Responding to the promotion of Islam

Islam is being pushed to promote disunity: don't let them.

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed Islam popping up a lot in the news. It’s been happening a lot — let me give a few examples: King Charles hosted an Iftar meal at Windsor Castle a couple of weeks ago. Then, there was the first Islamic call to prayer (Adhan) at Westminster Hall:

Yesterday, I saw that the Lake District was being given a new ‘mega mosque’ — despite the fact that the town itself (Dalton-in-Furness) only had 11 Muslims according to the last census. Then, there was a character in the BBC soap The Archers embracing a fast for Ramadan. To cap it all off, the new head of Ofsted is a Muslim who encouraged girls to wear a hijab outside of school.

I’m sure there are more examples — these are simply the ones which stuck in my mind. All of this goes to show that Islam seems to be in the ascendancy at the moment in this country. Or, perhaps I should say, that certain movers and shakers among elite circles want Islam to be in the ascendancy.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we are being goaded into civil war. That turned out to be the most popular thing I’ve ever written on Substack:

We are being goaded into civil war

There, I said that Islam is not the enemy: Islam is one of the political tools used by our cultural elites who want to keep us divided. It is being used to goad us into anger and unrest, so that the elites can swoop in and grant themselves new powers to solve the problem which they themselves have created (solutions which just happen to look like exactly what they wanted to do in the first place — Digital ID, CDBC, Chinese-style social credit system, etc.)

I think people are beginning to wake up to this. A few days ago I watched Peter Whittle interviewing David Betz on the New Culture Forum. They spoke about the destruction of ‘icons’ — that is, targetting someone or something because of what they represent. Peter said (about 37m in):

If people wanted to bring about extreme anger, shall we say, this is the way to do it, isn’t it? And quite often it almost looks like the government is, kind of, just, egging it on…

Quite so! I’m glad that he is beginning to realise. It’s getting so obvious now — earlier on I watched a video by David Wood about Two-Tier Kier and ‘Islamophobia’. The hypocrisy is so naked that the only explanation is either that Starmer and his cronies are stupid or ideologically captured (which some of them surely are), OR that it’s being done intentionally.

However, recognising that it’s being done intentionally doesn’t necessarily help us to respond. Obviously Islam does call for some response, but not the response the government want us to make. What I’d like to do here, briefly, is outline what such a response might look like, using some points from a book by David Garrison.

A wind in the house of Islam

A few years ago, David Garrison published a book called A Wind in the House of Islam. That book begins:

A wind is blowing through the House of Islam. The House of Islam, Dar al-Islam in Arabic, is the name Muslims give to an invisible religious empire that stretches from West Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, encompassing 49 nations and 1.6 billion Muslims. Dwarfing the size of any previous earthly kingdom, Islam directs the spiritual affairs of nearly a quarter of the world’s population. But something is happening today that is challenging the hold that Islam exercises over its adherents. Muslim movements to Jesus Christ are taking place in numbers we’ve never before seen.

Further on he says:

In only the first 12 years of the 21st century, an additional 69 movements to Christ of at least 1,000 baptized Muslim-background believers or 100 new worshipping fellowships have appeared. These 21st-century movements are not isolated to one or two corners of the world. They are taking place throughout the House of Islam: in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Persian world, in the Arab world, in Turkestan, in South Asia and in Southeast Asia. Something is happening — something historic, something unprecedented.

He goes on to outline what is going on in those areas, or ‘rooms’, of the House of Islam. Towards the end of the book he outlines how we should respond to Islam, and he gives five barriers to a Christian response to Islam. What I’d like to do is briefly sketch these barriers and what we can learn for how we should respond.

#1: Division breeds weakness

The book says:

From the earliest years of Islam in the 7th century, Muslim armies took advantage of internal divisions within Christianity to advance the cause of Islam. When the Arab General Amr ibn al-’As led a band of 4,000 warriors into Egypt in 640, he faced overwhelming armies and massive fortresses that should have been more than adequate to defeat his desert fighters. Instead, he discovered a Christian nation that was hopelessly divided over matters of doctrine that had been elevated to irresolvable levels.

This is an excellent point. I believe the reason why Islam appears to be strong in the UK at the moment is because Islam is united, or at least appears to be, whereas Christians are dispirited and disunited.

Note: I say ‘appears to be’ because I think there are more divisions within Islam than most Westerners usually acknowledge, e.g. the difference between Sunni and Shia. There’s a lot of violence against Muslims committed by other Muslims. This is not to mention ‘Westernised’ Muslims like Hamza Yousaf or Sadiq Khan — I’m sure many conservative Muslims would be very unhappy with their support of Pride, transgender etc.

As I said before, the UK would have a problem whether there was Islam here or not. Islam didn’t create two-tier policing, it didn’t create the fruits of the sexual revolution, and so on. If we have strong churches and strong communities, then we would have nothing to fear. I think the Muslim ‘community’ only appears to be strong because the British community is even worse by comparison.

An important lesson for secular Britain is that this can only happen through the power of the gospel. The gospel can truly bring people together — not to mention converting people from other faiths or atheism. We need to unite around Jesus. I don’t mean this as a kind of meaningless platitude, but as something we need to do truly and urgently.

Over the last few years I’ve become convinced that the church in this country has a problem because it has been weakened by secularism and abandoned faith in Christ without realising it. If the church recovers its faith, and there is a spiritual revival, who knows what might happen…?

#2: Love over hate

A missionary couple who served for many years in the Muslim world were on home assignment in the U.S. for a few months and used the opportunity to speak to churches about God’s love for Muslims. After speaking in a local church, the couple accepted an invitation to lunch from one of the church deacons. On the way to the restaurant, the deacon spoke candidly, “I hear what you’re saying,” he said, “about how God loves the Muslims and all, but let me be honest: I think we should just bomb them all.”

