappings attributed to Boko Haram, the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group that has since last year launched an increasing number of attacks in northern Nigeria. These continued threats have forced police to extend a curfew put in place after attacks on Jan. 20 and to lengthen it by one hour. Offices, stores, and restaurants now must close and all residents must be off the streets from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m.””in a city of about 9 million that is Nigeria’s second largest….

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Arch-Bishop Peter Akinola, a retired Primate of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), has urged Christians to remain peaceful and shun retaliatory attacks against their Muslims brothers.

Akinola made the plea at a thanksgiving service to mark the 80th birthday of Justice Adolphus Karibi-Whyte at St Cyprian Anglican Church in Port Harcourt.

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Thousands of mourners in Nigeria have attended the burial service for people killed at a church on Christmas Day.

The BBC’s Chris Ewokor at St Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla near the capital, Abuja, said the service sheets listed the names of 43 victims.

The militant Islamist group Boko Haram said it carried out a series of attacks on 25 December 2011.

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“Just as the mind can be poisoned, we can also de-toxiate the mind, by reaching out to them and telling them they are making a big mistake and that what they are doing is not even in their own interest.

“That is what you might call counter propaganda. This is one reason why we are challenging our Islamic community in Nigeria.

“They have said it clearly again and again that they are not in support of what they are doing. Alhaji Lattef Adegbite, the Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs had spoken voiceferously condemning what the Boko Haram people are doing and that what they do is not Islam. Good! They can do much more than that because whether you call them Muslims or not, they said they are one.

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According to the Primate [Nicholas Okoh], this rising wave of hostility is a dimension that is unheard of because it is the highest manifestation of intolerance.

Primate Okoh stated that all hands are on deck, the National assembly is concerned, the president is having sleepless nights and the Church is already facing serious temptation even though the Church does not initiate hostility. The head of the Anglican Church said the intense attack of Boko Haram is really tempting the Christians whether to continue to maintain peace, always turning the other cheek ,or fight back to find their safety.
He therefore made a passionate appeal to leaders in the country who can reach out to Boko Haram to dissuade them from dastardly acts of killing innocent Christian’s souls, asking them to dialogue with government if they have any axe to grind with her and leave the Church alone.

He said the attempt to drag Nigerians into militancy is something Nigerians must resist.

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Both Muslim and Christian residents of Kano, the northern Nigerian city where at least 160 people were killed in a series of attacks on Friday, have been urged to heed a day of prayer.

A special prayer session has been held near the palace of the Emir of Kano, asking Allah to help end the violence.

Islamist militant group Boko Haram says it carried out the attacks.

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