Islam

The billionaire Elon Musk has recently been invoking Christianity as he discusses core beliefs. Raised Anglican in South Africa, young Musk got an early taste of differing religious views attending a Jewish preschool. “I was just singing ‘Hava Nagila’ one day and `Jesus, I Love You’ the next,” he jokes.

As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.

“The answer is the easy part,” Musk said during a public event. “The question is the hard part.”

Recent tweets have included: “Jesus taught love, kindness, and forgiveness. I used to think that turning the other cheek was weak & foolish, but I was the fool for not appreciating its profound wisdom.”

And: “While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise.”

Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”

Many American Christians believe they can achieve Christ's kingdom on earth through political means, by dominating the culture. Author Tim Alberta, in his 2023 book The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age Of Extremism, attempts to get to the core of the issues involved.

He spoke to Pastor Brian Zahnd of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. Zahnd told him:

Christianity is inherently countercultural. That's how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it's a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.

Tim Alberta elaborates:

The Bible, as Zahnd pointed out, is written primarily from the perspective of the underdog: Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt, Jews exiled to Babylon, Christians living under Roman occupation. This is why Paul implored his fellow first-century believers - especially those in Rome who lived under a brutal regime - to both submit to their governing authorities and stay loyal to the kingdom built by Christ. It stands to reason that American evangelicals can't quite relate to Paul and his pleas for humility, or Peter and his enthusiasm for suffering, never mind that poor vagrant preacher from Nazareth. The last shall be first? What kind of socialist indoctrination is that?

Pastor Zahnd considers that the kingdom of God isn't tangible for many Christians: "What's real is this tawdry world of partisan politics, this winner-take-all blood sport. So, they keep charging into the fray, and the temptation to bow down to the devil to gain control over the kingdoms of this world becomes more and more irresistible."

Alberta concludes:

Pastor Zahnd told me he was offended by what the American Church had become. God does not tolerate idols competing for His glory and neither should anyone who claims to worship Him. He said, “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus. You have to choose.”

Controversial activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali became well known when she published her 2007 memoir Infidel, which was an account of her life as a Muslim woman and her fight against radical Islam. She made headlines worldwide when she converted to atheism, receiving numerous death threats. In November 2023, she announced her conversion to Christianity. Her reasons address in part what is happening in the world today. She writes:

Atheists were wrong when they said rejection of God would usher in a new age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the 'God hole'—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational, quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action. This is mostly by engaging in virtue-signaling theater on behalf of a victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.'

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We can’t withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage, and mobilize the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilization will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some New Age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

In Iran, Anooshavan Avedian, an Iranian Armenian pastor, started the 10-year prison sentence he received last year for “propaganda contrary to and disturbing to the holy religion of Islam.”

Avedian was arrested while leading a worship service in a Tehran home in 2020. The Assemblies of God meeting place was shut down 10 years ago for holding services in Farsi. Iranian security forces have arrested thousands of Christians in the past few years.

Editor’s Note: Worldwide persecution of Christians is rising. In a 2024 listing of the top countries which persecute Christians, Iran is #9. The complete 2024 top 10 list is: North Korea (No. 1), Somalia (No. 2), Libya (No. 3), Eritrea (No. 4), Yemen (No. 5), Nigeria (No. 6), Pakistan (No. 7), Sudan (No. 8), Iran (No. 9), and Afghanistan (No. 10).

You can view the full report here.

In his memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri tells the gripping story of his mother’s conversion from a devout Muslim background to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. She gave up wealth and social status, eventually being forced to flee from Iran under a death threat. But she was willing to pay the price. Nayeri writes about one example of her costly faith:

One time she hung a little cross necklace from the rearview mirror of her car, which was probably a reckless thing to do. ... My mom was like that. One day after work, she went to her car, and there was a note stuck to the windshield. It said, “Madame Doctor, if we see this cross again, we will kill you.”

To my dad, [who is not a Christian], this is the kind of story that proves his point. That my mom was picking a fight. That she could’ve lived quietly and saved everyone the heartaches that would come. If she had kept her head down. If she stopped telling people. If she pretended just a few holidays a year, that nothing had changed. She could still have everything.

