Turkey’s top religious official has defended brandishing a “sword of con-quest” while delivering his first sermon from Hagia Sophia’s marble pulpit after its conversion into a mosque.
“Preaching in this way [with a sword] sends a message about the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mos-que on the one hand and of conquest on the other,” Ali Erbaº, the country’s head of the Religious Affairs Dire-ctorate (Diyanet) defiantly declared.
“Reading sermons with a sword is a common practice in our history and tradition,” Erbaº stated. “When Istanbul was conquered, the first Friday sermon in Hagia Sophia was read with a sword and continued for 481 years,” the religious leader tweeted.
“The tradition of the khutbah (sermon) with the sword has been practiced in some mosques in our country,” he added. Erbaº held the sword all through his 19-minute sermon on July 24. The sword has three crescents engraved on it representing the three continents that were the object of the Ottoman conquest.
The “conquest verse” from the Koran (48:1) is also inscribed on the sword. It reads: “Indeed, we have given you, [O Muhammad], a clear conqu-est.”
Two green flags were also hung on the minbar (pulpit) of the mosque as a symbol of conquest.
Speaking to Church Militant, eminent Islamic historian Robert Spencer warned that “the Pope and all Christians should take careful note of the words of Ali Erbaº, particularly about Muhammad’s prophecy that Muslims would conquer Constantinople.”

Elias is waiting for a German official to evaluate his Christianity.
He converted from Islam in Iran secretly. He was afraid because he knew that other converts had been arrested and beaten, some even killed. He had also heard of converts finding asylum in Germany. He dreamed of going there and being baptized in public. He could worship in the open, start a new life, and join a church, free from the fear of reprisals for his newfound faith.
And so he fled to Germany. When he got there, he applied for asylum. Now, Elias (a pseudonym) waits for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) to rule on his case. He is far from alone. Between 20,000 and 40,000 refugees are seeking asylum in Germany on the grounds of religious persecution because of their con-version to Christianity, according to a 2019 Open Doors report. Amid sharp national debates about anti-refugee sentiment, religious literacy, and religious freedom, a number of evangelical leaders have called for changes to the process of officially evaluating refugee conversion.
Currently, the BAMF judges the sincerity of conversion and the severity of potential threats to asylum seekers’ lives. There is, however, a lack of explicit standards, clear criteria, or legal precedent for these exami-nations, and the BAMF grants asylum at significantly different rates in different parts of the country. “It’s like a lottery,” said Gottfried Martens, pastor of a Lutheran Church associated with the Missouri Synod in the Steglitz neighborhood of Berlin. Martens cares for more than 1,000 baptized Iranian, Afghan, and Pakistani Christians in his church and is currently instructing hundreds more in preparation for baptism.
“If you’re in Potsdam, you stand a better chance than in Berlin,” he said. “In Berlin, you stand a better chance than in Düsseldorf. In Hessen, you’re almost guaranteed protection. It just depends on which person you get.” Martens wants the process to be more consistent. He joins the German Evangelical Alliance and Open Doors in calling for a standardization of the exami-nation procedure and more cooperation between the government and religious authorities. The Christian groups are part of a diverse coalition calling for change, including conservative and liberal politicians, the Baha’i community, the International Society for Human Rights, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and Ahmadi Muslims (who have been persecuted in Pakistan).

Police overpowered an Egy-ptian migrant after the 30-year-old broke through security and, rushing up to the high altar at Milan Cathedral, held a guard hostage at knifepoint. Brandishing a 20-centimeter switchblade, the assailant who possesses a long-term residence permit for family reunification reasons, forced his uniformed captor to kneel for over eight minutes.
Italy’s General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS), which interrogated the suspect, revealed that the man, currently living in the Lombardy region, was stopped by a police patrol while he was sitting on the cathedral steps.
Asked by officials from the Centro Commi-ssariat for his residence documents, the migrant attempted to stall police inquires. Suddenly, he broke free and ran towards the cathedral entrance reserved for worshippers and pushed aside a security officer who was guarding the door. Inside the cathedral, a second security guard accosted him after he had reached the high altar. However, the assailant pulled a knife on the guard and forced him to kneel and later sit on the floor.
Senior police officials, including Commissioner Mauro Frare and Deputy Commissioner Luca Gazzili, rushed to the scene and began negotiating with the hostage-taker. A policewoman from the Flying Squad tried to calm the assailant and with hands raised told him: “Do you want me to take off the belt? I’ll take it off. I want to help you, look, I’ll put it on the ground.”
At one point when the migrant was distracted, armed police took him by surprise and disarmed him. Milan has over 50,000 mostly Muslim illegal migrants. Italian newspaper Il Giornale noted that it has become a “symbol of decay and disarray from the point of view of public order, with stabbings and rapes every day and open-air drug dealing.”

