Apologetics Session 44 - Islam

The Christian Basis for Studying Islam

For this day. I thank you for all that you've blessed us with, Father. I thank you so much for sending your Son to die on the cross for us. Just thinking of Easter that's just passed, I thank you so much that he didn't stay dead, but Christ rose from the dead to provide a way for us to be reconciled and saved, and we just thank you so much for that, God.

I just pray that you would bless this time, that we would all learn something from it, and that we would grow closer to you as a result. Lord, I ask all these things in Christ's name, amen. All right, so this is going to be one of my shorter ones because I didn't have to prepare quite as much as I did for some of the deeper topics that we were talking about.

This will, however, be a very sort of surface-level set of information about Islam. It is a very deep and rich topic that you could dive into, and I actually have a series, it's probably seven or eight hours long, that I've linked in the back of this presentation to a particular apologist, Christian apologist, who grew up Muslim named Nabeel Qureshi, who is just absolutely fantastic when it comes to thinking about Islam, thinking about Christianity, the overlaps, the doctrines, all of that stuff, so can't recommend it more highly.

I'll mention it again at the end just so you guys have it all kind of fresh on your mind, but this is essentially going to go over, and I will actually play like a seven-minute video of Nabeel Qureshi actually talking to a Muslim at one of his talks to sort of cap off the end of this, but there's a much deeper sort of study that he did for Biola University that's all on YouTube, and so I've got a link to that that you guys can watch, and it goes into extraordinary depth with regard to doctrines and beliefs and contrasts, I think, modern old Western Muslims from those, you know, in the original, sort of in older older times.

What Islam Is and Where It Came From

So Islam first is, what is Islam? So Islam is one of the largest monotheistic religions in the world. It's estimated nearly a quarter of the world's population are Muslims, and we'll talk about Islam and what the word Muslim means actually.

There are different varieties of Muslims in the world, but like a lot of other religions, it has very similar characteristics to Christianity. It even has some overlapping beliefs with Christianity, but it grew up over about 200 years from essentially not being a religion at all to being one of the dominant religions for one of the largest empires in the world.

So I didn't steal exactly from what Drew had done for Buddhism and Hinduism, but like those and Christianity, there are sacred texts, there are leaders or prophets, and there's an idea, a soteriology, an idea of how you become saved.

And so it's similar in those regards. The origins of Islam. So Islam, like I said, grew up over 200 years. The story, as I heard it, is that it started in about the 7th century AD, where Muhammad had an appearance of Gabriel, the angel Gabriel, who told him the exact words were to begin reciting the Word of God.

And so Muhammad apparently told his wife and family members, but it took him about three years from the supposed appearance for him to sort of accept the mantle of prophet and really found the religion of Islam.

It was believed at that time that Muhammad was already in his 40s, and he worked as a caravan trader in Mecca, which I'm sure you've all heard of, which was his hometown. At the time, Muhammad lived in a very tribal society, so there were a set of different tribes that had, you know, sort of different responsibilities.

So like a lot of sort of Middle Eastern countries, there were, you know, sort of a tribal society. He was a member of the tribe of Quraysh. Quraysh tribe. Yep, and his tribe mainly supported the trade with pilgrims to Mecca.

Pilgrimages to Mecca actually predate Islam, because there was, people would travel from all over to worship idols in Mecca, and so there were, there was this idol worship that people would make pilgrimages, and so his role and his tribe's role was really to essentially interact with trade.

So Mecca was already sort of a hub of trade, as it were. So Saudi Arabia at the time was sort of a melting pot of religions. There are a lot of different religions, monotheistic religions as well as polytheistic religions.

A lot of the gods they worship were very similar to the Mesopotamian gods, and there were lots and lots of idols there, and there was a structure called the Kaaba that sort of sat in Mecca, and around the Kaaba there were rows of like 360 idols, and this is, people would make a pilgrimage to Mecca to pay homage to their specific god amongst all of these, all of these gods.

Wasn't Allah one of them? Allah actually was, was one of those gods as well, yes, that is true. Although I'm not sure if it's this, I'm not sure that they, that Muslims consider that the same Allah as the one that they, that they worship.