I don’t know about you, but I think this is absolutely shocking coming from the deacon of a church. At the same time, this is exactly the attitude the powers that be are trying to promote. Don’t see Muslims as people, don’t try to understand, don’t try to offer them the gospel message — just respond with hatred and violence.

If we hate Muslims, the PsyOp is working and the elites are winning. Instead, we need to do what Jesus did — to love even our enemies, to pray for them to repent and turn to Christ. For example, we often hear about the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. It is utterly scandalous that the police and the authorities could have allowed this to continue for so long. At the same time, the men who committed these terrible acts will one day have to face the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. They will need to face the judgement seat of Christ — and they will face eternal destruction.

If our Christian faith means anything, it means that we must love those who do these terrible things and pray for their repentance. As the book continues:

Muslims are neither a religion nor an ideology: they are individuals in need of a Savior, individuals for whom Christ died.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore justice in the here and now — those who commit these heinous acts should be punished for it. However, we mustn’t give in to the temptation to see Muslims, or any group for that matter, as beyond the pale. They are as much in need of God’s grace and mercy as any of us.

#3: Don’t imitate Islam

One of the problems when facing a group of people who seem to be aggressive and harsh is to respond like for like. This is a grave mistake. Let me quote again:

When we find ourselves threatened, though, we are tempted to follow the path that Muhammad charted: legalistic answers for every aspect of life and violent reactions to those we perceive to be our enemies. When we succumb to those tendencies, we may become more like the Muslims we fear than like the Christ who promised us his power and presence.

I believe the elites are gambling on us reacting to provocation with violence and aggression. But if we do, we will become just like the jihadists. This is not the Christian way. The Christian way is to trust in the power of Christ to change us and transform the world. Christianity conquered the Western world not by might and power — unlike Islam, ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’ — but simply by sharing the good news of the gospel.

Rodney Stark showed in his book The Rise of Christianity that Christianity grew by about 40% per decade from about 40-300AD (detailed in this blog post by Ian Paul). In 40AD, there were only about .0017% of Christians in the empire. By 350AD, there were more than 50%. A 40% growth rate might seem extraordinary, but that’s a growth of about 3.5% per year. Christianity transformed the Roman empire simply by doing what Christians do. They didn’t need to conquer enemies by fighting!

#4: Don’t ignore injustice

If there are people struggling under injustices, it is possible (even easy) to win them over by promising to end those injustices:

Injustices perpetrated or simply tolerated by Christians persist today, and Muslims are not slow to identify these inroads, while offering Islam as the solution. On the contrary, when Christians are proactive and move to combat social injustice, both at home and abroad, we inoculate our communities against Islamic incursions. And more importantly, we honor the cause of Christ. In the same way, many of the Muslim movements to Christ we are witnessing today have occured because of unaddressed injustices that have been ignored within the House of Islam, prompting Muslims to find refuge and justice in the person of Christ.

It’s important to remember that we are all human, made in the image of God, and therefore we all have a sense of justice and righteousness. If we really love and care about people — and we should — then we should care about victims of injustice. As it says in Proverbs:

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.
Proverbs 31:8-9

What might that look like when it comes to Islam? One of the factors which Rodney Stark mentions in the growth of Christianity was how Christianity treated women. Christians stood out as different to a pagan culture. I think we could see a similar contrast with Islam. Do you think many Muslim women like wearing the hijab, worshipping separately from the men, and so on? As I said in last week’s podcast, the side that wins the culture war will be the side that learns to treat women well.

Hating women is killing society

Furthermore, I believe the Western world needs to publicly confess and repent of its role in 9/11, 7/7 and so on. This is why I believe it’s important for me to speak about these things: I do not believe we will be able to move on until we can publicly confess that the role of Western authorities in perpetrating these attacks. Part of the solution is people waking up and realising the truth, that the truth of these events is very different to how they were portrayed to us in the media. These things are a deep injustice which has been inflicted by Western authorities on the Islamic community, and if we want to make progress we need to repent and confess our sins.

#5: Don’t be ignorant

One final quote from the book:

Most Christians admit to knowing little about Islam or the ways God is at work in their world to reach Muslims. Too may others simply don’t care.

This is, I hope, one which should be obvious. It’s always better to engage from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance. When I was at Bible college, I remember a speaker called Jay Smith coming in to talk about engaging with Muslims. His way of engaging with Muslims was to engage on their turf, e.g. to make the point that the Koran says that Jesus will return at the end of time. He was very well-versed in the Koran and could debate Muslims with what it actually said.

I don’t think we necessarily need to become experts in the Koran like Jay, but it’s certainly worthwhile gaining some familiarity with Islam and what Muslims believe. If nothing else, we need to see Muslims as people, rather than seeing them as an ideology.

Christ is Lord

Above all, we need to remember that Christ is Lord over all. Christ is the one by whom and for whom everything exists, and we live for him (1 Corinthians 8:6). Whatever the truth is about Islam and Western governments, the only solution we have is Jesus Christ.

Like I said above, ‘Christ is Lord’ is not some platitude but the building block of the whole universe. If we take refuge in him, and stand firm in him, then he will not abandon us.

We rest on thee, our Shield and our Defender!
Thine is the battle, thine shall be the praise;
when passing through the gates of pearly splendor,
victors, we rest with thee, through endless days.

If you appreciate Sacred Musings, you can help me out in a few ways: 1. Becoming a subscriber - free or paid; 2. Sharing Sacred Musings on social media or with anyone you think might like it; 3. If you’d like to contribute to help keep this running but becoming a paid subscriber is not the right option for you right now, you can give one-off via PayPal. Thank you so much!