Back in the 1970s, my dear father warned that there would be a great world revival of Islam in the future, and that we needed to prepare for its impact upon endtime world civilization. We are now witnessing this master power of Islam stepping forward with great aggression. Until recently, the contemporary has failed to see that Islamic expansion is aimed at spiritual conquest of the West and ultimately, the world. It has been estimated that during the Gulf War at the turn of the last decade, over 20,000 of our armed forces in Saudi Arabia were converted to Islam while they were stationed there. And now, through the overwhelming free publicity given this religion since September 11, there is no telling the number of people who are becoming Islamic. The misinformation we are presently witnessing from the media and from the revamping of Islamic religious web sites is all part of the ploy to water down the poison that has been part of this religion for centuries. Even modern spokesmen for Islam are endeavoring to soften the message of Islam, especially during these days when a general hatred has increased against Islamic nations because of these terrorist attacks. While national prayer meetings are being held throughout our country, creating an ecumenical pantheon of gods from various religions, we now are hearing the name Allah presented equally with the Christian God.
We soon forget the shouts of tens of thousands of people chanting, "Hail to the prophet," as the Ayatollah Khomeini took control of Iran in the name of Allah. What happened in Iran in the 1970s became a signal for the world and especially for Christians. A power that had long been thought to be dead, Islam came to life again. Islamic countries for decades have been preparing to return to the pure doctrine of the prophet Mohammed and enforce the legal and moral teachings of the Koran again. The Koran is promoted as Allah's last revelation which is to be obeyed not only by Muslims but also by all mankind. It is Allah's will that all men be united under the Islamic banner at the end of the world. The triumph of the Ayatollah Khomeini was not just over the dynasty of the Shah of Iran but over all world powers. Europe's power has been broken by Arab nationalism. The Ayatollah demonstrated to the world that a militant Islam could bring America and the West to their knees. We must not soon forget the kidnappings of Americans by the Ayatollah without any reprisal from other Arab nations. To truly understand Islam, it is imperative that we go back into this religion's history and view its own self-portrait.
Islam's Beginnings
The religion has a variety of names: (1) Mohammedanism, named after the founder; (2) Islam, meaning "submission"; and (3) Muslim or Moslem, meaning "one who submits" or "one who submits to the will of Allah." In order to fully understand its beginning, we must commence in the book of Genesis, some four thousand years ago at Abraham's birthplace in Mesopotamia (which today is Iraq). Abraham lived among a people and family who worshipped many gods. Jehovah revealed Himself to Abraham and told him to leave his homeland. The Lord had revealed that He would give Abraham seed; he waited eleven years for that promise to be realized. Then, acting through the flesh, he married Hagar and had a son named Ishmael. Fourteen years later the promised son, Isaac, was born to Abraham and his wife Sarah. Each of Abraham's sons became the father of twelve tribes, Ishmael the father of the Arabs, and Isaac the father of the Jews. We must remember that Abraham prayed amidst the animosity between the two brothers, "Oh that Ishmael might live before thee." God's response was,
Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year (Gen. 17:19-21).
The Arabs (represented in Scripture by Ishmael) have never gotten over the fact that the Jews (represented by Isaac) are God's chosen nation and the bearer of God's promises. This genealogy helps explain why the Koran claims that Arabs are special in Allah's eyes; it also explains the struggles we see today over the land of Israel. Throughout history, Isaac and his descendants have represented the fulfillment of the promises of God while Ishmael and his descendants have represented the efforts of man to do things on his own.
Mohammed the Founder
Islam designates Mohammed as the founder of their religion and the promised prophet of Deuteronomy 18:15. (The Bible designates Jesus Christ to be the fulfillment of this prophecy.) Mohammed was born in AD 570. His father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was six years old. As an orphan, he was reared by members of his clan, the Quraish tribe. By his mid-20s he became a caravan manager for a wealthy widow named Khadijah, whom he later married. At the age of forty, while alone in a cave three miles from Mecca, Mohammed had a vision in which he claimed the angel Gabriel told him he was the messenger of Allah. It must be understood that the Arabs at the time of Mohammed worshipped many gods, and the center of the worship was the Kaaba in Mecca (which is still the most holy place of the Islamic religion). The Kaaba is a small cubical stone that orthodox Moslems say has been built or rebuilt ten times. The current Kaaba (they say built in AD 696), is 40 feet by 35 feet by 50 feet high and stands in the courtyard of the Great Mosque. In Mohammed's day 365 gods (idols) were worshipped and kept in the Kaaba. Allah was one of these deities and the god of Mohammed's Quraish tribe. For the next few years after the vision from Gabriel, Mohammed proclaimed more and more openly that Allah was the only god and that he was Allah's prophet. In AD 622, Mohammed learned of a plot against his life, and he fled from Mecca to Yathrib (later renamed Medina), where he ruled until his death in 632. In 630, he successfully went back to Mecca and conquered it, destroying all the idol gods but Allah. Before he died, he directed all prayers to be prayed in the direction of Mecca just as the Jews directed prayers toward Jerusalem. He believed he was the final prophet to be sent by Allah.
