THERE COMES a time in a nation’s history—and there comes a time in the church—when spiritual fog and religious deception must be removed by a clear, unbiased, passionate pursuit of truth.
America and the church are now in a spiritual fog over the issue of Islam. As mosques appear across the nation from city to city, people are asking, “What do I need to know about Islam?” Islam, once an obscure Middle Eastern religion, has rapidly grown into the second largest religion in the world. There are now more Muslims in the United States than there are members of the Assemblies of God. The population of Iran is approximately 99 percent Muslim, of which approximately 89 percent are Shi’a and 10 percent are Sunni.1
What attraction does Islam hold for its followers? What part does it play in shaping the attitudes of nearly one billion people around the world?
On 9/11, when the Islamic terrorists flew their hijacked airliners into the twin towers and the Pentagon, Americans discovered we were at war—a world war against fanatical Islamic terrorists who believe that killing Americans and Jews is the will of Muhammad the Prophet—and the will of God, called Allah. In war, when one side understands that it is at war and the other side thinks that its adversaries are apostles of peace, which side has the advantage?
One of the first questions we must answer is this: are those who follow the teachings of Muhammad, as found in the Quran, peaceful or violent?
America awakened on 9/11 to horrific scenes on TV of passenger planes deliberately crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Stunned disbelief gave way to grief—grief for thousands of children who would go to sleep that night without a father or mother. Grief for heroic firemen and policemen who dashed into the burning towers to save lives—and stepped into eternity into the arms of God. While we grieved, Palestinians danced for joy in the West Bank!
Who would do such a thing? Why would they do it? They were all Islamics who practiced the teachings of the Quran. Islam not only condones violence; it commands it. A tree is known by its fruit! The fruit of Islam is fourteen hundred years of violence and bloodshed around the world.
What are Muslims taught to do to the people who resist Islam? The Quran teaches:
Fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every strategem (of war).
—SURAH 9:5
The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.
—SURAH 5:33
In America, cutting off someone’s hand or feet because he would not accept your religion is unthinkable—but the Islamic Bible commands it. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared: “The purest joy in Islam is to kill and to be killed for Allah.”2 Is that fanaticism—or simply being faithful to the Islamic Bible?
Muhammad, the founder of Islam, slaughtered thousands of people in establishing and spreading Islam. He told his followers: “Who relinquishes his faith, kill him. I have been ordered by Allah to fight with people till they testify there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”
One of the most significant questions being asked in Washington and around the world today is this: Why is it that the Jews and the Arabs can’t get together in their disputing over the city of Jerusalem? In this chapter I will show you some of the answers. The most important reason Jews and Arabs cannot get together is not land, money, or history. The reason for the continual conflict over the city of Jerusalem is theology.
Many Arabs are Islamic fundamentalists, and they believe that Muhammad is the true prophet of Allah. Their Quran is the absolute truth—it supercedes the Bible. Muhammad supercedes Christ. An infidel (a Christian or Jew) has one choice and only one in the Islamic faith—convert or be killed.
Muhammad’s life can be divided into two parts—the tolerant years in Mecca and the aggressive years in Medina. The Quran reflects those two parts, and that is why at times someone will point out a teaching in the Quran that seems to indicate that Islam teaches its adherents to live at peace with their enemies. When Muhammad began to preach his revelations from Allah to the people, he believed that a peaceful religion was a good strategy for attracting people, especially the Jewish people, to the teachings of Islam.3
When Muhammad saw that his attempts to win over the Jews through peaceful coexistence were not successful, he “launched a new strategy, a strategy based on power. This is when he declared jihad (holy war) and went out to convert nonbelievers to Islam by the sword.”4 Muslims today are taught to interpret the Quran through a principle of progressive revelation known as nasikh. Any contradiction in the Quran is solved by using the newest revelation. If anyone denies the continuing revelation of Allah to Muhammad, they are denying Islam itself.5
We have arrived at a defining moment, when truth could conquer deception if the world would recognize that the Islamic terrorists are not fanatics—but devout followers of Muhammad who are following his example and doing what their Islamic Bible teaches them to do.
