The suffering of our Somalian sisters

Last Sunday, Nov. 13, was International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. As we all know, many of our fellow Christians in other countries are suffering greatly because of their faith. Jeff Sellers, editor of Compass Direct News, filed a report on the kind of persecution some of our sisters have undergone in Somalia. He interviewed them in Kenya, and his report was posted Nov. 11 on a blog at National Review Online. Here is nearly all of that report:

The women, who had fled to Nairobi from war in Somalia, are Christians who have paid the price for their faith not because they were bold in proclaiming it, but because they were unable to hide it. Before our translator showed up, I found myself waiting with some of them in silence, wondering if I should break the language/culture/gender barrier by showing them photos of my wife and baby.

I was glad I didn’t. There was Amina, a 28-year-old refugee from Mogadishu whose husband divorced her after kicking her and their four-year-old son out of the house when she converted to Christianity; he’s now threatening to take the boy away from her. There was Shukri, whose husband was killed by Islamic extremists from the al Shabaab rebels fighting the transitional government in Somalia; her late husband’s mother took her twin girls, born [in] 2006, to keep them from being raised Christian.

There was Kamila, who lost her truck-driver husband to an accident and who still bears the knife scars on her mouth and chin from her fellow Somali women; the brother of her late husband had sent them to attack her as part of his attempt to snatch her then five-month-old baby from her. According to custom, the brother should attain all of her late husband’s property, including her son, in order to keep him from being raised a Christian. A court ruled that the baby should stay with Kamila until he is weaned, and she took that opportunity to escape with him to another area near Nairobi; he is now five.

There was Sahra, who wears a full-body burqa in her Somali neighborhood in Nairobi to keep from being recognized and abused. Her husband was killed in fighting in Mogadishu in 2006. Her relatives have cut her off because of her Christian faith, and she said she can feel the same shunning from her fellow expatriates. “When they see you are low-income and have left your religion, they see you as sick in the head,” said the mother of two young daughters who survives by working odd jobs.

There was Mana, whose husband was kidnapped by al Shabaab Islamists in July after they discovered he was a Christian. He was able to escape last month with the help of residents of the area where he was held in Somalia, but his tortured body is still too fragile to be moved, so he cannot yet be reunited with his family in Kenya. He is still spoon-fed, the militants chopped off three fingers from his right hand and two from his left, and there are no fingernails on those that remain.

Finally, there was an older Somali woman, some of whose children are now grown. Her oldest is 25, but she nearly lost him when six Muslim neighbors, who surmised that they were Christians meeting secretly for worship, cut his hands with a knife and belted his face with a metal bar on Oct. 31, before leaving him unconscious, naked, and bleeding at the entryway of an area church. Every Friday the Muslim women in her Somali neighborhood in Kenya used to invite her to the mosque, and she would tell them she wasn’t feeling well. Eventually they figured out that they were Christians.

If ever there was an inconvenient truth, it is the lordship of Christ for these women. In their world, there is much shame associated with their status as refugees in a bleak economy and as Christians in a Muslim fishbowl, but they know what it is to live 1 Peter 4:16, “Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.”

And so it is that the older Somali woman who found her son in a pool of blood, echoing the attitude of the others, could tell me, “Although he has been beaten, we trust God to protect us. We don’t feel like we’re going to return to Islam; we will stand with Christ.”