Mohammed's Teachings & Religion
Mohammed claimed that eternal life depended on a person's moral behavior and the performing of the religious duties called the Five Pillars of Islam. They include the recitation of the Kalima aloud, correctly, and with full understanding. (The Kalima is "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah.") The second pillar is praying five designated times daily facing Mecca. The third pillar is the giving of alms to the poor and needy, but this could include giving to Mosques and organizations of the Islamic religion, as well as financial assistance of the holy wars. (One fortieth of one's complete assets is to be given yearly.) The fourth is fasting during the month of Ramadan in daylight hours (but the early morning and night hours can be given to sumptuous feasting). And the fifth is making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a person's lifetime.
However, the Koran also teaches a sixth pillar: it is Jihad, or the Holy War. Mohammed tried to win converts by persuasion, but when that failed, he encouraged the use of force in securing converts. The sword was considered a valid instrument for spreading Islam throughout the world. If any of his followers were killed in a holy war, Mohammed promised that they would go to paradise. The Ayatollah Khomeini reiterated this: "If you are slain, you will go to paradise. Even if you do the slaying, you will go to paradise. That is Islamic logic." Holy wars were common in the years after Mohammed's death. All of Northern Africa and most of Spain came under Islamic influence this way in the seventh century. The Arab commander-in-chief El Okbar conquered all of North Africa. When he reached the Atlantic, he rode his horse out into the water, drew his sword, and cried, "Bismellahi! If the ocean were not in my way, I would carry the prophet's message even farther west!" After the defeat of the Islamic armies by Charles Martel at Tours in central France, Islam looked eastward, conquering India, Java, the Philippines, and other countries. The idea of a holy war has not been strongly preached this century until recently when many of the older Islamic customs were revived. The Jihad is a true part of the revival. As one caliph stated recently, "Only he can wear the mantle of the prophet who is in position to defend Islam by the sword throughout the world."
According to Moslems, the original Koran is in heaven in the Arabic language, the language of Allah and therefore the most perfect, complete language of all. The Koran was not translated into other languages for a long time in order to prevent this divine language from being desecrated. But it is now translated and distributed on a wide scale to make the teachings of Islam more accessible. In many passages the Koran is a counterfeit of the Bible.
As Christians today waver on the authority of the Bible, the Moslems are strong concerning the Koran. The dictator of Libya, Qaddafi, stated the following:
Christianity must consist of many question marks. It has absolutely no divine message. It has always been a tool of imperialism and allied with capitalistic exploiters. Islam is the only valid religion, encompassing all others. Jesus was a Moslem, he has more connections with us than with Christianity.
Islam's Allah is a soulless, rigid god who shows no mercy. To him man is simply a slave, having no power of decision. He is a gruesome tyrant who can give only commands. Faith in such a god can lead only to fatalism.
The message of the Koran is clearly "another Gospel" which Paul condemned in Galatians. Islam, as taught in the Koran, is the only true religion. Mohammed laid claim for his followers to the promises which God gave Israel in Deuteronomy 14:2, "The Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth." Mohammed, however, said to his followers in the Koran:
Ye are the best folk that hath been raised up unto mankind. Ye enjoin the Just, and ye forbid the Evil, and ye believe in God: And if the people of the Book [the Jews] had believed it had surely been better for them. Believers there are among them, but most of them are perverse (Sura 3:106).
He cursed the Jews in the name of Allah (Koran, Sura 4:42-55), preached hatred and damnation on all who will not accept Islam, and urged his followers not to have any dealings with the Jews or Christians:
O Believers! Take not the Jews or Christians as friends. They are but one another's friends. If any one of you taketh them for his friends, he surely is one of them. God will not guide the evil doers (Sura 5:56).
It must be remembered that for a Christian to witness to an Islamic is against the law in an Arabic country; the penalty is death.
The Islamic Conquest in History
From their very beginning, the followers of Mohammed sought to dominate other countries and conquer Europe, not by conversion but by force. In the sixth and seventh centuries, the followers of Islam swept out of Arabia to claim the Holy Land and what is now the region of Turkey. They then spread westward across northern Africa, conquering the fertile Nile Valley and seizing control of Africa's lucrative slave trade. They forced the Coptic Church to accept Islam and all but destroyed the influence of Christianity on the African continent. In AD 711, the Moors (a militant clan of African Muslims) crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and took Spain. They pressed across the Pyrenees and would have taken France as well, had they not been turned back by Charles Martel's army at the Battle of Tours in 732. The Moors fell back to make Spain their stronghold, establishing an Islamic capital at Cordova. Though Christian nations waged the Crusades against the Turkish Muslims in Palestine from 1096 to 1270, they were unable to dislodge the Turks from their holy shrines. Not until 1492 were the Roman Catholic rulers Ferdinand and Isabella able to take Granada, the last Moorish fortress of Spain. The Muslims held a tenacious grip on the lands they conquered. Even when they were defeated militarily, they continued to influence the thought and culture of Western Christianity. In 1683, Islamic Turks besieged Vienna, which was considered the stronghold of Catholic Christianity. Weakened by religious wars, Europe almost came under the domination of Islam. At that time, the Christian west nearly ceased to exist. Tekeli stated to the Turkish Vezir who nearly succeeded in making Europe Islamic in 1683, "The Christian faith is a hairsbreadth from its downfall if you are victorious here." But western Europe united and drove the Turks out.
