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—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Every year Saudi Arabia lands on or near the top of lists of violators of religious freedom, and every year the royal family that rules the kingdom could not care less. The United States has formed an alliance with this intransigent opponent of human rights for reasons that parallel the charge given to Lawrence of Arabia. Leading Saudi Arabia forward into unfathomable wealth by developing its oil industry, the United States has found the partnership profitable for both economic and geopolitical interests.

U.S. oil companies arrived in Saudi Arabia a generation after Lawrence helped lead Arabs in their revolt against World War I-era Turks. Like the Christians who often work for these and other companies, Lawrence had no illusions about the limits of his ability to assume Arab character. But he did defer to his host culture, accepting its ways as a point of departure, and his example in war may yet have something to teach us about spiritual battles for human dignity.

In 1992, December 25 fell on a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, when pastor Oswaldo "Wally" Magdangal was to be hanged in the Saudi capital of Riyadh for blaspheming Islam. Shari'ah law requires beheading for "apostates"—those who renounce Islam—as well as for murderers, and no Friday passes without at least one such execution in the public square following the noon prayers, rights organizations say. Hangings are reserved for "blasphemers" like Magdangal. Foreigners of non-Islamic faiths can worship legally in private in Saudi Arabia, but the 42-year-old Filipino pastor was arrested after his growing house church had become too noticeable. On December 23, Magdangal wrote out his last will and testament for his wife and young daughter.

Religious police had tortured every part of his body in trying to force him to renounce his faith in Christ. Embracing Islam would have won his immediate release. Initially the religious police, or muttawa'in—a vigilante force with a hierarchy and membership extending into government and other sectors—beat him throughout 210 minutes of mocking interrogation. They handed him a pencil and paper and demanded names of other Christians he knew. He refused.

"Eventually I was so weak, they placed the pad of paper in my lap, and they forced the pencil into my hand," Magdangal told CT. "I was weeping, and I said, 'Lord, you've got to help me here,' and I began to write the names of Billy Graham, Charles Spurgeon, and others. After a few days, they were so mad, because they'd been all over Saudi Arabia looking for those people."

During interrogations—which included flogging of his back, his palms, and the soles of his feet—the muttawa'in did not state charges against him. Only when he answered that he agreed with an article predicting the ultimate fall of Islam in Christ for the Nations magazine (which the muttawa'in found in his home) was the basis for the eventual blasphemy charge established.

Magdangal was not allowed to speak during his high court trial, which Muslim clerics held in secret.

"I was shaking with pain; I was trembling with fear," Magdangal says. "I kept asking them to get my wife, but that led them to tell me in strong words to stand silent—not to say a word or I would suffer the consequence of every word I spoke. That's when I just broke down, and I just wept and wept."

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July 8 2002, Vol. 46, No. 8