One of these devout followers of Muhammad, Indonesian jihad leader Abu Bakar Bashir, told Scott Atran of the First Post this chilling message: “Islam can’t be ruled by others. Allah’s laws must stand above human law. There is no [example] of Islam and infidels, the right and the wrong, living together in peace.”6 When asked what the West could do to make the world more peaceful, Bashir responded by saying, “They have to stop fighting Islam. That’s impossible because it is sunnatullah [destiny, a law of nature], as Allah has said in the Koran. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam.”7
Yet, shortly after the events of 9/11, Oprah Winfrey devoted a program to what she called “Islam 101,” professing it to be a crash course in the Islamic faith for her vast television audience of clueless Americans. Rod Dreher, columnist for the New York Post, said of that telecast: “It was grossly imbalanced and extremely dishonest. In fact, given how many Christians and other non-Muslims are horrifically persecuted today by Muslims in the name of Islam, it amounted to offensive propaganda.”8
Dreher continued by saying:
Oprah called Islam “the most misunderstood of the three major religions.” Yet she did her best to add to the confusion by candy-coating the complicated truth about the Muslim faith. If you were to take Oprah’s show as your guide to Islam, you would think Muslims were basically the Episcopalians in veils and turbans.9
In his 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard University’s Samuel P. Huntington warned Americans about deluding themselves concerning the true nature of the Islamic threat: “Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam, but only with violent Islamic extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”10
We can sit around making diversity quilts and thinking happy thoughts, or we can, with charity, commit ourselves to soberly assess the historical and present-day reality of the absolute commitment of Islam to violence, to murder, and to terror toward anyone who rejects their faith.
Several years ago, Steven Emerson produced for PBS an excellent video titled Jihad in America. Its cameras went directly inside Islamic cell groups associated with mosques here in America where eager young Muslims were being recruited for holy war against the United States. Muslim leaders were shown giving speeches about bringing America to its knees through terrorism, and they made cold-blooded statements such as the following from Fayiz Azzam in Brooklyn in 1989: “Blood must flow. There must be widows, orphans…hands and limbs must be severed and limbs and blood must be spread everywhere in order that Allah’s religion can stand on its feet.”11
Is this peaceful? Does this promote brotherhood?
Many people believe today that because the world’s three major religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—came from the same roots, there is no reason why the three religions cannot exist side by side today in peace. But Islam follows a theology of triumphalism—“the dominance of one’s nation, ideology, or religious creed over another.” Islam teaches that Muhammad superceded the patriarchs and Christ. To a Muslim, it is Allah’s will for Islam to rule the world. The word Islam does not mean peace—it means submission. Their objective is for everyone to be in submission to them.
That’s the reason the Islamic prayer tower is the highest point in every city. It must have a position of physical supremacy. That’s the reason for the impasse between Palestinians and Jews over the city of Jerusalem. Sitting in the throat of all Islamic nations is Israel—with an unconditional blood covenant from the throne of God that has given to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the land of Israel forever. God didn’t loan the land of Israel to the Jews; He gave it to them.
And that flies in the face of Islam. Islam believes the prophet Muhammad taught absolute truth—that it is God’s (Allah) will for them to rule the earth. Therefore, if Islam does not defeat Israel, Muhammad and the Quran were wrong—and that’s absolutely unthinkable to them. Therefore, they must defeat Israel. Oh, they may agree to sign a peace accord, but if they do, it will be one that is good for only seven years, and it will only be for the purpose of redeveloping their army for the destruction of Israel. If Israel survives, then Islamic theology is not true.
