Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top religious official in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa earlier this month calling on the faithful to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula. The ruling came in response to a request from a Kuwaiti legislator who wanted to know if under Islamic principles the government of Kuwait could ban church construction in the country. Citing what is said to be a deathbed request by the Prophet Mohammed as the basis for his ruling, the senior cleric in the Saudi religious hierarchy (Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh) found that under Islamic principles, not only should all new church construction be banned, existing churches should be destroyed.A little later on in the article, the author makes a salient point about the Islamic worldview:
For many Muslims, however, the rise of tolerance in Christianity looks less like maturity and self confidence than like the senescence of a religion in decline. Christianity, these critics say, is losing its hold on the western mind. The rise in religious tolerance is the result of necessity — the churches are weak, the believers indifferent, and so Christians no longer have the inner conviction to stand up for their faith. Just as Christian countries tolerate a range of vices and practices that in the past, when their faith was stronger, they opposed (homosexuality, abortion, sexual immorality of all kinds, blasphemy and obscenity), so now they also don’t care very much about what religion people profess because their own faith doesn’t mean all that much to the shrinking minority that still has one. Islam, these Muslims say, is a stronger faith, less subject to erosion by the forces of modernity and the neo-paganism of consumer culture. Islamic intolerance of religious error reflects a faith that feels itself to be true and is not ashamed or embarrassed to insist on its core values and its historic ideas. Don’t hold up your flabby faith and your immoral, secular societies to us as examples to imitate, these Muslim critics say. You are tolerant because you are decadent, open because you have lost the will and the strength to defend yourselves and your ideas.Top Saudi Cleric Issues Fatwa: Destroy Churches
