The Islamic worldview—even concerning things such as disease (e.g., coronavirus)—is fundamentally based on a dichotomy: anything and everything non-Islamic is evil, dirty, to be shunned, hated, and struggled (“jihad”) against; anything Islamic is good, clean, to be embraced, loved, and struggled on behalf.

A Christian youth recently found this out the hard way.  Saleem Masih, 22, was tortured and killed for using water from his Muslim employer’s well in Pakistan.  Outraged, the Muslim accused him of being a “filthy Christian” who “had polluted the water.”  A number of equally outraged Muslims gathered and “vow[ing] to teach him a lesson,” they “dragged him to their cattle farm, where they tied his hands, chained his feet and continued to torture him with sticks and iron rods.”  Before he died from his severe wounds, Saleem told his family that he had been “tortured just for being a Christian.” As for the Muslim employer, he insisted that he committed no crime; it was, after all, the murdered Christian who had, he said, “committed a crime by dirtying” their water, and therefore his punishment—torture and death—was “justified.”

Violent and murderous outbursts by Muslims whenever “filthy” Christians drink or use the former’s water is not uncommon.  In Pakistan alone, Javed Anjum, another young Christian, was killed, after being trapped and tortured for five full days, because he too had the temerity to drink water from a madrassa.  And then of course there is the most notorious case of Christian persecution in Pakistan, that of Asia Bibi: she was attacked, beat, falsely accused with blasphemy, and accordingly imprisoned for a decade—all because she too, then a farm laborer, had drunk from Muslim water.

Nor is this a Pakistani but rather an Islamic phenomenon.  Dr. Abdullah Badr—an Egyptian Muslim scholar, Al Azhar graduate, and onetime professor of Islamic exegesis—once explained during a videotaped conference how he is so “disgusted” by Christians, to the point that, if a Christian were to touch his cup, he would not drink from it: “Disgust, I get grossed out, man, I cannot stand their smell or … I don’t like them, it’s my choice.  And they gross me out; their smell, their look, everything.  I feel disgusted, disgusted!”

Badr added that he once entered a store in Egypt to buy food, but when he saw the crosses and Christian icons on the wall, and understood that the owner was Christian, he immediately gave the food away on the street.