I. CHRISTIANITY ON THE HORIZON#

As the third millennium gains momentum, the Christian church finds itself weighed down by many of the same burdens it faced in the twentieth century:

  • suffocating poverty

  • rampant sexual abuse especially against women and children

  • moral decline

  • hypocritical leaders

  • institutionalization

  • youthful rejection of traditional values and teachings

  • harsh internecine battles over increasingly fine points of theology

  • bounded versus centered ecclesial visions

  • racial and ethnic tensions

  • clueless church hierarchies

The enduring challenge for all thoughtful Christians has always centered on how to live out their Christian faith in a fallen world.

From this cauldron of tribulations that await us in the future, there is yet one challenge that is more immediate than any other: the rise of militant Islam.

II. 2001: A RELIGIOUS ODYSSEY#

For as long as humans have roamed the earth, religion has been a vital life force within the human experience. Academic soothsayers of the twentieth century lost sight of this fundamental reality and predicted that religion would be absorbed by the secular. Reports of God’s death, however, proved to be greatly exaggerated. If anyone wondered whether religion was still a potent force in the new millennium, all doubt was removed on a clear September day in 2001.

On that bloody Tuesday, a series of coordinated suicide attacks was launched against American symbols of economic and military power. The shadowy Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, headed by the Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, struck a deadly blow against American invincibility.

On that autumn morning, terrorists intentionally crashed two hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, as millions gasped at their television screens. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, leaving a terrible scar on the New York cityscape. A second group of hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, headed for Washington, DC, crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after passengers courageously rushed the militants in an attempt to retake control of the plane. Nineteen terrorists managed to take the lives of 2,999 people in the three attacks, including 358 Muslims.

Amid the flood of condolences from Muslim leaders around the world, other Muslims were celebrating the attack. Thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets of Nablus on the West Bank, chanting “All?hu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”), blaring car horns, and holding up the “V sign” for victory.

Since 2001, many of the leaders of al-Qaeda have been killed in combat or by radar-guided bombs launched from high-tech military drones. The coup de grâce occurred in 2011 when American elite Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. In spite of U.S. declarations to the contrary, many in the Arab world viewed the death of bin Laden and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not as a war on terrorism, but as a war on Islam.

The religious dimension of the conflict between Islam and the West entails more than theology and dogmatics. It is a clash of cultures and values. In short, American values are judged both corrupt and corrupting. It is not simply that the West is inherently evil, but that it is an evil with a rapacious appetite. Islamic fundamentalists therefore view the very existence of the evil empire of the West as a clear and present danger that must be resisted by all means necessary.

This begs the question: Can two billion Christians and more than one billion Muslims peacefully coexist?

III. RELIGIONS IN CONFLICT#

A. The First 1,400 Years#

Christianity’s first encounter with Islam was violent.

  • In 638 Muslims took both Jerusalem and Antioch by military force.

  • By 642, Muslims had taken Alexandria.

Of the five ancient patriarchates, in which resided ultimate authority over the church, three were conquered by Muslims in the span of five years. Although the western European nations were ultimately repelled, the bloody Crusades of the Middle Ages left a bitterness that continues today.

When Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christianity, fell to Islam in 1453, the city was renamed Istanbul, and the largest Christian cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years, the Hagia Sophia, became a Muslim mosque. At the height of its power in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

The Muslims remained a major threat to the West until the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which marked the end of Ottoman expansion into Europe. The failure to take Vienna set in motion a gradual decline in Muslim power over the next two centuries. However, for most of their history, Muslims were largely victorious in their confrontations with Western Christian nations. That changed at the turn of the twentieth century.

The fateful decision to side with Germany in World War I led to the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which shared in Germany’s defeat. The consequence was dismemberment of the empire, with the spoils going to the victors.

  • The French took Lebanon and Syria.

  • The British took Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and part of the Arabian Peninsula.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, more than 90 percent of Muslims lived under Western rule—a disgrace virtually unparalleled in their history.

In the aftermath of World War I, only four Muslim countries remained independent: Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.

  • Turkey and Iran became secular states with a Muslim population.

  • Afghanistan remained poor and politically insignificant.

  • Saudi Arabia remained the Islamic epicenter — the land of Mecca and Medina, the birthplace of Muhammad, the destination of the Hajj, and the geographical focal point of Muslim prayer.

It was during this period of Western domination that the Saudi royal family discovered the writings of the eighteenth-century radical Muhammad ibn al Wahhab (1703–92) and embraced his austere form of Sunni Islam.

