Christians oppressed by rebels in Syria

Opponents of the Syrian regime are imposing the Islamic tax on Christians in Homs
Marco Tosatti
04/21/2012

News from Homs, one of the cities in Syria that has been hardest hit by the clashes between the Syrian army and rebels, suggests that the future for Christians in Syria will be no rosier should the long dictatorship of the Baath party, controlled by the Assad clan’s Alawi minority, come to an end. “The opposition army has imposed the Islamic tax on Christians in Homs.” The news started circulating a week ago and was confirmed in recent days.

The Koran reads: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” The reference to “those who have been given the Book” is about Jews and Christians. What seemed like a custom of the early centuries of Islam and the medieval era, has clearly not been applied for some time in Middle Eastern Countries with Islamic majorities which only adopted democratic and representative political models after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and then after the Second World War. Most Muslim spokesmen living in the West would say that this verse cannot be applied in today’s modern world. the rest