The Recent Decades of Conquest
What the followers of Mohammed could not accomplish for more than one thousand years with force, they are now accomplishing through the control of world oil. One of the West's strongest allies in the Middle East was Iran. Although the nation was 93% Moslem, the late Shah of Iran (called the "light of the Aryans") nonetheless developed a strong country that was friendly to the West. Who would have thought that he could have lost his power so quickly? Or who would have thought that Islam would attempt to stem such progress in order to reintroduce Islamic laws and chronology? Since the mullahs have taken power, violent changes have taken place in Iran. Although Iran used to supply Israel with oil, now it is advocating the destruction of Israel. In addition, Europe for the past thirty years has constantly come under increasing pressure to take a stand against Israel through an Arab oil boycott against nations friendly to Israel. During the past three decades, we lived as though things were continuing normally. But the world situation was changing daily, and Islam was becoming more powerful. In Iran, Islam succeeded in toppling one of the mightiest dynasties in the world, ending the rule of the Shah of Iran.
Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), knew that the explosive power of Islam was greater than the power of weapons of war. In 1978, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca to renew his alliance with Allah. What nationalism, terrorism, and war could not bring about, he knew could be accomplished in the name of Allah, and with the power of oil. In his name, millions of Moslems could be mobilized and united in a common purpose. In the name of Allah, the Middle East could rise up united against the West and force it to its knees. Jerusalem will be taken by these powers in the Tribulation Period, and all other nations will stand by silently.
Much has been happening to America here and abroad at our embassies and military compounds even before these recent attacks. The West has never learned its lesson. We must remember that for years people were executed daily in Iran during Khomeini's reign. Just before each execution, the executioner yelled, "Bismellahi!" (In the Name of Allah). Khomeini even executed the general who had pled to the Shah to preserve Khomeini's life. With Iran's elite leaders eliminated, the nation was catapulted back into the Middle Ages.
We must see from all this history how merciless Islam is. Islam destroys anything that stands in its way. What it does not control through oil it will control through religion. America is already economically entrapped through the power of oil, and now we are falling for Islam's religious entrapment. Oil has brought world power to Islam, and by means of it the followers of Mohammed are seeking to bring about a global religion.
Lebanon and Malta are two other parts of the world where the Moslems have demonstrated their plan to gain world domination. Lebanon for many years was the only Middle East country in which Christians had constitutional rights to participate in the government. It was a thorn in the side of Moslems in the same way the state of Israel or a future Palestinian state with "equal rights for Jews and Moslems" is an impossibility from the Islamic perspective. The Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s was a religious problem; the Moslems gained absolute control. This conflict was also seen in Turkey, Chad, Iran, Malta, and other countries in that region. In Malta, the British took down their flag for the last time in March 1979. For 180 years the British had controlled the path to the Suez. When the British left, the Arabs came. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya arrived at the farewell festivities with sultans on bejeweled horses and eight hundred Libyans distributing the "green bible" of Qaddafi. Libya then poured money into Malta, and dictator Qaddafi laid out this money in the name of Allah. This became the first conquest of Europe. We must not soon forget the ties that Princess Diana of England had with a wealthy Islamic family. She would have married into the power of Islam if unknown providence had not intervened.
Conclusion
For four hundred years the Arabs have awaited their Baath, their resurrection, their coming to global power. No statesman in the world could have foreseen such an overnight change as we have seen in recent events. Today, Islam numbers nearly one billion people. The growing percentage of Arabic ownership of American real estate and businesses is staggering. The Moslems consider oil a gift from Allah for the purpose of making Islam a leading force in the world. Amidst the nomadic spirit of all Arab nations, they are being united under the common banner of this one religion. It is reported that nearly five percent of all the Arab world's income is used for holy war. Can it be merely coincidental that Ishmael and Isaac have both moved suddenly to the center stage of world events?
A new era has begun both for the world in general and for Islam in particular. Islam is accusing Christians and Jews of being heretics and heathens. The American media are showing the rising of people all over the Arabic world who are expressing delight in the terrorist acts against our country. Islam is declaring war on anyone who gets in its way and anyone who will befriend Israel. Persecution, war, and animosity are a heritage from the past for Moslems. As we approach the endtime, Islamic religion worldwide will become more intense. The Islamic geographical area of Babylon is coming back into world prominence. This United Arab world will be one of the three powerful horns plucked up by the Antichrist in a war, leaving seven nations who will yield themselves to Antichrist. Islam is here until the end of the Tribulation Period.
We must anticipate the culmination of the endtime powers: the powers of Islam, the powers of Christian ecumenicity, and the powers of global government. But we await the Rapture of the saints before the coming of Antichrist for the full unification of all these powers.
As the media and modern religious ecumenism seek to soften the message of Islam, may God grant us discernment to see that Islam has not changed. It is against the Christ of Scripture, the Atonement of the Cross, and the Trinity of Heaven.