Conference on Islam

You can’t destroy radical Islam with bombs. Sooner or later you have to take on that ideology. Someone’s got to start confronting that which is motivating them,” said Islam expert Jay Smith of London as he displayed a copy of the Koran. “This is what destroys them. This book makes them do what they do.”

As one of six speakers at the Inter-Faith Workshop on Islam hosted by Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary last fall, Smith advocated the confrontational style of evangelism for which he is famous in England. There he participates in Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner where Christians and Muslims openly air their disagreements.

The popular misconceptions that Islam is a religion of peace and that Christians and Muslims worship the same God were dismantled by the speakers in Kansas City, including Patrick Sookhdeo of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Sasan Tavasolli of the Outreach Foundation, Samuel Shahid of Good News for the Crescent World, as well as Midwestern President R. Philip Roberts and Missions Professor Robin Hadaway.

“There’s not one seminary, one Bible school that’s taking this on,” Smith charged, calling for more thorough preparation of Christians to understand Islamic teaching and apologetics.

Roberts seized the opportunity to accept Smith’s challenge, pledging further detailed studies of Islam if Smith would return to teach.

The fear of confrontation neutralizes the Christian’s witness to Muslims, Smith said. Noting that some 43,000 videos attacking Christianity are available on YouTube—offered up in English from sources in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. He found only six Christian videos challenging Islam. Since that survey, Smith and others have uploaded dozens of films attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers to his rebuttal of Islamic beliefs. .Smith said Christians cannot depend upon government to counter the Islamic convictions that are at the root of much terrorist activity. He recalled former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s contention that he only saw peace and tolerance represented in the Koran after reading it three times.

“As a politician he cannot say what he knows. You can only imagine the vigilantism that would take place. He is elected to office by a constituency and many of them are Muslims. But I’m not elected to office, and I don’t have a constituency, save one. His name is Jesus.”

Looking at United Nations projections, Sookhdeo said, “Muslims are very conscious of the idea that they will ultimately out-populate us.” He factored the impact of legalized abortion to present a dismal forecast for Europe as the increasing Muslim population becomes a majority by 2022.

“The argument is made that massive labor shortages require opening doors to principally Muslim immigrants,” Sookhedeo said in describing Europe’s dilemma. “Haven’t we killed off a whole generation? Then we will end up with a community that will ultimately destroy us. We will have reaped what we have sewn. All of these things are interlinked.”

He explained how the strategy of Islamization differs from the expansion of Christianity. Having served in Christian ministry for 40 years, Sookhdeo has found that missionary endeavors often lack an ecclesiology that disciples and equips believers. “We believe what we’ve got to do is get out there and get as many people as possible saved and then we leave them be.”

“Islam is very different,” he said, describing provisions for meeting basic needs, particularly with the influence of Saudi money pouring into countries to build new mosques, schools, hospitals, radio and television. “Every conceivable aspect of Muslim life brings them back to the Koran, Mohammed, and sharia—a set of rules, guidelines and principles that govern all of Islamic society.”

He shared his frustration with media analysts who say terrorism has nothing to do with religion or ideology and more often point to “poor Muslim young people who can’t get work” as the cause. “Most of the great analysts have never read Islamic theory, the books that reveal the strategy of the doctrine of separation of parallel societies.”

Sookhdeo explained the process of first creating a consciousness of Islam, requiring every woman to wear hijab to affirm their morality, and Muslims defining themselves in terms of Islamic identity. “Then they create institutions—an Islamic Legal Society or Islamic Women’s Society—all based on sharia principles.” From there they approach local, regional and national governments, arguing for observance of Islamic holidays, separate space in swimming pools. “Then they begin to say, ‘We are here, you must make room for us. You must adjust.’ Then finally, if you don’t adjust. ‘We can’t help it if your society gets blown up.’”

With the Archbishop of Canterbury arguing that it seemed “unavoidable” for sharia to exist in some form alongside common law, arbitration courts will be forced to honor it, Sookhdeo explained. “There are moves for it to be imbedded here.” He described secularists who argue that the collapse of the subprime market and banking failures could have been averted by following Islamic financial principles that are based on assets and not speculation.

“In one sense the horse has bolted and you can’t shut the gate,” Sookhdeo declared, noting how few countries in Europe had refused Islamic demands.

All the workshop leaders agreed that the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only real hope for change in the lives of Muslims. They varied on how that message of hope is

introduced—by confronting false doctrine through debate or attracting misled adherents through relationships. “We have a belief that the only thing we must be doing is converting,” Smith said, describing a missiological paradigm of friendship evangelism. “You come alongside them, go out to tea, and try to be like them. You dress like them, talk, walk, and eat like them—no wonder everybody’s confused.”

He called for defending orthodox Christianity, answering untruths that Islam proclaims about the Bible, Jesus and Christians, as well as holding Islam accountable for the actions of its followers.

But in long-identified Muslim regions like North Africa and the Middle East, the patient pursuit of relationships can draw people to Christ, several speakers shared. Tracing his ancestry to India and Pakistan with the influences of Hindu and Islamic beliefs, Sookhedeo was impressed by the love expressed by a group of Christian believers he encountered in England.