My mom took the cross down that day. Then she got a cross so big it blocked half the windshield, and she put it up. Why would anybody live with their head down? Besides, the only way to stop believing something is to deny it yourself. To hide it. To act as if it hasn’t changed your life.

Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing? It’s a tough question, because most people haven’t picked anything worthwhile.

Best-selling Muslim author and renowned critic of Islam, Irshad Manji shook the religious world with her ground-breaking and highly acclaimed book The Trouble with Islam Today. Translated into more than 30 languages, Manji writes about the lack of inquiry and freedom of thought and speech that pervades across the entire Islamic world.

In 1972, her devout Muslim family immigrated from East Africa to a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, when she was four-years-old. She writes that she came to believe in the basic dignity of every individual not from Islam, but "It was the democratic environment to which my family and I migrated." A couple of years later, her always frugal parents enrolled her in free baby-sitting services at a Baptist church when her mom left the house to sell Avon products door-to-door.

There the lady who supervised Bible study showed me and my older sister the same patience she displayed with her own son. She made me believe my questions were worth asking. The questions I posed as a seven-year-old were simple ones: Where did Jesus come from? When did he live? Who did he marry? These queries didn't put anyone on the spot, but my point is that the act of asking always met with an inviting smile.

She cites another example at her junior high school and her evangelical Christian vice-principal.

[The majority of students] lobbied for school shorts that revealed more leg than our vice-principal thought reasonable. After a heated debate with us, he okayed the shorts, bristling but still respecting popular will. How many Muslim evangelicals do you know who tolerate the expression of viewpoints that distress their souls?

Of course, my vice-principal had to bite his tongue in the public school system, but such a system can only emerge from a consensus that people of different faiths, backgrounds, and stations ought to tussle together. How many Muslim countries tolerate such tussle? I look back now and thank God I wound up in a world where the Quran didn't have to be my first and only book.

In a CT magazine testimony, Damon Richardson shares why he left the Nation of Islam to follow Christ:

The year I was born, my father was in prison. During his incarceration, he officially became a member of the Nation of Islam, joining a growing number of African American men for whom the nation signified community, identity, reform, and dignity.

The element of my upbringing that left the deepest impression was the constant indoctrination. We were drilled extensively in the nation’s core doctrines. Our understanding of God originated with Fard Muhammad’s book The Supreme Wisdom Lessons. I distinctly remember chanting, “God is a man, not a spirit or a spook; never has God been a spirit or a spook; God is a man; God is a man!”

This chant had a clear purpose: to instill certainty that God (Allah) had come to earth in the person of Fard Muhammad, whom we knew by the exalted title of Savior of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in North America. However, even as a child, I remember thinking often about why my conception of God didn’t align with the nation’s teaching. Why was I so convinced that God really did have a spiritual nature?

One day, I had an epiphany. My sisters and I were playing hide-and-seek around our house. While remaining hidden, I was gripped with a thought. I said to myself, “My sisters don’t know where I am. But Allah does, because he knows everything, so he must be on both the inside and the outside of this closet.” This meant that he couldn’t be a mere human being, like me or my sisters. Somehow, even at an early age, I was developing a notion of God’s omniscience and omnipresence that contradicted the nation’s insistence that he was neither “spirit” nor “spook.”

At the time, I had no idea that God was working behind the scenes, sovereignly steering us away from the Nation of Islam. After marital discord caused my parents to separate, my mother moved us to Florida, where we encountered a Southern Baptist children’s evangelist. Mr. Brown was sowing the seeds of the gospel in our hearts. Mr. Brown gave us our first copy of the Bible, which we read in secret. He kept inviting us to Sunday school until our mother finally relented—but cautioned against being proselytized. We were instructed to go only for the sake of being with friends and afterward to come straight home.

For a while after my father died, our family maintained a lukewarm connection to the Nation of Islam doctrine. That began changing when the boyfriend of my second oldest sister invited her to church with his family. Soon thereafter, she accepted Christ, and we would often get into debates about salvation, Jesus, the Trinity, and the afterlife. I hadn’t lost my youthful interest in matters of theology.

