01 - The Truth About Islamic Jihad By Pastor Jeff Wickwire
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"The Truth About Islamic Jihad"
At a prayer breakfast on Thursday, February 5, President Obama said in response to the recent burning alive of a Jordanian pilot by ISIS:
“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. So it is not unique to one group or one religion.”
These statements rightly set off a firestorm of response from both Christians and other concerned Americans and other countries around the world. So let's first look at the birth of Islam, then compare its history to the history of the Christian Crusades.
Islam dates from the time of the last ten years of the life of its founder, Muhammad Ibne Abdullah, or simply the "prophet" Muhammad. He was born around 570 A.D. in the city of Mecca, which is now located in Saudi Arabia.
Muhammad was orphaned early in his life and tradition says that he was raised by his grandfather [who also died] and then his uncle, Abu Talib. By age 25 Muhammad was a poor man until he married a wealthy widow named Khadija, age 41.
His wife gave him love, wealth, leisure, and an influential position in Meccan society. He had two sons who died in infancy, and four daughters. At about the age of 40, Muhammad is said to have begun to see visions and receive revelations from the Angel Gabriel.
It was at this time that he began preaching publicly against the multiplicity of idols that were worshiped at Mecca’s central shrine. For his monotheistic beliefs he was an enemy to many, particularly of the merchants whose wealth stemmed from the sale of idols.
Muhammad and his many followers were forced to leave Mecca for Medina (city of the prophet), a mainly Jewish city 280 miles north of Mecca. From that time it took Muhammad only ten years to build his band of followers into a strong army which conquered nearly all of central and western Arabia.
Muhammad, who had been previously cast out of Mecca, returned less than a decade later and made it his capital. If anything, Muhammad was a strong military leader. Yet he considered himself to be the prophet of Allah, and as such, he founded Islam, which he taught was a return to the pure worship of the one true God of Abraham.
Muhammad believed that God’s true path came from Ishmael the first son born of Hagar to Abraham, when Abraham disobeyed God’s command to wait for a child to be born of his aging wife, Sarah (Gen 16:11-12).
This connection is crucial to understanding the Islamic religion. Muhammad considered Abraham to be his father and thus, the religion he founded was to be, not so much a new thing, but a return to the worship of the one true God of his father. This is how he spun it.
It is important to note that the name given to god by Muhammad, Allah, does not find its roots in the true worship of Abraham, but in pagan traditions. Allah corresponded to the Babylonian god Baal, and Arabs knew of him long before Mohammed worshiped him as the true god.
Allah was the god of the local Qurish tribe which was Mohammed’s tribe before he invented Islam to lead his people out of their polytheism. Allah was originally known as the Moon God!
Mohammed simply drove the other idols away and made one god, now the only god, and he as its messenger. So Allah was part of a pagan, polytheistic system of worship before being crowned the supreme and only god by Muhammad. Hence, the crescent moon, the symbol of Islam, was first the symbol of the moon God Allah.
Islam did not appear until the Church of Jesus Christ was more than six hundred years old. Muhammad’s interest in establishing Islam seems to be almost entirely driven by a desire for power and a desire to unify that power around a central ideal and religion.
In driving out the other pagan gods--the pantheon of more than 360 gods worshiped in the region of Mecca--and unifying people around the one god Allah, the moon god, he effectively unified his power by merging his political power (which had been won by the sword), and his religious power where he claimed to be the prophet of the only god worthy of affection.
Yet, while the majority of Muslims are not violent people, violent subjugation has marked Islam from the start. There are many examples of the trail of blood left by this religion.
Reaching back just a bit to the 19th century, 50,000 Greeks and Armenians were massacred in 1822, 10,000 Armenians and Nestorians were murdered in 1850, 11,000 Maronites and Syrians in 1860, 15,000 Bulgarians in 1876, 10,000 Armenians in 1894, 325,000 Armenians from 1895 to 1908, 30,000 Armenians in 1909, and 80 percent of the Armenian population (1.5 million) wiped out in 1915 to 1918.
Armenia was the very first Christian country. So it should be no shock or surprise that satanic, Muslim Turks tried to brutally snuff it out in the first genocide of the 20th century.
In the 1980s and 90s, Muslims in North Sudan were either starving or selling into slavery Black Christians in the South. Oppression against non-Muslims in general, but Christians in particular, has also occurred in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
In 1994, Iran began a campaign of persecution against Christians (but certainly not the first in history). Since then, Muslim terror groups like Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, and ISIS have particularly targeted Christians and Jews, leading up to now some of the worst atrocities ever witnessed by history, all in the name of Islam.
Now, it is very important to note that Islam is a religion of purported revelation. Muhammad never claimed that he had performed miracles to prove that he was a prophet. When asked what sign he could show to convince the people that God had sent him, he replied that his miracle was the Qur’an, because no one was able to produce anything like it.
The verses of the Qur’an are called signs (suras) in Arabic. The primary sources for the knowledge of Islam for a Muslim are the Qur’an and the Hadith. The Qur’an is the central source for Muslims. When read by a good reader the Qur’an makes a strong impression.
Muslims treat their copies of the Qur’an with reverence, often keeping them wrapped in beautiful covers and never placing anything on top of them. Muslims believe Muhammad is the last and greatest prophet who listened to the angel Gabriel dictate in Arabic God’s precise words or the Qur’an, the “perfect word of God for the Muslim.”
The very name Islam means "submission." It is a religion of peace only in this sense. When you submit there will be peace!
Now here comes the rub: If, as Muslims believe, the Koran is divinely inspired, then Allah has called for the murder of those who don't submit to Islam. The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule.
Some are very graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who don't join the fight are called 'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.
Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.
There are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or balance out the many others that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed.
Muhammad's own violent legacy - and that of his companions - along with the pronounced stress on violence found in the Quran, have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history.
Listen to some of the verses out of the Koran, keeping in mind that Muslims believe the Koran to be the very words of Allah, given through Gabriel:
Quran 2:191--"And kill them (unbelievers) wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out."
Quran (3:151) - "Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers..."
Quran (4:76) - "Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah…"
Quran (8:12) - "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them."
Quran (47:3-4) - "Those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord... So, when you meet (to fight Jihad in Allah's Cause), those who disbelieve, smite at their necks till you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly" (on them, i.e. take them as captives)...
All of these words are in stark contrast to the words of Jesus Who taught: "Put away your sword," Jesus told him. "Those who use the sword will die by the sword" (Matt. 26:52).
He told Pilate, "My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36).
Concerning enemies, Jesus taught, "But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you" (Luke 6:27-28).
Okay, back to President Obama's statements. Was he right in his moral equivalency, stating that Christians have done just as bad? That there's really no difference between what Christians have done in the Crusades and Islamic Jihad? Let's look at history...
The Crusades were launched in response to Islamic aggression in the Middle East. From the moment that Islam was solidified in Medina under Muhammad, it was characterized by violence, rapidly spreading through Europe and the Middle East. Let's look at a video showing how the Crusades and the spread of Islam by violence stack up against each other in history...
VIDEO:
In closing, while Islam has many followers who are not in any way violent, the words of the Koran for the Muslim who takes it literally is an invitation to violence with the promise of reward in heaven.
Islam is the antithesis of Christianity. It's god, Allah, bears no resemblance to Jehovah God, our Heavenly Father, as He's revealed in Scripture. It's prophet, Muhammad, could not be more different from our Lord Jesus Christ. And the teachings of Islam are in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles.