YasminFuckingBegum

The Save Maryam campaign has been unleashed. Its origin lays in a Youtube video that describes the scenario of a young Indonesian woman, Maryam. Maryam lives in Indonesia, which has the largest number of Muslim citizens in the world. 2 million of them a year are converting to Christianity. If it grows at the current rate, by the mid 2050s, Indoesnia will no longer be a Muslim majority country. Maryam is heralded as a voice of a generation, and explores her issues. For every time Maryam experiences a problem, it is the Christian people who are there on standby providing support, as opposed to the Muslim. This leads Maryam to consider converting to Christianity.  The video attributes this to a poor teaching of Islam in Indonesia, a lack of Muslim support networks and seeks to raise money to reinstate a feeling of Islam in its young people through better teaching of Islam and young Muslim TV channels. 

It asks viewers to help raise $2 million for the ‘Save Maryam’ campaign. The video already has 300,000 or so views. The video is so Islamic that no music was used in it. 

It’s a Muslim outreach campaign, aimed at ‘Muslims across the world’ are aware of the ‘problem’ in Indonesia. It wants to utilise social media to make the message widespread to raise money to save Muslim souls from Christianity. 

With a production value reminiscent of Kony 2012, the Save Maryam campaign doesn’t smell too great. One should note that its launch during Ramadan plays on Muslims in a similar way that Christmas advertisements hit Christians. It’s a manipulative campaign that demonises Christianity and manipulates Muslims into paying it as da’wah, a charitable act. Given the large minority of Christianity in Indonesia, this video stirs up anti Christian sentiment, Islamophobes will have a field day with this video and lots of people will be standing at the sides thinking “What the fuck?”

Any official state religion is ridiculous. Anyone preventing people from excercising religious freedom is ridiculous. Any campaign whose grounding is to save people from conversion or leaving a religion is freaky. When Scientology stages ‘interventions’ to save people from leaving, it’s freaky, when a bunch of people in Indonesia do it, they expect donations. People should be free to worship, covert and leave any religion that they please. No organisation has to save souls; it’s a knee jerk reaction to modernisation. If this video took place in the UK, it would be traditional Church in England Christians trying to stop conversion to other religions, and that, too, would be equally unacceptable. 

To put it simply, it’s the Muslim Kony 2012. Unfortunately, people bought into the Kony 2012 Bullshit, thus people are going to buy into this bullshit. The western media is going to have an absolute field-day.