Eventually, I started visiting this church to see for myself what was being taught. The more I visited, the more I was drawn to what I heard, almost as if the Holy Spirit was confirming that this was what I was searching for all those years ago, when doubts about Fard Muhammad’s teachings first arose.

After a period of deliberation, I realized I couldn’t sit through another sermon without declaring that I trusted in Jesus for salvation. At age 16 I was born again, and one year later I was already preaching the gospel.

Looking back, I can see that … I really was lost. I was living in a wilderness—it was inside my own heart. And it wasn’t Fard or Elijah Muhammad who came to find and rescue me—it was Jesus. Our “Savior” had indeed arrived … but he was both an eternal spirit and a man—God’s own Son, who came not to exalt one particular race but to gather a “chosen people” of sinners like me (1 Pet. 2:9)

Many pastors challenge their hearers to meditate on Scripture. But a teenager in France took this idea in completely wrong direction.

An article in Live Science reports that 16-year-old Adrien Locatelli, a French high school student, transcribed parts of the Hebrew Book of Genesis and the Arabic-language Quran, into DNA and injected them into his body—one text into each thigh. DNA is just a long molecule that can store information. Mostly, it stores the information living things use to go about their business. But it can be used to store just about any kind of information that can be written down.

Locatelli explained, “I did this experiment for the symbol of peace between religions and science, I think that for a religious person it can be good to inject himself his religious text.”

Locatelli said he didn’t experience any significant health problems following the procedure, though he reported some “minor inflammation” around the injection site on his left thigh for a few days.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Love God’s Word. But the correct way to get the Bible deep within us is not through sequencing and injection but by reading and studying the Bible every day.

British pastor, Matthew Hosier, writes about a missionary friend who moved to a Muslim majority nation:

When we first moved to the Middle East we heard that on festival days everyone dresses in their best clothes and goes to visit their relatives and neighbors to celebrate. So, for our first Eid festival we carefully cleaned our apartment, dressed up in our best clothes, got some sweets and chocolates which are traditional to hand out to visitors and waited in our house. But no-one came to visit.

Another missionary explained what we did wrong: "On festival days, the small visit the big, and the big give out presents." For example, everyone in a family visits their eldest brother, or their parents, or grandparents. When they arrive they would kiss the hand of the older person to show respect and honor. The host would then care for their guests by feeding them, serving them, and giving them gifts like good quality chocolate, money, or other presents. As newly arrived foreigners without social standing or relatives, naturally no-one came to visit us. We are considered "small" by the culture, so we are the ones who need to do the visiting.

This incident made me ponder the awesomeness of the incarnation. In every other religion, humans (the small) try to visit God by their own strength and good works. But as much as we try to dress up nicely, we cannot be clean enough to enter his house without polluting and disrespecting it.

In the incarnation God decided to play the role both of the "small" and of the "big." He humbled himself totally to become "small" so that he could visit us in our squalid house. But also as the "big" he played the role of host and gave gifts—atonement, the Holy Spirit, and clean clothes—which means that as believers we are now appropriately dressed and thus free to enter his house without disrespecting it.

In his book The 9 of Arts Spiritual Conversation, John Crilly tells a story about building a relationship with five young Muslim men from a refugee camp outside Kenya:

We have very different life experiences and faith stories. I was raised in an Irish Catholic middle-class family of four outside of Chicago. They were Muslims raised in Kenyan refugee camps, fleeing tribal violence in their homeland. They boarded a plane in T-shirts and flip-flops and arrived in a new country in the dead of winter, carrying all their belongings in a bag. We had hardly anything in common. But because of God, our lives have been divinely woven together as our God of Love pursues each one of these young men.

As we were driving along [in my pickup truck], one of the boys mentioned something about prayer. Following a whisper from God and stirred by curiosity, I turned down the radio and asked, "How does a Muslim pray?" The relational dynamic changed as soon as I asked that question. I wasn't only these young men's tutor/mentor/adult friend in a position of status above them; I was also a person who was interested in learning from them. They were empowered to guide the conversation and share as much or as little as they wanted. They were in control of the discussion. They started the conversation by telling me about the five "salats" of each day, with each one chiming in as I listened intently. I was fascinated and asked follow-up questions to clarify my understanding and seek to know their lives better. Their experiences were utterly foreign to me. The discussion was rich, as I was able to demonstrate my love for them by hearing their story, learning about their religion, and exploring their world with them. Then an amazing thing happened.

