The Crescent and the Gun: Islam and Violence
by Brian Saint-Paul - January 1, 2002
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
It's hard to watch Francis Bok remember. He speaks softly, haltingly. His piercing eyes stare out, sometimes at you, sometimes into space, but always to that day 15 years ago in Sudan.
He was seven years old and living with his family in a small southern village. His mother had sent him to the local marketplace to sell eggs and beans for the family. It was a busy day in the town square-the locals bustled from stall to stall, buying and selling as they had always done. But the steady hum of business was silenced when hundreds of Muslim gunmen rode into the market on horses. As the villagers looked up at them from their baskets of produce, the riders opened fire.
All around Francis bodies fell, pierced by bullets. People screamed, ran, tried desperately to flee the massacre around them. But it was hopeless. The gunmen had boxed them in. There was no escape.
"It was terrible," Francis remembered. "Men were killed, the women were raped. Everything happened in front of us. It was terrible."
Amid the low moans of the dying, the gunmen grabbed the children and tied them to the sides of donkeys, to be carried off and sold into slavery. Francis was on one side of a donkey, two young girls on the other. "The girls couldn't stop crying, so the men shot them. After that, I learned to be quiet."
He was sold to a Muslim family, where he was beaten every day and called "Abeed"-meaning "black slave." Even the family's children had a hand in the brutality, taunting and whipping him in imitation of their parents.
For ten years, Francis lived like an animal, sleeping in the barn. "For ten years, I had no one to laugh with...no one to love me."
One morning when he was 17, he decided to escape. He'd tried twice before and failed. This would be his final attempt. "I said to myself, 'This is the last time.' If they caught me, I'd tell them to kill me, or I'd kill myself. I wasn't going to be a slave anymore."
He rose early, prayed, and with the kind of luck only God can provide, left ten years of unimaginable horror behind him. Only last year did Francis learn that the day he was abducted, the Muslim gunmen had murdered his family as well.
It would be easy to chalk up such atrocities to Sudanese fanaticism alone. But these things aren't happening only in East Africa. Every day, the newspapers bring more horrifying examples to the public consciousness-Islamic extremists kidnapping and murdering villagers in the Philippines...Islamic gunmen walking into a Pakistani church and machine-gunning the worshipers...Islamic fundamentalists hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings...Islamic militants storming Christian villages in Indonesia, brutalizing the women and murdering the men.
Islamic extremists. Islamic gunmen. Islamic fundamentalists. Islam.
