Christian Rapper Saved by Circumcision—Twice

After a childhood encounter with terrorists, hip-hop artist raps for religious freedom.

Back in the 1980s, a doctor in a remote clinic performed an emergency circumcision to treat a young boy’s severe urinary tract infection in Azerbaijan on the Caspian sea. Ruslan Karaoglanov was cured from potentially fatal infection that day. But the Karaoglanov family had no inkling that five years later this same circumcision would cause Muslim terrorists to spare Ruslan’s life during a bloody pogrom.

Recently, rapper Ruslan, a rising talent in the Christian hip-hop world (known professionally by his first name), retold the story to Christianity Today. It was during the historic period in which the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire collapsed. In Azerbaijan, Christians lived in daily fear for their lives as Islamic terrorists sought to purge non-Muslims from the region.

Black January

The worst occurred in the early days of 1990 (labeled today as “Black January”). Across seven days that month, violence between Azerbaijani Muslims and the Soviet Red Army left an estimated 220 people dead and 1,500 injured in Baku, the capital.

One day, armed men crashed through the door at the home where the Karaoglanov family was living in Baku. They were seeking to find and murder any Armenian males. Ruslan’s Armenian father and uncles had already fled to Moscow for safety. But Ruslan, about 5 years old, had stayed with his ethnic Russian mother, Marina, and grandparents.

As three rebels with automatic weapons poised to kill him, his mother quickly exposed her son’s circumcised penis to prove that his was not Armenian. “No! No! No!” Marina shouted in Russian.

“We’re not Armenians. Look, my son is circumcised!”

Armenian Christians traditionally do not practice circumcision, …