As we arrived in my driveway, one of them asked me, "How does a Christian pray?"

Possible Preaching Angles: Evangelism; Witnessing—Crilly uses this as an example of "pre-evangelism"—the art of learning to listen and ask good questions in order to show love and build trusting relationships.

Leighton Ford, evangelist and brother-in-law of Billy Graham, once met the former boxing champion Muhammad Ali at a hotel in Sydney, Australia. Ford listened as Ali regaled a group of admiring onlookers before introducing himself as "Billy Graham's brother-in-law." Ali's face lit up as he said, "Oh Billy! Billy! I love Billy! I went up and saw him at the house at Montreat and he signed a book for me." Ford explained what happened next:

We got into a very interesting conversation. He was not only very articulate, he was also a very bright man. Of course earlier in his life Ali had become a Muslim, but he told me and the onlookers, "You know I have travelled all over the world. And I have seen all these different religions. It seems to me that they all have the same thing. It's kind of like you have a river, and you have a lake, and you have a pond, and you have a stream. But they all have water in them, so they are all the same, aren't they?"

I said, "Muhammad that is very interesting. But suppose you have all of them and suppose they are all polluted. Then you would need a purifier, don't you? You see that's who Jesus is. Jesus is the purifier." And he thought about that for a minute and he said, "That's good. I had never thought about it quite like that. Jesus, the purifier."

I know that Muslims don't refer to Jesus as "the Son of God" because they interpret that in some physical way that God had relations with Mary, which of course isn't true. So I told him, "Did you know that in the Bible Jesus is called the Second Adam?" And he said, "I didn't know that." I said, "Yes, you see there was the first Adam that God made in the first creation. Then the second Adam was Jesus, the new creation, in whom everyone can become new." And he said, "I've got to think about that."

Well it was 30 years ago and I haven't seen him since. I know that "The Greatest," as he called himself, has met the One who alone is really the Greatest, because all great ones pass away. But he has come face-to-face with the One great God. I wonder what Muhammad Ali had to say, or maybe he would say, "God what do you have to say?"

About every ten seconds, on average about 26 people die. By extrapolating from various statistics, including death rates and world populations and religious affiliations, seminary professor Dr. Ron Blue estimates that of these 26 recently deceased persons …

• Two were Buddhists
• Four were Hindus
• Six were Muslims
• Seven were Christians (of any type or commitment level)
• Seven were "Other," including atheist, agnostic, and animist

Hassan John, a Christian pastor from Jos, Nigeria, is regarded as an "infidel" by Muslim extremist Boko Haram insurgents and has a price on his head of 150,000 Naira (about 800 American dollars). He goes to his church each day not knowing whether someone will murder him in order to claim the price on his head.

As an Anglican pastor and as a part-time journalist for CNN, Hassan has often been surrounded by violence and bloodshed in northeast Nigeria. He's seen friends shot dead or injured in front of his eyes. As a reporter, he has often rushed to the scene immediately after bombings. He has narrowly escaped death himself. Hassan said, "You see it again and again and again. You get to places where a bomb [planted by Muslim extremists] has just exploded. There are bodies all over the place. You visit people in the hospital. You go back and meet families, you cry with them, you console them, you do the best you can with them all the time."

But this violence and hatred has not stopped him from reaching out to his Muslim neighbors who need Christ. After he helped a small Muslim girl who could not go to school after her father had been killed in the violence, he started to reach out to other orphan children. Soon he was helping 12 Muslim women, then 120. Young Muslim men in the area are starting to ask if they can find help as well.

Hassan's evangelistic outreach involves eating meals with Muslims. Hassan explained, "Now in Nigeria that is a big thing. You don't eat with your enemy because you are afraid that you will be poisoned. Now [in an attempt to share the gospel,] Christians build friendships with Muslims; it is just so marvelous."