The real difference between the two religions, however, lies in their basis for belief. Judaism is based on the unique historical event of a divine revelation experienced by the entire nation, whereas Islam is based on the prophetic claims of a single individual who subsequently convinced others to follow his ways.12
Sayyid Qutb, the leading twentieth-century theoretician of Islamic fundamentalism, believed, “Humanity is standing at the brink of an abyss, not because of the threat of annihilation hanging over its head—for this is just a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself—but because humanity is bankrupt in the realm of values, those values which foster true human progress and development.”13
While this is a symptom of modern society that nearly all Christians would agree with, they would not agree with the solution according to Sayyid Qutb. He believes only the Quran provides for Allah’s values, and he believes that Muslims can and should impose those values on the world. Any society “not dedicated to servitude to Allah alone and does not embody this servitude in its worldview and beliefs, its rituals and in its laws”14 is, in Qutb’s view, illegitimate. Thus any society that does not follow Islamic law as he defined it (and he wrote an eight-volume exegesis of the Quran) is, according to Qutb, morally perverse.15
In contrast to Islam, the Jewish beliefs and traditions are associated specifically with the Jewish people. Judaism strongly opposes forced conversions of other nations. The Old Testament Torah delineates the land of Israel where the Jewish people lived. Israel does not seek expansion beyond the land of Israel. Israel has withdrawn its army from territories captured after each war (for example, giving up all of the Sinai Peninsula).
The use of Islamic religion to encourage suicide bombers with the promise of heavenly life with virgins illustrates the great gap between Islam and Jewish beliefs. The Hebrew Bible prohibits killing in the Ten Commandments and completely rejects and deplores suicide. But Judaism also states, “If one comes to slay you, slay him first.” This phrase is a relevant moral guide for dealing with the modern-day terrorists.16
The teachings of the Quran insist that no matter how mighty a nation is, it must be fought until it embraces Islam. (See Surah 9:5, as quoted earlier.) Secular America does not understand radical Islam, which is increasingly embraced with the destruction of America in mind. The growing number of extremists who take the Quran as a declaration of war against America and Israel has become a clear and present danger.
Islamic fundamentalists believe the Quran teaches them not to befriend Jews and Christians. Surah 5:51 states:
O you who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them.
We have reached a theological impasse between these three religions. For a Muslim, Muhammad is the only absolute truth. It is unthinkable that he was wrong, and because Israel would not adhere to the teaching of Muhammad and convert to Islam, Israel must be defeated. Muhammad is the one who made war against Israel holy! If Israel survives, then Islam would be wrong, a failure, and that is an unthinkable position.
Today, jihad, or holy war, is the world’s foremost source of terrorism, inspiring a worldwide campaign of violence by self-proclaimed jihadist groups, including Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network. Al-Qaeda has published a book, The 39 Principles of Jihad, through its Web site network that teaches terrorists how to plan and carry out the Islamic holy war of jihad. Recently exposed in a private study by Israeli researcher Colonel Jonathan D. Halevi, this book contains explicit “how-to” instructions for everything from “Performing Electronic Jihad” to “Expressing Hostility and Hatred Toward Infidels.”17
Another terrorist agency is the Islamic Jihad, one of the most complex and dangerous of the Arab terrorist organizations. According to a special report by Boaz Ganor:
These groups generally act on their own initiative without coordination, sometimes even within the same country. All these groups share a fundamentalist Islamic ideology that espouses holy war…against the infidels, and which is under the powerful ideological-religious influence of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Iranian regime and the Islamic Jihad groups collaborate closely at times. Some groups not only receive aid and guidance from Iran but also enjoy generous support from other Arab and Islamic countries such as Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf oil states. They also cooperate extensively with diverse Palestinian organizations.