But yes, there was, there was one idol that was to a god, Allah. So there were, there were monotheistic religions in Mecca, so Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, so monotheism wasn't like a completely foreign thing to folks that, that lived in, in that time, and it wouldn't have been a foreign concept to Muhammad, and considered himself a, a monotheistic worshipper.

This is a picture of the Kaaba, this obviously is a modern picture of the Kaaba, but around the Kaaba would have been the idols that people would come and, and worship their gods. Now the Kaaba is a structure that Muslims believe was created or constructed by Abraham.

They believe that Abraham took Hagar and Ishmael to Mecca and constructed this, this particular structure. Modern Muslims believe that the black stone that you see here was constructed from a meteorite that was sent from Allah, and modern Muslims believe it was a meteorite, they believe that Allah sent the meteorite down and that's what it was constructed out of.

In pre-Islamic Arabia, the building was surrounded with the 360 idols that I was talking about, and pilgrims would come there to worship, but it's now one of the most holy sites in, in Islam. You're actually not allowed to visit it unless you're a Muslim.

Muslims are required, at least once in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca and, and pray. There's actually a lot of rituals where they walk around it, where they pray, and they actually believe that, that you can be blessed by touching it.

So there's actually people that maybe have wounds and they would rub their wounds on the, the actual building to try and, and get a blessing and get healing from it. How did Islam spread? Well that, that's actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to that.

So pre-Islamic Arabia, the northern part of pre-Islamic Arabia, was sort of sandwiched in between the Byzantine and Persian Sasanian empires, and those empires were constantly fighting each other. And just like Judaism, Islam has a body of law.

Their law is called Sharia law, which we'll talk a bit more about later. There's actually a number of competing ideas about Sharia law. Unlike Judaism, Sharia law is not a fixed set of actual rules. Sharia law just, you know, really means, you know, Islam itself just means submission, and Muslim means one who submits.

And so you're submitting to the will of Allah. And so Sharia law is just following the Prophet, following Allah. The problem, really, of Sharia law comes into interpretations of what the holy texts, you know, what their interpretation is.

And we'll get into some of, some of that a little bit later when we actually talk about the, the Quran and the Hadiths. So when, when you become Muslim, you become part of the Ummah, which is the community of believers.

And so when Islam was, was actually coming up, it actually got Muhammad in a bunch of trouble because people were devoted to the Ummah, or the community of believers, over and above their own tribes. And so it actually got Muhammad in trouble.

Also, Muhammad was an avid preacher of monotheism, which obviously, given the pilgrimage trade that was going on there, was not, not too keen to keep him in, in, in good standing with his own tribe. So he was actually a member of the Banu Hashim clan within the Quraysh tribe.

And the Banu Hashim were traditionally stewards of, of the pilgrims who visited Mecca and pre-Islamic Arabia. But, you know, he, he was, you know, preaching this monotheism thing, and ultimately got him kicked out of, of Mecca in 622 AD, where he went off and headed towards Medina.

I think it was called something else at the time, and I think the next slide actually has a map. So you can see you've got the Byzantine and Persian Empire, and this is pre-Islamic Arabia, now Saudi Arabia, and there's, I think, a few others over here.

But, but you can see the Quraysh tribe over there, and Mecca was right around, right around there as well. But they ultimately kicked him out, and he ended up having to go to Medina, which was further, I guess that's east.

So when Muhammad was ultimately kicked out of Mecca and went to Medina, that's about the time that he severed their ties with Judaism. Because remember, this is an Abrahamic faith, which means they, they, they believe some things that are different from Jews at the time.

So they, they believe, for example, that Ishmael was the chosen son and not Isaac, and, and so forth. So there's, but they all believe that, that we, we sort of originated from the same sort of tradition, but somehow have been corrupted along the way.

Those of us who aren't Muslims, obviously. So in Medina, the Islamic community started to look more like an empire than a religion, because Muhammad was not only the prophet of Allah, but he was also their sort of civil leader.