“Give people the Word of God. Pray for the Holy Spirit to so move in their lives that he will bring them to himself. It’s no different for Muslims than anyone else,” he added.

While “more Muslims than ever before in history are becoming Christians,” Sookhedeo acknowledged his global overview of the influence of Islam can be depressing. Muslim leaders gathered in Mecca in 1899 asked themselves whether Islam had a future, he said. With colonialism advancing, Western powers planting Christian flags across the world and the rule of the Church of England, their despair was compounded when the Ottoman Empire was secularized.

After a century of change, Sookhdeo described a world where a corporate giant like Coca-Cola adorned cans with the Islamic symbol of the star and crescent for distribution in Muslim lands during the season of Ramadan. “If Coca-Cola were asked at Easter time would you put the symbol of the cross on every can, would they do it? Imagine you are in some remote village in Latin America or Asia where Coca-Cola is now a universal brand; you get your can of Coke, take it to your lips and are then faced with the Islamic symbol. What would you be thinking? Coke the real thing? Islam the real thing?” he asked.

“Today in Europe, the big question is, ‘Does Christianity have a future? Is it Islam that will survive?’”

Shahid traced the history of the Middle East in pre-Islamic times, recalling nearly 50 Arab tribes that had converted to Christianity. Ultimately, he said, “They were so involved in discussing the nature of Christ and persecuting each other that they stopped evangelizing. There was no witness. So when Mohammed came, he was aware of all these disputes and presented to the Arabs a simple creed—there is one God and Jesus is just a prophet.”

Shahid said early Arabs lacked an Arabic translation of Scripture and a church body to disciple them as they migrated. “When Islam came, it came with a book written in Arabic in a language they could understand that reflected their own culture and, for the first time, a prophet who was an Arab.”

Alluding to syncretism, Hadaway described the development of folk Islam among many African and Middle Eastern tribes that imported Islam into their practices of worshiping idols, ancestors and demons.

While they claim to believe in the five pillars of Islam, Hadaway said such Muslims are seeking answers to what he called the “what’s happening now” questions. They are more interested in knowing why there is a drought, why a child died at birth, why a wife has cancer than in knowing how to get to heaven, he said.

“The nature of God himself has been a major point of dispute between Islam and Christianity,” explained Shields, recalling that Muslims dispute Jesus’ claim to a divine nature, describing him as no more than a prophet.

“Christianity is considered a welfare religion” by Muslims, Roberts said. “Islam gives you dignity because your own effort and worth, self-esteem, morality—that’s what’s going to get you into paradise. By putting you to work in that regard you raise your sense of dignity,” he said in explaining their perspective. And since Muslims hold to a very simplified confession of God as the one, absolute, sovereign, eternal God, Roberts said the concept of the trinity troubles them.

“These doctrines are our strengths because God is not an impersonal monad who lives in heaven making decrees in fatalistic fashion. He is a God of love and great righteousness.

The whole idea of the trinity says a great deal about God and us—that we have an interpersonal God who believes in relationship, community, family, and fellowship. This great, wonderful God of the universe through Jesus Christ has made it possible to have fellowship with him,” Roberts reminded.

That assurance of salvation is the primary reason Muslims are attracted to Christianity, he said. Other religions counter that “if you join our group, keep our ethics, our standards, and if you do well enough long enough you might get salvation,” he explained. “Only the Christian faith says you can know for sure you will go to heaven when you die because it’s not based on what you do, but on what Jesus Christ has done for us.”

Tavasolli encouraged Christians to communicate the distinctives of their faith to Muslim friends, exercising patience when they misunderstand. “Giving lip service to Jesus, as Islam does, is no honor to Jesus. It is a betrayal of the truth as set forth in the Bible.”

The daily recitation of the shahada—declaring one’s belief in the oneness of God and acceptance of Mohammed as his prophet—runs counter to the Christian testimony of I Jn. 5:10-12, Tavasolli reminded.

“Another book, written 600 years later declared that if you believe in Jesus as the Son of God, God’s curse be on you,” he said, citing the Koran. “Both cannot be true. Both cannot be from God. All religions don’t teach the same thing.”

Sookhdeo described the success of the Muslim community in taking American symbols to contextualize them into an Islamic framework. Their goal of changing the perception of the world makes Islam “not just neutral, but Islam-friendly,” he said, “presenting it as a religion of peace and then going on from there to present Islam as being the real thing.”

Roberts told the audience, “When Muslims look at the decadent West which they understand to be largely Christian, then many doubts and concerns are raised about the value of the Christian faith. As we see the decline of mainstream Christianity in the western world and most major denominations wilting on the vine because of jettisoned Christian values, there is even more cause for criticism and cynicism by Muslims. The answer is that you’re not looking at real Christianity.”

In spite of such discouragement, Roberts said, “We know who wins in the end. The Lord Jesus Christ ultimately conquers and every knee will bow and every tongue confess Jesus as Lord, including all those who have been involved in the Muslim faith and propagation of the Koran.”

He committed Midwestern Seminary to be a place where students are equipped to defend their faith and share the Gospel with Muslims wherever God leads them to serve.

[Reprinted from Midwestern Magazine Winter 2008.]