Wahhab advocated an especially militant and punitive form of Islam.

  • Sharia law was made the governing rule of the Arabian Peninsula.

  • All other forms of Islam were rejected, and all opponents denounced as apostates and infidels.

  • Wahhab even went so far as to assert that other Muslims who did not embrace Wahhabism should be killed and their property confiscated.

Wahhabism might have remained a small obscure sect were it not for the discovery of oil beneath the sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

B. Petro-Islam#

A turning point in the history of the Middle East came with the discovery of oil, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia and then in other Persian Gulf states. The Middle East, it turned out, possesses the world’s largest accessible reserves of crude oil. Rulers of the oil states became immensely rich, enabling them to consolidate their hold on power and giving them enormous political clout.

No Muslim nation benefitted more from the “black gold” than Saudi Arabia. Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud managed to consolidate the various political factions on the Arabian Peninsula under the house of Saud and to create the modern nation of Saudi Arabia in 1932. The discovery of oil in March 1938 eventually transformed Saudi Arabia from a regional kingdom to a global power broker by the 1970s. As tensions increased in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia began openly to use its oil wealth to fund Wahhabist proselytizing efforts all over the Islamic world—mosques, madrassas (schools or universities that are often part of a mosque), and journalism.

What had been a fringe sect of Islam became a force with which to reckon by both the moderate Muslims and the Western world.

C. Arab-Israeli Conflict#

Perhaps the major pivot point in the twentieth-century Middle East was the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

  • The birth of the nation of Israel and the consequent displacement of the Palestinian people led to more than half a century of bad blood and bloodshed between Jews and Muslims.

  • Israelis were viewed by Muslims as invaders who had taken from the Palestinians what had been Islamic territory for over a millennium.

Religious solidarity compelled other Muslims to take up the Palestinian cause.

This inevitably led to a series of regional wars over the last half of the twentieth century and into the third millennium:

  • The Arab-Israeli War (1948)

  • The Suez Canal Crisis (1956)

  • The Six Day War (1967)

  • The Yom Kippur War (1973)

  • The First Intifada (1987–93)

  • The Second Intifada (2000–2005)

  • The Lebanon War (2006), and too many military skirmishes to count.

Each humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel deepened Muslim resentment and ensured that the Middle East would remain a powder keg for the foreseeable future. The Israeli military success was attributed in significant measure to the support of the United States. Consequently, militant Muslims have turned their sights on what some have called “the Great Satan.”

D. The “Great Satan”#

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was one of the signal events in the late twentieth-century resurgence of lslamic militancy. The architect of the Islamic revolt was the Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who made Iran the first modern Islamist state.

  • Not only was the Iranian Revolution successful in ousting the Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi); it also was seen as an act of defiance against the perceived imperialism of America, which Khomeini designated “the Great Satan.”

  • The Iranian Revolution not only overthrew the westernized secular monarchy of the shah, but also cut the strings of the puppet masters in America.

Khomeini viewed Western powers and westernizing Muslims as complicit in a global conspiracy against Islam. When Iranian students seized control of the U.S. embassy in November 1979 in violation of international law and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days, Khomeini supported the students.

The hostage crisis was a political humiliation for the American government, but for Khomeini it was Allah’s vindication against the Great Satan as well as retaliation for Western interference in Iranian affairs. Glorying in his triumph, Khomeini denounced the United States in religious terminology as the enemy of Islam.

While there have been periods of tolerance and goodwill between the Christian West and Muslims, that has not been the case in recent decades.

IV. THE DEVIL IN THE DEMOGRAPHICS#

Demographic research indicates this will remain the case for centuries to come. At the turn of the twentieth century, these two religions collectively represented less than 50 percent of the world’s population, but by 2050 they are projected to represent more than 60 percent. Currently, there are about 2.3 billion Christians in the world, or about 33 percent of the world population. Muslims number about 1.5 billion adherents and make up 22 percent.

Both religions are experiencing significant growth, especially Islam, which will have doubled its share of world population in 140 years (from 13 percent in 1910 to 27 percent in 2050). That 2050 projection sees 2.4 billion Muslims compared with 3.2 billion Christians (35 percent of the world population).

One of the most ominous demographic projections is that “ten of the world’s twenty-five largest states in 2050 could be profoundly divided between Islam and Christianity, and judging by present trends, any or all of them could be the scene of serious interfaith conflict.” This nightmare scenario might unfold in a nation like Nigeria.