He was their general, and he was sort of the, the caliph, or the head of state for them as well. And so, you know, they, they had kind of a small, a smallish empire over there in Medina, and Muhammad was actually quite a good general, and orchestrated and took back Mecca and 630 AD.

So there really is no separation from civic and religious duty in Islam. It is effectively a theocracy. So here are things like Caliphate, which is just the kingdom of the caliph. And so Muhammad was the only prophet, but he served as a, as a caliph.

And then when he died, the religion didn't need another prophet. It was fairly well established, but he, they needed to select a new caliph. The first one to be caliph after Muhammad's death was Abu Bakr, who was Muhammad's father-in-law.

And this caused actually a rift that exists today. So if you've heard of Sunni and Shia Muslims, this is why they are in conflict, because one group believes that Abu Bakr was the correct successor to Muhammad as the, as the first caliph, and the other believes that Ali, who was Muhammad's son-in-law, was the rightful successor to Muhammad as caliph.

And believe it or not, they still fight over that today. And so there, this rift was created back then. Ali did become the fourth caliph, but this group still thinks that the first four caliphs were illegitimate.

And, and there was also a lot of, apparently a lot of difficulty about Ali's, there's a lot of assassinations and stuff going on. So again, Shia and Sunni Muslims, the Shia believes that it should be Ali, and the Sunni believe that it was rightfully Abu Bakr.

And caliph is where the term caliphate comes from. So when you hear about creating a new Islamic caliphate, that's, it's just a kingdom, a theocracy kingdom. This next slide is sort of the campaign to take back Mecca.

So you can see Mecca here, and Medina there. So he was exiled over to Medina, but then over time orchestrated, you know, the take back of Mecca and, and the, you know, Islamic caliphate, you know, began there.

And then spread even further beyond that. So over the next 160 years, and this is after Muhammad had died, the Muslim Empire grew from Arabia and took over much of the Middle East. And this is why it is said that the, the religion of Islam spread by the sword, although it didn't exclusively spread by the sword.

It, they kind of got this, the Islamic caliphate got, they were just really good at winning wars. They were really good fighters, and so they sort of got the, the idea that, that Islam spread by the sword.

But there were a number of cultures that embraced Islam for lots of other reasons. Some of them embraced it because they, they, they looked at the Islamic caliphate's ability to win wars and thought, because when, when people fought wars back then, as, as you see in the Old Testament, it wasn't just the country's fighting, it was their gods fighting, right?

And so when the Muslims would win all these wars, people would say, oh their gods must be stronger, we should worship their gods, right? Or God, in this case. And, and then others converted because they had to pay taxes.

If they, the, the Muslims would allow them to live, but they would pay these taxes for not being Muslims, and so some people converted just because nobody likes to pay taxes. If you have to pay taxes to worship a god, well maybe worship a different god, right?

It depends on how devoted you are to your god. And so there were many cultures that converted peacefully, and then there were certainly cultures that were conquered and, and, and ruled and converted by the sword itself.

And a lot of extremists nowadays are, are, are harsher even than they were in those days. So this next slide is, it shows you, this is Arabia and where it grew up, and then it basically spread all the way over and took over much of the Middle East and northern Africa.

So the, the, you know, the Empire really kind of grew, took over the Persian Empire and so forth. So Islam spread as a result of, of that, and this talks about the, and I'm gonna do what, what Drew did, where I think, Drew, you put all of your documents in a folder and then shared the whole folder.

I think I'm gonna do that as well, that way you guys can all have access to all of the, the topics that we've covered, or that I've taught. So this was essentially the spread of Islam. Now this gets into the sacred texts.

The Quran, the Hadiths, and the Five Pillars

So there's two groups of, of sacred texts. The first is obviously the Quran, and the Quran is an interesting book because the Quran is not narrative like the Bible is. It is considered to be literally the words of God.

So God or Allah would dictate to Gabriel, and Gabriel would dictate to Muhammad, and Muhammad would just recite the words of God. And so it's not, it's not really telling a story as much as it is sort of sayings.

And, and, and so the, the thing was, is Muhammad was actually illiterate when he became a prophet. He didn't know how to read or write. And so he didn't actually, and if you tell a Muslim that Muhammad wrote the Quran, they'll actually get angry because Muhammad didn't write anything.

