Category • History & Politics• Muhammad
Muhammad’s Relationships with Women, Christians, and God
Dr. Larson describes some of the history of Muhammad’s adult life, including his relationship to Christians.
Dr. Larson describes some of the history of Muhammad’s adult life, including his relationship to Christians.
The sordid histories of both institutional Christianity and Islam are replete with political and military enmeshment. Our Christian forbears left us the legacy of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Wars of Religion—sterling examples of what happens when sincere obedience to Jesus is subverted by a political/military/economic agenda, endorsed by clergy…
There are typically two responses to ISIS. ‘ISIS has nothing to do with Islam’ or ‘ISIS are the real Muslims’. It’s easy to understand why so many Muslims—especially in western contexts—dissociate themselves from ISIS. They are thoroughly embarrassed to think that non-Muslims around them might assume that because they are Muslims, they must have some sympathy with ISIS and all that it is doing. They therefore argue that many of the practices of ISIS are completely un-Islamic, even anti-Islamic and cannot be justified by the legal traditions that have been developed over many centuries.
At the other extreme there are many Christians—and, dare I say, especially evangelical Christians—who believe that ISIS is much nearer to the spirit and practice of early Islam than moderate Muslims of today. They point to particular verses in the Qur’an (e.g. about beheading, crucifixion and slavery) and passages in Hadith literature, the biographies of Muhammad and legal texts to show the connections between the brutalities of ISIS and early Islamic texts.
Both of these approaches are thoroughly unhelpful and need to be challenged.
Many Americans today associate the word “evangelical” with white Republicans, especially the large number who voted for Trump in the 2016 election. How did the word “evangelical” become disconnected from vibrant Christian faith and connected, instead, in popular usage at least, to politics and ethnicity? In part, through the movement’s increasing politicization, ethnic misunderstandings between black and white evangelicals, and the rise of polling data tracking religious demographics. The term’s evolution presents a fresh challenge to American Christians, who cannot afford to mistake this-worldly political affiliations with our heavenly citizenship…
There has been a dramatic decline in the number of Christians in the Middle East and they face some difficult dilemmas. At the time of the Islamic Conquests in the 7th century, a few thousand Muslim Arabs were ruling over a population in which the majority were Christians.
Since 1900 the Christian population of the region has gone from 14% (around 7 million) to 5% (around 25 million) in 2015…