Nigeria is one of the more prominent nations in Africa — having the largest population on the African continent and being the seventh most populous country in the world. By the end of this century the United Nations estimates that the Nigerian population could approach one billion people. It is the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter and has the tenth-largest proven oil reserves.

Precisely because Nigeria is such an important African nation, if religious violence breaks out there, the potential for a much larger conflagration is probable. Even more ominous is the fact that it is a nation evenly divided between Christians in the south and Muslims in the north.

Tensions are in fact on the rise. In the 1990s Muslims in the north began demanding that Sharia law be implemented, and currently twelve of Nigeria’s thirty-six states have instituted it. This is a legal code that prohibits any kind of Christian evangelism and prescribes the death penalty for any Muslim who dares to embrace Christianity. This development not only strikes fear in the hearts of Nigerian Christians, but severely constricts economic, social, and political interactions between north and south. Further entangling an already complicated situation, Nigeria has been and continues to be ruled by a Christian president.

The situation in Nigeria is not merely hypothetical. A more recent explosive development is the emergence of Boko Haram, a violent Islamic terrorist group committed to the eradication of the secular government and the establishment of Sharia law in the country.

  • In August 2011 they bombed the United Nations building in Abuja.

  • In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and destroyed more than 350 churches.

  • In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for fifty-four murders.

Religious violence could easily spread to some or all of the countries that border Nigeria. All have majority Muslim populations or possess significant minorities, such as Niger, which is 98 percent. Arab Wahhabists have turned up in Niger more recently, and for the first time, religious violence has erupted. Other countries bordering Nigeria are Chad (54 percent Muslim, 34 percent Christian), Benin (27 percent Christian, 24 percent Muslim), and Cameroon (70 percent Christian, 21 percent Muslim).

A. 10/40 Christian Provocation#

Christian missionaries often speak of the “10/40 window” — a term coined by missiologist Luis Bush in 1990 to identify that region of the planet where the spiritual and physical needs are greatest. It refers to geographic coordinates located between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator and generally comprises the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.

This region is important to missiologists because it is the hub of the world’s major non-Christian religions: 865 million Muslims, 550 million Hindus, and 275 million Buddhists. The 10/40 window also encompasses 82 percent of the world’s poorest populations and has the least exposure to the Christian message.

The 10/40 window is one of the primary target areas of evangelical missionaries in the twenty-first century and also has the greatest potential for religious violence between Christians and Muslims. The Christian aim of converting Muslims is itself a crime in most Muslimdominant countries and thus inevitably is perceived as a provocation by the West.

To many Muslims the mere presence of Christian missionaries is not only a religious menace, but since Islam conjoins religious and political convictions, is perceived as a political threat as well.

For a Muslim to abandon his or her faith is not only apostasy; it is political and cultural treason — a violation punishable by death under Islamic law.

B. The Conflict within Islam#

Divisions, oppositions, and violence have been a constitutive part of the Islamic tradition ever since the death of the prophet Muhammad. Islam has three main branches: Sunni, Shiite, and Sufi.

  • Sunni is by far the largest branch of Islam, representing 86 percent.

  • Shiites make up 13 percent.

  • Sufis are found in all traditions, much like Charismatics among Christians.

Tensions, especially between Sunni and Shiites, have portrayed a long and bloody history that continues into the present. Further, moderates and militants interpret the Sharia law in vastly different ways.

  • The moderates interpret Sharia law much more loosely, while the militants take a rigid literal stance.

  • Militants believe the Qur’an justifies jihad (“holy war”), while moderates assiduously declare that terrorism is a blatant violation of the Qur’an and historic Islamic teaching.

V. A CONCLUDING CODA#

Only time will tell if Christians and Muslims can peacefully coexist and share space on this small planet. From our human vantage point, we see the future only through a glass darkly. But it may be helpful to be reminded that Christianity was born amid a plurality of competing religious alternatives.

In a culturally diverse matrix of Judaism, pagan mystery cults, philosophical Hellenism, and Roman domination, a message emerged that would survive them all. As one dares peer into the future, we may be reminded that the Christian gospel changed the world once before.

If it happened before, can it happen again?

The ultimate value of history lies not in its predictive ability or even its capacity for elucidation, but in its aptitude to teach humility. Church history, in particular, is an opportunity for self-reflection and, indeed, for self-correction. If the story of the Christian church can bestow on us a measure of this humility, then we will enter the uncertain future with a sure compass.