Muhammad recited, and then others wrote down. So it was generally friends that would act as scribes to write down, write down his words. And then shortly after Muhammad's death, all of those things that were written down were sort of compiled together into the Quran by either what people had written down, or even what some had memorized of what Muhammad had said.

And in the Quran, it actually mentions Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus, and Isaac, and it mentions a lot of, you would see a lot of names that you see in our Christian Bible and in the Jewish Torah mentioned also in, in the Quran itself.

But you have to understand that the Quran was not written really from a human's perspective. It wasn't like trying to tell us a story. It was more just the words of God written out on a on a page. And Muslims actually believe that all monotheistic sacred texts, such as the Torah and the Bible, are also the Word of God.

They would actually say they're the Word of God, and that they believe that those books actually teach Islam. They believe that they're from Muhammad and actually teach Islam, but were corrupted by man over time.

So they believe that the original Jewish Bible and Christian Bible, and, and that all of these prophets, they would consider Moses and Jesus and, and Abraham, they would consider them all prophets, but they believe that they were prophets of Allah and preached Islam, and that it was just corrupted by others over time.

Muhammad was the seal of the prophets. That's right. And, and they believe that Muhammad was the seal of the prophets, or the final prophet that was meant to correct the, the actual corruption. And so they believe he was the final prophet to bring God's Word back to the one true religion of Islam, and that was the religion that worshipped the one true God.

And they reject the Trinity, by the way. They just believe that there is one God. And they actually believe that God is not, it's not like a personal relationship. It's a duty for us to please God, but we don't actually have a relationship with God.

And he didn't have a son. Yeah, and he didn't have a son, and, and, and they also, and we'll talk a bit about some other things that they believe as well. The second body of, of sacred texts are called the Hadiths.

The Hadiths are a collection of sayings or stories about the Prophet Muhammad. The problem with the Hadiths is some are better sourced than others. So just like if you remember when we talked about the Bible, we talked about textual criticism, and we talked about, you know, certain books that were put into canon because they could be accurately sourced or, or reliably sourced back to their original writer.

So Pauline epistles or, you know, the Book of John being written, you know, by John, and why certain things were excluded or included. Well the problem with the Hadiths is they just kind of lump them all together, and some of them are very reliably sourced, and others are very unreliably sourced.

And so the Isnad, or the chain of narrators, is the official list of sources that go along with each Hadith. The shorter and more reliable the list of narrators, the more accepted the Hadith is. So they have this, like some Muslims will just throw some Hadiths out and say, I don't believe those are, those are legitimate.

But then, because they are Hadiths, you have some Islamic extremists who will hone in on one. So the one example is the, you know, dying as a martyr and getting 72 virgins. That is a, what they consider, a poorly sourced Hadith.

So it's a Hadith, but they don't consider it a reliable one, but you'll see that, that a lot of this Islamic extremists will hone in on that 72 virgin martyrdom Hadith as, you know, for terrorist, you know, reasons.

So the way that I describe this is some of the Hadiths are accurately sourced, they're, you know, they could be reliably sourced back to something that Muhammad actually said, and others are more whispered down the lane, right?

Things that were just transmitted over time and, and are almost folklore in some cases. So some Muslims don't consider poorly sourced Hadiths as scripture, but obviously it's hard to tell when you have this kind of fluctuation, right?

It could be, it could be accurate or not. So these are the two major bodies of sacred texts for Muslims. Any questions about those? So now we'll get into sort of the doctrines of Islam. So the first is what you'll mostly hear from any Muslim is the five pillars of Islam.

The first pillar is the Shahada. The Shahada is essentially their profession of faith. You'll hear them speaking in Arabic largely. I, I tried, I can't. I can't do it. We forgive you. Forgive me for that.

But the English translation is, there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is Allah's prophet. That is their, that is their statement of faith, and Allah is just Arabic for God. That's, that's all it is.

So we, we say Allah, but all it is is just the Arabic word for God. So you could read this as, there's no God but God, and Muhammad is God's prophet. And believe it or not, this Shahada is actually whispered into the ears of newborns by their parents, and they are supposed to recite it on their deathbed.

