Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship and heard around the world on his daily radio broadcast BreakPoint, relates the following anecdote: A group of women gathered at the Old Country buffet of Boston at the shopping mall. They laughed and chatted as they enjoyed the roast beef and ice-cream sundaes. They could be any group of young moms and college students enjoying a night out. But they’re not. These women are recent converts to Islam, celebrating the end of Ramadan. This symbolizes a curious new phenomenon in the wake of September 11: a surge of Islamic conversions. “I said the testimony, and poof, I was a Muslim,” said one, a University of Massachusetts theater major. And she added, “I used to feel something was wrong with me because I couldn’t grasp the concept of God. Now I finally had peace of heart.”1
Universities are now in a bidding war for Islamic experts. Every government in the world is sizing up security risks related to extremist Muslim groups, while also trying to figure out how to structure communities that have a blend of Christian, Jewish and Muslim populations, among others.
The story of Islam begins, of course, with the life of the prophet Muhammad, who lived 600 years after Jesus and who wrote the Koran, which means “recitation.” Today one billion Muslims live in almost every country in the world and believe that this recitation of Allah is the guiding force of their lives.
Life was hard in the deserts of Arabia in a.d. 600. Blood feuds, gambling, drunkenness and general chaos ruled. Muhammad, who was in the caravan business, had a disgust for the times in which he lived. Rejecting the crudeness and superstition of his time, Muhammad took a look at the 360 gods of the city of Mecca and believed that the one called Allah, which simply means “the God,” was the one true God. The only God. A God whose true nature is awesome, fear-inspiring power.
Muslims believe that one day Muhammad was visited by an angel who commanded him, “Proclaim!” Muhammad told the angel that he was not a proclaimer and hurried home, believing that he was either called to be a prophet or was turning mad. He began teaching this radical commitment to one God and developing a teaching about life. After three years, Muhammad had 40 followers, although most people were quite hostile to his message. After a decade, however, he had several hundred followers. In the year 622, Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina. There his message was accepted and he became an administrator, a master politician, a magistrate and a statesman. This is very important in understanding Islam. Muhammad was at once a religious, military and political leader, and ever since, followers of Islam have held to a belief system that is both political and religious.
Islam is generally a religion of preaching and proclamation about the right kind of life to live, not of miracles. But there is one miracle Muslims believe in: the transmission of the Koran. The Koran is the holy book of Islam. It is four-fifths the length of the New Testament. Muslims regard the Koran as the literal word of Allah revealed to Muhammad, who wrote down what was given to him over a span of 23 years.
Muslims believe that this revelation is the last and highest revelation of God, following the Old Testament (which centers on the stories of Abraham and Moses), and the gospel of Jesus. Muslims view Jews, Christians and themselves as People of the Book. Unlike the Old Testament and the New Testament, however, the Koran is written as direct speech of God, speaking in the first person. It is seen to be a heavenly word uncorrupted. Non-Muslims find the Koran difficult to read for its density of doctrinal words.
When Medina won the war that broke out between the two kingdoms of Medina and Mecca, Muhammad became the indisputable leader of Arabia, and the beginnings of a new empire were formed. When Muhammad died in 632, Arabia was united under Muhammad’s control. By the close of that century, his followers had also conquered Armenia, Persia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, North Africa and Spain and had crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into France. If the European ruler Charles Martel had not defeated the Muslims in the Battle of Tours in 733, Muslim rule might have extended all the way into Europe. Western history might have been entirely different. The European immigrants who came to America from Poland and German and Norway might not have been Lutherans and Catholics, but Muslims.
Many religions have gotten entangled with militarism and conquest—including Christianity, especially in the Middle Ages. But one historical reality about Islam is that political rule and conquest were part of its inception. Many believe that is one reason why extreme Muslim interpretations even today place an unambiguous label of “infidel” on Christians, Jews and Westerners and why non-Muslims living in Muslim-dominated lands are considered dhimmi, a definite second-class citizenship.
The posture of Islam toward the rest of the world began with Muhammad. For the Muslim, there is unbounded respect and admiration for Muhammad. He was a shepherd, a hermit, a soldier, a politician and the writer of mystical writings. Yet the Muslim is insulted by the old-fashioned word “Mohammedanism.” They maintain that Allah is the focus of their faith, and Muhammad is only a prophet. In contrast, in Christianity, Jesus Himself is the object of faith. It is Christianity, not Peterianity or Paulianity. Today it is believed that more boys are named Muhammad than any other name in the world.2
“Islam” means “submission,” and “Muslim” means “one who has submitted his life to God.” Islam focuses on the total submission of one’s life to a lifestyle based on law. Islam is more a religion of deed than belief. It is appealing to some because it is so concrete and specific in what it requires. Sexual immorality is prohibited, as are intoxicates and gambling. The main requirements, however, are delineated in what are known as the Five Pillars of Islam.