The Islamic Jihad aspires to overthrow secular Arab regimes in order to establish an Islamic pan Arab empire. The Jihad is unique among the Islamic movements, however, in that it views war against the Jews and Israel (“the spearhead of the West and imperialism in the region”) as an initial, essential step toward fulfilling the goals of Islam. According to the Islamic Jihad, the only way to resolve the conflict with the Jews in Palestine is by direct violent confrontation. In 1990, one of the organization’s leaders—Sheikh Tamimi (author of a 1982 booklet called “The Obliteration of Israel: A Koranic Imperative”)—expressed this principle in the following words: “The Jews have to return to the countries from which they came. We shall not accede to a Jewish state on our land, even if it is only one village.”…
It was the Islamic revolution in Iran that triggered the growth of Islamic Jihad groups in the Arab countries. In the late 1970s, after establishing their status firmly in Iran itself, the Iranian fundamentalist revolutionaries began to “export” the Islamic revolution from their bastion to areas heavily populated by Shiites and to other Arab countries generally. The Islamic Revolutionary Council was established in Iran with this purpose in mind, and it was instructed to coordinate the activities of pro-Iranian organizations in the various countries. The Council dispatched activists to Arab countries where, with the help of local supporters and sermons delivered in the mosques, they worked to recruit young people into the Islamic Jihad. Some of the new recruits traveled to Iran to acquire a military-terrorist education, and then returned to establish additional cells in their own countries.18
ISLAM AND AMERICA
Let’s turn our investigation toward American Islamics. Historian Daniel Pipes, writing for Commentary magazine’s November 2001 issue, recorded the following shocking evidence concerning Islamic’s loyalty to America: “In June 1991, a convert to Islam, Siraj Wahaj, a recipient of the American Muslim community’s highest honors, had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives. On that occasion he recited from the Quran and appealed to the almighty to guide American leaders and to ‘grant them righteousness and wisdom.’”19
But the story about Siraj Wahaj did not end there. A little over a year later this same Muslim, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, “articulated a completely different message from his mild and moderate prayer given before the U.S. House of Representatives. He said, ‘If only Muslims were more clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate [Islamic leadership body].’ He concluded his remarks with these words: ‘If we were united and strong, we would elect our own leader and give allegiance to him.…Take my word, if the six or eight million Muslims in America unite, the country will come to us.’”20
This is not loyalty—it is sedition! Calling for the overthrow of the United States is resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority. In 1995, Siraj Wahaj served as a character witness for Omar Abdel Rahman at the blind Islamic terrorist’s trial, which found him guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. More alarming still, the United States Attorney in New York listed Wahaj as one of “the unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirator to blow up the twin towers in New York City in 1993.”
This is the point. This Islamic leader, selected by the U.S. House of Representatives as the award-winning model of the Islamic faith in America, is on record calling for the overthrow of the United States government. Think about that when you hear a politician or talk show host on television jabbering about Islamic loyalty to America.
ISLAM VERSUS THE TRUTH OF CHRIST
Islam and Christianity are not “sister faiths.” A side-by-side examination of the texts of the Bible and of the Quran will quickly identify some of the differences related to Islam’s teachings about Christ and the truths of our own Bible about the Son of God.
1. Islam instructs its followers to kill their enemies, but Christianity instructs its followers to love their enemies.
The Quran says to “fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them” (Surah 9:5). But our Holy Bible tells Christ’s followers to: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matt. 5:44, KJV).
2. Islam denies Christianity’s core truth—the death and resurrection of Jesus.
That they said (in boast), “We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah”;—but they did not kill him, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they did not kill him.
—SURAH 4:157
Islam says that Jesus did not die on the cross. The Bible says that Christ died on the cross and rose from the dead.
3. Islam also denies the deity of Jesus Christ.
The Jews call ‘Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the Son of Allah.…Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!
—SURAH 9:30
Not only does the Quran deny Christ’s deity—but also, as we see in the verse from the Quran above, it puts a curse on all who confess Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Islam brings Jesus Christ lower than Muhammad, making him no more than a messenger:
Christ the son of Mary was no more than a Messenger; many were the Messengers that passed away before him. His mother was a woman of truth. They had both to eat their (daily) food. See how Allah makes His Signs clear to them; yet see in what ways they are deluded away from the truth!
—SURAH 5:75
Since there are such marked differences in these areas between Islam and Christianity, we must be prepared to test the “truth” of each. History has revealed to us that the Islamic Bible, the Quran, is a collection of the revelations Muhammad said he was given by an angel, or from a voice coming down from heaven, or sometimes as a message from a dream.21 Christians are commanded to “try the spirits” to see if they are from God:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.
—1 JOHN 4:1–3
Every person who calls himself a prophet must be tested by Scripture. (See 1 Corinthians 14:29.)