So their entire life is encapsulated by the Shahada. So, and the one thing you could take from devout Muslims is they are very serious about their duties, right? They take seriously the duties, the five pillars and their duties, which is something I wish more Christians did about Christianity, but, but that is the Shahada and the first pillar.

The second pillar is called the Salat, this, or Salah. I don't know if it's pronounced Salat or Salah. This is the ritual prayer, right? The five times a day prayer. The first time is at dawn. It's called the Fajr.

The second is at noon, which, which is the Zuhir. The third is the afternoon, which is Asir. The fourth is at sunset, and the fifth is in late evening. And you must always face Mecca when you're praying.

And believe it or not, I think they used to face Jerusalem, but Muhammad changed that when he went to Medina and, and, you know, separated from Judaism. The significance of this is, first, submission to Allah.

Second, the fulfillment of religious duty. Third, the inculcation of moral values. Fourth, the teaching of discipline to the youth. Fifth, the development of community. And sixth, the journey to spiritual upliftment.

So they, they view the, the, the ritual prayer as a way of breaking up their day and, and, you know, essentially praying to Allah. And the praying, the ritual prayer is very ritualistic, meaning they're reciting portions of the Qur 'an, they're reciting certain things.

They actually have to interject sort of inner, sort of supplication in the midst of that. So Nabil Qureshi, if you watch the, and different Muslims do this differently. Some of them doing it at the end, some of them do it in the middle when their face is on the ground.

They'll, they'll do it at different times, but mostly it's a ritualistic sort of recitation of portions of the Qur 'an and different, and, and they would actually have to memorize portions so they can recite them.

So unlike a lot of Christians who don't do a whole lot of memorization of the Bible, they'll mem, they have to memorize because they have to have something to say during these prayers. And so they'll memorize portions so that they can just recite them during, during these prayers.

Now the only exceptions to the ritual prayer is if you haven't hit puberty yet, or if you're too sick to actually pray, or women if they're menstruating, which I thought was an interesting one. But those are the only exceptions that you have to the ritual prayer.

You're supposed to do this, and actually work with a gentleman who literally does this. We actually have prayer rooms in that they can go to and work and actually, and actually pray. The next three pillars, the third pillar is psalm, which is the month-long fast they do during the month of Ramadan, which is based on a lunar calendar, so it doesn't happen in the same month every year.

And actually I think there was recent news about Passover and Easter and Ramadan all sort of colliding in Jerusalem this year around the same time. And, and so this is a month-long fast. Now it's a different kind of fast than you normally think of when you think of Christian fast.

They only fast during the day hours. So essentially what they'll do is they'll get up before dawn and eat a lot of food. They'll feast before dawn. Then they won't eat or drink, not even water, because remember this is a sort of almost nomadic desert society, so water was very important.

So they won't drink even water, and some will even be spitting throughout the day so they don't swallow their own saliva. That's how serious they are about the fasting. Where they don't eat, drink, or smoke cigarettes.

I'm not sure why smoking cigarettes is in there, but they don't do any of those, those things during the day hours. And then when the sun goes down they will have another big feast. So this is like a community building thing where they'll, they'll have these sort of community feasts, you know, before and after the day, daylight hours.

So obviously it's probably a lot more fun to fast in the winter than it is in the summer because the days are shorter in the winter. So Ramadan is in commemoration of what? So Ramadan is like their, is kind of like their atonement time.

So it's, it's, it's kind of like, I guess, I guess the equivalent is what? Yom Kippur for Jews, which is, you know, it's, it's just their holy month. So they'll do that fasting then. Okay, the fourth pillar is Zakat.

Zakat is almsgiving. Now everyone in here has heard of tithing, right? Giving 10 of your income, essentially, right? And there's also, you know, there's offering giving, there's tithing. Well almsgiving for Muslims is not based off income, it's based off net worth.

So you're supposed to give 2 .5 annually of your net worth, of all that you own, to the poor or to charity. Now the funny thing about Zakat is you can actually be a recipient of Zakat if you're one of the poor.