In his book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, Nabeel Quershi explains how an insight from organic chemistry helped him, as a young Muslim, to accept the truth of the Trinity.

We sat front and center in Mrs. Adamski's lecture hall, not more than three feet from her as she taught. I vividly remember the exact location of my seat because it was there that I first opened up to the Trinity, a moment still etched in my mind.

Projected in the front of the room were three large depictions of nitrate in bold black and white. We were studying resonance, the configuration of electrons in certain molecules. The basic concept of resonance is easy enough to understand, even without a background in chemistry. Essentially, the building block of every physical object is an atom, a positively charged nucleus orbited by tiny, negatively charged electrons. Atoms bond to one another by sharing their electrons, forming a molecule. Different arrangements of the electrons in certain molecules are called "resonance structures." Some molecules, like water, have no resonance while others have three resonance structures or more, like the nitrate on the board.

Mrs. Adamski continued: "These drawings are the best way to represent resonance structures on paper, but it's actually much more complicated. Technically, a molecule with resonance is every one of its structures at every point in time, yet no single one of its structures at any point in time." My eyes rested on the three separate structures of nitrate on the wall, my mind assembling the pieces. One molecule of nitrate is all three resonance structures all the time and never just one of them. The three are separate but all the same, and they are one. They are three in one.

That's when it clicked: if there are things in this world that can be three in one, even incomprehensibly so, then why cannot God? And just like that, the Trinity became potentially true in my mind.

In his book If I Were God I'd End All Pain, John Dickson recalls speaking on the theme "The wounds of God" at a university campus. After his speech, the chairperson asked the audience for questions. Without delay a man in his mid-30s, a Muslim leader at the university, stood up and proceeded to tell the audience how preposterous was the claim that the Creator of the universe would be subjected to the forces of his own creation—that he would have to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet, let alone die on a cross.

Dickson and the man went back and forth for about ten minutes during which the man insisted that the notion of God having wounds—whether physical or emotional—was not only illogical, since the "Creator of Causes" could not possibly be caused pain by a lesser entity, it was outright blasphemy, as stated in the Koran.

Dickson later wrote,

I had no knock-down argument, no witty comeback. The debate was probably too amicable for either approach anyway. In the end, I simply thanked him for demonstrating for the audience the radical contrast between the Islamic conception of God and that described in the Bible. What the Muslim denounces as blasphemy the Christian holds as precious: God has wounds.

Christian minister John Dickson once spoke on the theme of the wounds of God on a university campus in Sydney, Australia. During the question time, a Muslim man rose to explain "how preposterous was the claim that the Creator of the universe should be subjected to the forces of his own creation—that he would have to eat, sleep, and go to the toilet, let alone die on a cross."

Dickson said his remarks were intelligent, clear, and civil. The man went on to argue that it was illogical that God, the "cause of all causes" could have pain inflicted on him by any lesser beings. Dickson thought for a minute but he couldn't come up with a knockdown argument or a witty comeback. So finally he simply thanked the man for making the uniqueness of the Christian claim so clear. Then Dickson concluded, "What the Muslim denounces as blasphemy the Christian holds precious: God has wounds."

In an issue of Christianity Today, a Muslim man describes his commitment to follow Isa al Masih, Jesus the Messiah. Suprisingly, a rather "ordinary" miracle caused this man to open his heart to Jesus. Here's how he described the miracle:

One night the only food my wife and I had was a small portion of macaroni. My wife prepared it very nicely. Then one of her friends knocked on the door. I told myself, The macaroni is not sufficient for even the two of us, so how will it be enough for three of us? But because we have no other custom, we opened the door, and she came in to eat with us.

While we were eating, the macaroni started to multiply; it became full in the bowl. I suspected that something was wrong with my eyes, so I started rubbing them. I thought maybe my wife hid some macaroni under the small table, so I checked, but there was nothing. My wife and I looked at each other, but because the guest was there we said nothing.

Afterward I lay down on the bed, and as I slept, Isa came to me and asked me, "Do you know who multiplied the macaroni?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "I am Isa al Masih [Jesus, the Messiah]. If you follow me, not only the macaroni but your life will be multiplied."