The first pillar is the profession of belief required of all Muslims, the shahadah. This creed of Islam is extremely simple: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” All it takes to become a Muslim is to publicly recite that phrase with sincerity of heart. The second pillar is prayer five times a day. (You’re probably familiar with the scene of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people kneeling together in prayer—a powerful and binding ritual for Muslims.) The third pillar is charity. Giving 2 percent of your profit to help those who are less fortunate is a fundamental act of mercy. The fourth pillar is observing the holy month of Ramadan, which includes fasting from food and drink from sunup to sundown. And the fifth pillar is the requirement of a pilgrimage to Mecca once in the Muslim’s lifetime.
Part of the appeal of Islam is how straightforward it is. No matter what country you come from, whether you are Arab or Indonesian or African-American, to become a Muslim, you begin by reciting the simple creed: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” and agree to a set of specific, concrete rules. It is a form of religion that many seek.
One day Jesus was asked, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” (John 6:28). It’s likely that each person in the crowd was hoping to get a short list of rules, perhaps something akin to the five pillars. “Lay it on the line, Jesus, and I’ll hop right to it. God wants it; He’ll get it. He’ll be pleased, and I’ll be justified.” But Jesus looked at the people and said, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent” (John 6:29). Amazing. Unexpected. Simple, but powerful. According to Jesus, God is looking for something much more than a lifestyle based on law. He is looking for a faith relationship out of which come not merely conformity of behavior, but spiritual character and connection with divine power. This is how a human life tainted by sin is cleansed and reshaped. Life ethics are shaped by the power of faith relationship.
Over the centuries, Islam spread well beyond Arabia. Much of that 1,400 years has been a history of war. A conviction that has been called a “sixth pillar” of Islam is jihad, which means “exertion or struggle.” Sometimes Muslims have thought of jihad as the struggle for true religion in a chaotic world, and sometimes jihad has meant a holy war—the taking up of arms in a just cause.
For obvious reasons, people today want to understand the global conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims. We look at the World Trade Center tragedy and other terrorist acts and we ask ourselves, How can these things possibly be? We know that these were not the attacks of all Muslims, but they were the acts of some Muslims.
Samuel P. Huntington is a professor at Harvard University and the author of a fascinating book called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, written before September 11. Huntington says that the causes of contemporary Muslim wars lie in politics, not seventh-century religious doctrines. He gives several reasons for the rise of radical Islam in the modern world:
- There’s a resurgence of Islamic consciousness, movements and identity, a response to modernization and globalization and secularization.
- Throughout the Muslim world, there is a sense of grievance, resentment and hostility toward the West and its wealth, power and culture, prompted by Western domination of the Muslim world for much of the twentieth century.
- There are bitter divisions within the Muslim world—tribal, religious, ethnic, political and cultural—and there is no single dominating Muslim state today.
- High birthrates in Muslim countries have produced an explosion of youths, particularly males between 16 and 30 years old who may be educated or uneducated but are unemployed. They are the ones joining radical organizations like guerilla groups and terrorist networks. Young males are the principal perpetrators of violence in all societies, and they exist in abundant numbers in Muslim societies.3
Could all of this become a war between civilizations, not just one country against another country or even one ideology against another ideology—whole civilizations set against each other? This is the desired goal of people like Osama bin Laden, although one of the things preventing such a development today is that Islam is not united. There are many different factions. The sobering fact is that radical Islam includes not just a few thousand terrorists, but tens of millions of Muslims. Newsweek reported:
If we recognize that the underlying struggle is not just with actual terrorists but with radical Islamists who see the world as a Manichaean struggle of believers and nonbelievers, then we are not talking about a small and isolated group of fanatics. Osama bin Laden has evoked substantial sympathy throughout the Muslim world since September 11 for standing up to the United States, from slum dwellers in Karachi to professionals in Beirut and Cairo, to Pakistani and Algerian citizens in Britain and France. The Middle East specialist Daniel Pipes estimates this radicalized population to be some 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim world.4
So what do we learn when we compare Islam, which has some interest in Jesus, with the historic Christian view of Jesus? In Christianity, of central importance is the fact that Jesus Christ is the speech of God. The New Testament book of Hebrews begins with this statement:
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe (1:1-2).