Following the execution of five aid workers by Islamic extremists, a leading Catholic Bishop in Nigeria has argued that systemic violence against Nigerian Christians constitutes genocide.
The Bishop, Mathew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, told Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) that, in his view, the recent violence was genocidal in character. He stressed, however, that Christians were not the only victims of recent unrest, as the killings “have been far worse in the predominantly Muslim north in such states as Katsina, Sokoto and Zamfara.” Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) justi-fied their murder of five aid workers as a warning to “all those being used by infidels to convert Muslims to Christianity” – some-thing that indicated, the Bishop said, that extremists are not only targeting Christians.
A video of the killings, the victims of which were employees of international NGOs, was released by the Islamist group. Although the group has avoided executing Muslim civilians in the past, this appears to be changing as the conflict continues.
Implying that the Nigerian government is complicit in the unrest, Bishop Kukah also criti-cised western countries for not doing more. He said: “We hear promises from the United States and Europe and they all come to nothing.”
Nigeria is ranked number twelve on the persecution charity Open Doors’ 2020 World Watch List of countries where Christians are the most in danger for practising their faith.

The Trump administration commendably made Christian persecution in the Middle East a priority. Vice President Mike Pence is a chief advocate in the administration, and Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour Robert Destro has spent a large bulk of his career defending international religious freedom. Now the administration and Congress should emphasize persecution of Christians in Iran because Iran is the new battleground for Christians’ religious rights. When one thinks of persecution of Christians in the Middle East, the Islamic State’s killing of Syrian and Iraqi Christians comes to mind. But Iran, not Syria, has the largest Christian population enduring government persecution.
Speaking of faith and Iran, most people think of Islam. Yet Islam is the fastest shrinking religion there, while Christianity is growing the fastest. According to a report by the Department of State from 2018, up to half a million Iranians are Christian converts from Muslim families, and most of these Christians are evangelicals. Recent estimates claim that the number might have climbed up to somewhere between one million and three million. This is up from 100,000 in 1994, and a majority of these converts are reportedly women. A recent documentary, Sheep among Wolves, documents the lives of these converts and shows how Iran is the “fastest-growing church” in the world.

An Argentine bishop said the seminary in his diocese was ordered closed on July by a decision of the Vatican’s Congre-gation for Clergy, after a contro-versy surrounding the reception of the Eucharist during the coronavirus pandemic.
Bishop Eduardo Maria Taussig of San Rafael said on Aug. 7 that the Santa Maria Ma-dre de Dios Seminary in Mendo-za, Argentina was ordered to close in December, at the conclu-sion of the academic year, by the Congregation for Clergy, and not the Diocese of San Rafael.
“The decision took me by surprise, but it is a directive that comes directly from the Holy See,” Taussig said.
The bishop said the decision to close the seminary was deeply upsetting, and he has since been discussing with the Vatican where the former students of the school will be sent to in order to continue their studies.

Conversions involving Islam sometimes look like a one-way street in the West. Famed new believers like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Keith Ellison seem to get all the attention—along with flamboyant flirts like Lindsay Lohan. But those who leave Islam may ultimately influence the faith more than converts do.
There are about 3.5 million Muslims in the U.S., according to a 2017 Pew Research Centre survey. The data suggests that about 100,000 of them abandon Islam each year, while roughly the same number convert to Islam. Altogether nearly a quarter of those raised in the faith have left, with Iranians disproportiona-tely represented. Similar trends prevail in Western Europe, where conversions in and out of Islam appear roughly to balance out.
In the U.S., ex-Muslims’ motives for leaving vary. Asked what their “main reason” was for no longer identifying as Muslim, Pew found 25% had general issues with religion and 19% with Islam in particular. Some 16% said they prefer another religion, and 14% cited “personal growth.” More than half of them abandon religion entirely, and 22% now identify as Christian.