For 21 months now, Americans have been engaged in a crash course on Islam, its geography and its followers. ..Yet there is one group that has been thinking—passionately—about Muslims for more than a decade.
They have been thinking about them, but only to convert them. They don’t know a thing about them.
Imagine a group of Christian missionaries in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or Tel Aviv, Israel converting Hasids.s Or imagine a group of Islamic missionaries travelling North Dakota, bearing their most precious gift, the Holy Qur’an. Or Would you be saying that those people “mean well?” no matter how much money or labor they brought? No. You’d be very suspicious of them. And rightly so.
...some familiar with the Middle East have begun asking whether the missionaries, who love Muslims but despise Islam, are the sort of nonappointed goodwill ambassadors the U.S. really needs in a region dense with the rhetoric of holy war.
This is specious reasoning identical to Senator Rick Santorum’s “distinction” between homosexuals and homosexual acts. It is a meaningless distinction. Islam is their religion and they have every right to practice it and not be bothered by people so ignorant of Islam that they resort to empty rationalizations to disguise their intrusiveness.
This is an utterly false analogy. A true analogy would be a man like the Ayatollah Khomeini standing outside Jerry Falwell’s church in Lynchburg, Va, and during Christmas week, exhorting Falwell’s flock to convert to Islam.
[Josh] enjoys sharing Christ with cabbies, in part because their English is better than his beginner's Arabic.
He’d be better off listening to the cabbies explain Islam and work on making his Arabic better.
[Josh says,] "I pray that as they go to mosque, Jesus would somehow be revealed to them. I pray against that callÑthat it would not affect their souls." He prays he may help lift "this totally oppressive spiritual atmosphere."
He almost certainly is confusing Islam with an Islamist government. Since he doesn’t know even enough Arabic to speak to cabbies, and has probably never read the Qur’an, how can he possibly know that there is a “totally oppressive spiritual atmosphere.”
Rare is the conservative Protestant church that doesn't send its teens off on short-term mission trips or play host to a stream of missionaries on home leave, their stories full of exotic places and changed hearts.
Whose hearts changed? Not the missionaries’. Did these young people learn anything beyond a smattering of Arabic? Did they view the countries they were visiting as opportunities for personal growth and education? I don’t think so. No matter how “nice,” the cultural and spiritual arrogance of thesse missionaries is breathtaking.
No. You can believe exactly as she does and leave others alone. Matthew 6:6 “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. “ Also see 2 Chronicles 18:23-24, and nearly identical passage in 1 Kings 22:24-25.
[Luis Bush] "Put on the full armor of God and fight with the weapons of spiritual warfare." (He has emphasized to Time that he did not mean military action.)
I see no difference in what he is saying and the Islamic concept of jihad. This should have been pointed out.
Absolutely true and completely ripped out of the context of Islam, which even a beginner to Islamic studies can spot. For one thing, again the author confuses Islamism for Islam, conflating sharia with the religion (sharia is not one of the Five Pillars) which is the equivalent of confusing the laws governing the Holy Roman Empire with Christianity.
But far more importantly, since this is virtually the only description of the tenets of Islam or Islamism (all of which in this article, by the way, are negative), the impression one takes away is that Islam must be a cruel religion, intolerant of dissent, and intrinsically beholden to a violent ideology. That is just not so.
Indeed, it is a fact that of the three "Religions of the Book" - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the only religion that preaches tolerance of other faiths and goes so far as to name those faiths in its holiest scripture is Islam . This happens not once, or even twice, in the Qur'an, but many times.
(Of course, the issue of “tolerance” in Islam is very complex. The point is that the view of Islam that one draws from Time’s article is heavily biased against Islam, ignorant of its basic tenets, and unintentionally crosses the line into outright bigotry.)
At a small Tennessee Bible church, a mission facilitator assured his listeners that "if you're a native speaker and can fog up a mirror, you can teach" English abroad.
In other words, there’s no reason to know a thing about the people you’re teaching.
There seems to be only token interest in “sharing Muhammed.” He’s not even on the sharing radar. Nor does anyone, including the author of the article, have any awareness that both Moses and Jesus are important prophets in Islam.
Mercer and Curry: "We believe the Afghans—like all people—should at least have the opportunity to hear about the teachings of Christ if they choose."
This is an opportunity similar people wish to deny to the students of U of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, when the holy teachings are those of Muhammed. The protests were loud and ugly.
So now overall Muslim perception of Americans is that they are either libertines or fanatics bent on converting the world. Great.
dawn's Rich Haynie says that to the extent that the Allied bombardment induced Muslims to question their god, "we could say that the war was a ripeness moment."
Let's ignore the ugly, Un-Christian sentiments of Rich Haynie but look at the whole sentence.
What's this "their god" stuff about? “Allah” is simply the arabic word for “God”. As Karen Armstrong says in her short history of Islam, Christians in Arabic countries pray to “Allah” in church.
In other words, Muslims and Rich Haynie both worship Allah. They both worship God. They all worship Dios, Dieu, Adonai, Pater, and the thousands of different names “God” has in thousands of different languages.
The conception of God in the Qur'an is, in many ways, identical to the conception of God in the New Testament. Certainly, in many ways it is different. But the conception of God in the Hebrew Bible also differs from the New Testabment.
If you use the phrase “their god” to describe the Deity of the Muslims, then logic compels you to also do so when describing the Deity of the Jews. But at the core, all three religions worship the same God. There are so many similarities between them that it is wildly wrong, in fact it is a textbook example of unconscious bigotry to talk about "Allah" as "their god" with a lower case "g" . This simply must be corrected: it is language used, not by an interview subject, but by Time Magazine itself.
They are far better informed and more actively concerned than the average American citizen about the Islamic world's material needs, and their desire to share Christ springs in the main from a similarly generous impulse.
They are, apparently, completely uninformed about the spiritual world of Islam, and think it is irrelevant.
Government officials admit the existence of a few "cowboys," but by and large, says one, missionaries "are often helping people, and not simply because they want to convert them," and Muslims are happy for the aid.
Where in this article do we hear from all those happy Muslims?
Tristero, June 24, 2003