So again, this is, there can be exceptions to folks if they are poor themselves, and they can actually be recipients of it. But the way that Muslims give is, and they have, it's, it's crazy, they have, both for, for praying, the ritual prayer, they have apps on phones now that tell you where Mecca is so that you can pray.

They have apps and complex calculations for calculating Zakat, the actual two and a half percent. It's not just, oh I gotta look at my bank statement and two and a half percent of that. Like they have, it's possessions, right?

So they have these calculators that they can use to determine how much they need to give. And this is, you know, another, another major duty that they have to fulfill. And the fifth and final pillar is Hajj.

Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca. This is where they actually have to fulfill, they have to fulfill going to Mecca at least once in their life, and praying at the Kaaba. The, the only exceptions again are if they are too unhealthy to do it, or are too poor to do it.

Those would be the two,.

Salvation, Sharia, and the Meaning of Submission

Two exceptions to that rule. Amen. Yes. So you haven't mentioned anything about sin or forgiveness or anything like that. Is the whole concept here, is if you do these five things well enough you're in right standing?

So it's, it's a deeds.

Based, it's a deeds based religion. So essentially the, the eschatology is that, and it's very... Not eschatology, that's not what you mean. No, but I'm getting at your judgment at the end, right? It's very weird to me because essentially it's, it's if your good deeds outweigh your bad, then you go to heaven, right?

And, and so performing these duties, there's also other things that, that they, that they have to do, but, but essentially performing these duties, you know, for God, pleasing God, is how you get to heaven.

Now the trick is that they also believe in sovereignty. So similar to, you know, sort of predestination or, or Calvinism, you know, for some, some of us who are more Calvinistic, they also believe that it's preordained, who goes to heaven and who doesn't.

And they also, they believe that Allah can both multiply your good deeds so that they outweigh your bad, and they can, he can also overlook your good deeds because, so it's, it's entirely up to Allah whether or not you go to heaven, but, but the theory is if you, if you fulfill your duties, then you will go to heaven.

The only guarantees to get into heaven are dying as a martyr or if you fought in the first war to take back Mecca with Muhammad. Obviously nobody has done that that's alive today, but, but everyone that fought in that battle supposedly goes to heaven, and if you die as a martyr, you're guaranteed to go to heaven.

So a martyr for the faith, which you'll hear a lot of extremists talk about. That's why they do acts of, you know, suicide terrorism. But, but yeah, it's basically a deeds-based, works-based, and, and again, it's not relationship-based.

It's not that you have a relationship with God. It's that you are doing these things to please God so that he can, you know, either multiply your good deeds so that they outweigh your bad deeds, and you can go to heaven.

So it's entirely a deeds-based religion. Sharia law. It's, this is the moral law of Muslims. It is actually part of the laws of the United Arab Emirates, believe it or not. It's built in, now, it's, it's what they consider to be Sharia law.

Again, it's very, Sharia law is a very fuzzy concept. It is practiced by nearly all Muslims, at least their understanding of Sharia law. It is perverted by Muslim jihadists. They will interpret certain hadiths a certain way and consider that part of Sharia law, but Sharia law as, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, if you, if you talk to a Muslim scholar, they will say Sharia law is just about justice and the common good, and it's following Allah and the Quran and Muhammad.

And so, so the problem is that it's not really all that well-defined. So if you look at, if you look at Judaism, for example, right, you have, you have the law of Moses, and then Jews go to excruciating detail to document hundreds of additional laws.

I'm talking about modern-day Jews. They follow all these laws where you get things like you're not allowed to work on the Sabbath. Well, what does that mean? That means you're allowed to only lift this much.

You're allowed to only walk this far. Like, they're very into the details about what the law actually means. Well, Sharia law is a lot more fuzzy than that. It doesn't have that level of, of sort of definition, which is why it can be perverted.

And so you have certain countries in the Middle East that practice a very harsh form of Sharia law, but if you asked an American Muslim who is, you know, fully, you know, Westernized, if they follow Sharia law, they would say yes, right?