In Islam, the Koran is centrally important, because it is believed to be the recitation of God. The Bible, on the other hand, describes Jesus as the speech of God, the Word of God. Many people have observed, in fact, that Jesus is to Christianity what the Koran is to Islam. The difference, of course, is that Jesus is a living Word of God—God Himself—speaking to humanity with a clarity and brilliance and depth and character and beauty that is unlike what any other religious theory in the world has conceived.
Christians believe that God has been speaking throughout human history. Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and many others delivered diverse messages of God. God spoke through the poetry of the psalms and the oracles of the prophets, on Mount Sinai and even in historical events themselves. But in these last days, something different has happened. The Son of God has spoken—and so God has spoken. God’s speech through the prophets is an amazing thing. The fact that He spoke at many times and in many different ways is all the more amazing. But when the very Son of God came, God’s revelation became personal and direct.
In Islam, Jesus is held in high regard. He is seen as a prophet, as born of a virgin and as the Messiah, but not as the Son of God, not God incarnate. The Koran teaches that “it is not worthy of God that He should take a son” (19:92). It would drag God down to speak of Him as the father of anybody—of Jesus or of us. Muhammad was exposed to Christians in Arabia early in his life, but he said some really strange things about their beliefs. For example, the idea that Christians worship a Trinity consisting of the Father, the Virgin Mary (to whom the Father was married) and the Son, Jesus (5:116). This is a convoluted representation of Christianity that Muhammad rejected. It’s possible that he may have met some people who considered themselves Christians who had terribly warped beliefs.
In contrast to the Koran, the New Testament portrays Jesus as the Son of God in a unique sense and says that we are invited by God to be His children by faith, to view Him as a loving and powerful Father and to address Him as such.
Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus “is the radiance of God’s glory.” That means that the very essence of God’s being shines through Jesus, because He belongs to that being. As surely as you cannot separate the sun from its rays, we cannot separate God the Father from the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the “exact representation of [God’s] being” (Heb. 1:3). The Greek word used in this phrase means “character” or “stamp,” and it suggests the impression made by a die. A stamp leaves in what is stamped an exact duplicate of the stamp itself. That is why Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) and “Believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1, NRSV). It is the very reason why we can have confidence that we can know God. In the past, God used prophets, but now He has spoken to us in the Person of His Son.
Hebrews 1:3 goes on to say that Jesus “provided purification for sins.” Chapter 2 verse 10 tells us that Jesus is the author of our salvation because of His suffering, and chapter 2 verse 14 says that Jesus destroyed the power of death and the devil, and freed “those who . . . were held in slavery by their fear of death.” Although Islam regards Jesus as a prophet, it does not view Him as the Savior. He does not atone for sins—you alone must pay for your sins. Furthermore, the Koran says Jesus was not crucified, but somebody was mistakenly crucified in a case of mistaken identity (4:157). And if Jesus didn’t die, then there is no resurrection either.
Hebrews 1:8-13 also clearly describes Jesus as the Lord of heaven and Earth. The Lord Jesus was there when the foundations of the earth were laid, He rules over His enemies, and His throne lasts forever and ever.
In Islam, Jesus is a prophet in a long line of ascending prophets, beginning with Adam and going through Abraham, then the great prophet Moses, then the greater Jesus and finally the greatest and final prophet, Muhammad (the “seal of the prophets,” according to Koran 33:40). Hence the creed of Islam, which is recited five times a day, every day, by devout Muslims: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
But in the Christian faith, Jesus is the Creator and Lord of a people who are gathered together at the foot of His cross in thanksgiving for forgiveness and cleansing. Jesus knows how far short we have all fallen, yet He loved us enough to give His life for us, paying a price we couldn’t pay ourselves. He points to life, not death and conquest.
Because of the empty tomb, His followers believe that their Lord is still on the loose.
This article was taken from I Want To Believe: Finding Your Way in an Age of Many Faiths (Regal) by Mel Lawrenz
Notes:
- Charles Colson, Tough Questions About God, Faith, and Life (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2006), p. 208.
- Nick Wyck, “Muhammad—The Most Popular Name in the World?” TimesOnline, January 23, 2007. http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/book_of_names/article1183264.ece (accessed June 2007).
- Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 263-265.
Francis Fukuyama, “Their Target: The Modern World,” Newsweek, December 17, 2001, p. 42.
