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Brotherly Love
"I'm coming down to burn that church."
That's the chilling phone response from the brother of a 28-year-old London Pakistani who announced to her family that she had converted to Christianity.
The BBC publishes a long feature by former Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist Shiraz Maher on the difficulties facing Muslims who convert to Christianity.
For many, the result is broken family relations, violence, even death. Maher speaks to a number of Islamic scholars who try to show that the death sentence for apostasy is more realistically reserved for those committing "treason" - though the fact that around a third of young British Muslims believe that converts should be executed suggests that opponents of the death penalty have some way to go.
Maher speaks to classical Islam scholar Dr Hisham Hellyer, a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at University of Oxford, who believes that "the death penalty punishment is no longer applicable and should be suspended under certain circumstances." While it is refreshing to discover that Oxford is still home to people so right-wing that they continue to support the death penalty ("under certain circumstances"), we'd like to know to which cases Dr Hellyer would like to see it applied.
Maher also reports on the difficulties facing Christians in supposedly secular Turkey:
"Before heading back to Turkey for the holidays, Ziya briefly visited a Christian summer camp where he was filmed eating a bowl of spaghetti.
"The first his parents heard of his conversion was when they saw Ziya on the national news being described as "an evil missionary" intent on "brainwashing" Turkish children.
"His parents decided they would rather tell people that he was dead than acknowledge he was a Christian."
Ziya was lucky: This time last year, two Christian converts and a German friend working for a Christian publisher were found murdered in what was suspected as a ritual Islamist killing linked to Hezbollah. The murders were part of a campaign against Christians in Turkey, which The Pope has tried to draw attention to.