So things like the Hajjib would be part of Sharia law, right? It's essentially just their moral law. So again, the problem with certain Hadiths being very poorly sourced is that you can say, well, I'm following Sharia law because it's, in this particularly poorly sourced Hadith, it says to do X, and therefore, you know, like, women can't read or something, right?

They're not allowed to get an education or something like that. So is there an interpreting body, like, kind of like a Supreme Court of Muslims that knows the final ruling? Not really. What you'll end up is with things like the Taliban, right?

Which, again, it's a theistic or theocratic, you know, governance. So you'll end up with imams and, you know, different bodies like the Taliban who will be doing the interpreting. So you're really subject to whomever is doing the interpreting.

You could go to liberal, more liberal Western imams, and they will interpret it totally differently. So there's no... So it differs by caliphate? It differs by, you know, whatever the sphere of influence is of that.

Particular governing body. Matt, I know there's parts of Minneapolis that is quartered off. Yes. That's following Sharia law. There's some more Somali... Yes.

Yeah, because remember, Islam, if you look back at the map, it's in northern Africa as well, right? And so Islam has grown even further there. Like I said, it's like a quarter of the population of the world.

So yeah, there are parts of France, there are parts of America, and in Great Britain as well, especially in, like, I think the London area, where you've got population centers that are full of folks that have immigrated from some of these Muslim countries who are, you know, instead of assimilating into the culture that they have immigrated to, are essentially preserving their culture in that particular country, Minneapolis.

Again, another example of that. So yeah, and they would practice Sharia law.

There as well. Yes, and they don't seek to immigrate, they seek to dominate. Yeah.

Well, think about it from their, like, I try not to do this too much, but think about it from their perspective. They believe that that is God's law, right? So think about, in the Christian circles, theonomists, right?

We talked about theonomists who want essentially a Christian theocracy and think that that is the ultimate goal. I don't want to equate them or have a false equivalence too much with them, but it's a similar concept.

If you truly believed that Sharia law, whatever form you consider Sharia law, was God's law, wouldn't you want to make it the law of the land, right? So that's kind of the perspective you have to have with them.

Now, obviously, there are tremendous abuses because you're dealing with human beings here, but yeah. The problem is that there's conflicts with the Constitution and you have some of these elected officials that, you know, were elected out of these areas that follow this type of law, and then they want to just subvert the Constitution.

I know up in Maine there's a whole section of Portland which is, it's all Somali refugees. You know, we go to these foreign countries and we have these wars, and then to make amends for these wars that we have, we go ahead and say, well, we can bring thousands and thousands of them, and we'll put them in the middle of white landia, which is like, you know, where there's no Muslims at all, and we'll just like plop them down in Portland, Maine.

Yes. And next thing you know, there's all these mosques and stuff like that, and it's, you know, it's definitely, they're not, they're definitely not trying to be a melting pot into our country. They're trying to keep their culture the way it is and and dominate.

That's what they're trying to do. Yeah, and yeah, I mean, I try to, I try to be gracious, though, and say if I were plopped in an atheistic country, would they say the same thing about me because I decided to stand up a church and evangelize, you know, for Christ in that particular country?

So while there are certainly abuses and certainly people trying to subvert the, you know, the laws of this land, the Constitution, and so forth, and I'm not discounting that in any way, but when you think about it, someone's, you know, belief system, they're going to try and preserve their belief system.

Of course they are. We would try to preserve our belief system as well. So I try to give a little bit of grace, but yes, we have to stop. We can't turn into a, you know, a Sharia law country, right? We can't allow that, but, you know, people are gonna, are gonna hold on to their, to their beliefs.

But they're quick to interpret your grace as weakness. They're quick to interpret what? Your grace as weakness. Oh, my grace as weakness. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. There are certainly some, and not everyone is acting in good faith, right, in those communities either.

So, you know, there's going to be that because you're dealing with, again, human beings. How about the, how about the You're talking about from, like, South America? From Spain. Yeah, so in Spain there was, again, yeah, there was a, there was a lot of, the Islamic Empire grew into Spain until they were thrown out.

Jesus in Islam and Why Christians Reject It