Every revelation and every prophecy must be judged by the Word of God. If it is not scriptural—if it denies Jesus Christ as the Son of God—it is the spirit of the Antichrist. By applying these tests to the teachings of Muhammad, we will quickly discover that this prophet doesn’t pass the test. From Genesis to Revelation, every page of the Bible testifies of the deity of Jesus Christ. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
WHO IS “ALLAH”?
The name Allah came from an Arabic word that had to do with the worship of the moon god in pre-Islamic Arabia. “Allah” cannot be found in the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament.
Allah is not the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. According to the Bible, God is knowable! Jesus Christ came into the world that we might know God (John 17:3). God’s Word tells us that man can come into a personal relationship with God the Father. He said, “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jer. 33:3). God wants to love you…today…just as you are! “For God so loved the world that He gave…” (John 3:16). “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).
But in Islam, Allah is unknowable. He is so exalted that no man can ever personally know Allah. The Allah of the Quran is so distant, so far off, so abstract, that no one can know him. And Muslim believers can never know the love of Allah until Judgment Day when they find out if Allah loves them and will invite them into paradise. In his book Jesus and Muhammad, Mark Gabriel, a former devout Muslim, says: “If you ask a Muslim, ‘Do you know how much Allah loves you?’ he will respond, ‘I don’t know how much he loves me. Only Allah knows.’”22 He gives this example from his own life:
When I was living as a Muslim in Egypt, I was always puzzled by a little saying that the Christians used to put on their cars or frame in their shops. The phrase was Allah Mahabe, or God is love. Those two words are never put together in the Quran. I always thought, I wonder what these people are trying to say.23
The god of Islam is totally different from the God we know. The Quran tells us that the god of Islam works with Satan and demons to lead people astray in order to populate the hell he created (Surah 6:39, 126; 32:13; 43:36–37).24
When you turn to the Quran, you discover that Allah told Muhammad to kill and maim anyone who did not believe in Allah or in Muhammad his prophet. Jesus Christ never told His disciples to kill anyone. When Peter attacked the Roman soldier who came to arrest Christ and take Him to the cross, Jesus healed the soldier—a soldier who later nailed Him to the cross. That’s love!
The love relationship between Jesus and God the Father was reflected in Jesus’ relationship with His followers. Jesus told His disciples that God loved them: “The Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God” (John 16:27).
Mark Gabriel describes the differences between our God and the god of Islam with these words: “For Jesus, God is a loving father; for Muhammad, Allah is a demanding master. This description sets the tone regarding love for all their other relationships.…Allah finds new believers who will serve him better. In contrast, God the Father searches for the one lost lamb until He finds it and brings it home rejoicing. This is the difference between Allah and God.”25
ISLAM AND ISRAEL
Islam’s attitude toward the Jews is found in Surah 9:5: “Fight and slay the Pagans [Christians and Jews] wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every strategem (of war).” In Surah 5:33 we read: “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger…is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land.”
Muhammad taught a doctrine of triumphalism, meaning that it is God’s (Allah’s) will for the law of Islam to rule the world. The first step in fulfilling Muhammad’s dream is the destruction of Israel. No peace treaty will ever stop fourteen hundred years of Islamic hatred for the Jews. Israel cannot make peace until it has a partner who wants peace.
God’s policy toward the Jewish people is found in Genesis 12:3:
I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Today, the religious beliefs of Islam and Israel remain in total opposition to each other. And the front line of this religious war can be identified in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. What is the root, the fulcrum, the cornerstone of the opposition? It is the land of Israel.
For Islam, the land of Israel is “an Islamic Waqf [Holy possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.”26
In 2000, the Islamic Assembly of North America published a booklet titled No for Normalization, written by a Muslim scholar. He gave a similar picture of the Muslim view of land rights:
The Jews came and attacked this land and stole it, and this will not change the fact that this land is Muslim, and it will remain that way forever. If we aren’t able to liberate this land today from the Jews, this doesn’t mean that we can give it up. We have to work until the time comes, and then we will bring it back to the Islamic world.27
This is a religious war that Islam cannot—and must not—win. It was God Himself who gave the land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their descendants forever. Israel belongs to God and to His chosen people, the Jews. And God holds the future of Israel in His hands, and it will be a glorious future.