Synopsis:
When the news depicts only tragedy, it begs the question, “is this all there is?” David Garrison shares his findings from his book, “A Wind in the House of Islam” and reminds us that God is always moving.
Theme Music by: Nobara Hayakawa – Trail
Sponsor Music by: Drunk Pedestrians – Mean
Interlude Music by: Labon – North, Chris ZaBriskie – Cylinder 6, There are Different Kinds of Love, I Am a Man that Will Fight for Your Honor, Aeoa – 4, Pitx – See You Later
Here starts the auto-generated transcription of What God is Doing in the House of Islam:
I talked to a shake in the horn of Africa who I said tell me your story because he had he came to breakfast with me. It was a day after Christmas back in 2011. He had, 9 guys, I think it was with him, and he had led about 7 of them to Christ and those 7 were imams and shakes. So I asked him, I said, tell me, how did you come to faith? And he said, well, someone, this in this case, it was an African evangelist gave him a new testament in Arabic.
Now Arabic is not the language of that culture, so it’s a little bit strange. But because he was a sheik and he had been studying the Quran since he was 2 years old, he understood Arabic. Furthermore, it created a bit of a conflict because he says, you know, I knew Arabic was God’s language. This could not be corrupted. So he started from this basis of here’s an Arabic, New Testament.
He begins reading it that night. He put it under his pillow, went to sleep, and he had a dream. In his dream, he said, I saw, there was this minaret. At the top, it had a big loudspeaker on it, and someone was working on the loudspeaker. It was broken, but the the minaret started shaking.
And I looked down at the bottom to see why was it shaking? And someone at the bottom of the minaret had an axe and they were chopping down the minaret. And I looked at the person and I looked closely his face and it was me. Once again, Muslim terrorists A terrorist. Islamic extremists.
These and it certainly is not irrelevant. It is a warning. Welcome to the Truth About Muslims podcast. The official podcast of the Swimmer Center For Muslim Studies, where we help to educate you beyond the media. Here are your hosts, Howard and Trevor.
Alright. Welcome to the Truth About Muslims podcast. We’re super excited because today we have a very special guest. Trevor, you wanna introduce him? I I I just wanna point out that Howard said super excited.
I am also super excited. We have David Garrison in the studio today. And David Garrison, wrote a book, a while back called Church Planning Movements. And Howard and I read that when we were Youth With A Mission missionaries and thought, man, this guy sounds awesome. And now, he’s in the studio.
Right. That that was like the most official church planning book that we’ve ever seen and we’re like, this is what real missionaries do. That’s right. And so, Garrison, you have a a new book out, A Wind in the House of Islam, How God is Drawing Muslims Around the World to Faith in Jesus Christ. And I I say this with no exaggeration.
This is only one of 2 books that I have read cover to cover in one sitting. This book is an excellent account of what God is doing in the world, how he is drawing Muslims to himself. And so, David, welcome to the studio. Let’s start with just how did you even get the idea to write or take on such a huge task of documenting what God is doing in the Muslim world? Well, you know when I was assigned as a missionary back in 1992 to Libyan Arabs, my wife and I went to North Africa, began studying Arabic, moved around from Egypt to Tunisia and various other places.
And I think during that time, Trevor, we learned, hundreds of ways not to win Muslims to Christ. I also know those ways, my friend. It was it was striking. I think the only movement we’d ever heard of, and by that I mean at least a 1000 baptisms, was was actually taking place in neighboring Algeria. But other than that, you could look across the Muslim world and they were just the last of the giants.
There just wasn’t much going on. Now fast forward a decade later, I’m living in India with my my family and we have Muslim background believers who are evangelists, they’re church planters. We’re seeing multiple networks of Muslim movements to Christ. So move flash forward a few years later by 2009, I’m approached by some Christians who say, you know, we’re hearing more and more reports. Are you hearing this too?
I said yes. They said look we’ve got a little foundation that we would like to fund you to go and investigate these movements. Find out what’s going on. I told him I said you know that’s been on my my bucket list for a while. I think I’m getting too close to kicking that bucket.
I’m not sure I can actually do it. But but I was game to try and so we set out a project that would take the International Mission Board. Southern Baptist supported this as well for me to take the next 3 years to travel wherever I needed to go to to investigate these movements and, to ask the fundamental question, what did God use to bring you to faith in Christ? Well, even before that, in the beginning of the book, you talk about for the first 1300 years of history with Christian Muslim interaction, there is virtually no movements of Muslims to Christ. There are actually and I I’m glad you put this in the book because I felt like it was it was honest.
There were a lot of absorption of Christian communities by Muslims and there were virtually no Muslims moving to Jesus, no movements. Yeah. This is something I had to look into because my background is in church history. I’ve got a degree from the University of Chicago and I knew that as sure as I published this and said, oh look what an amazing thing is happening right now. Some historian would step up and say, of course that also happened in the 15th century, 13th century, twice in the 11th century, and of course everyone knows about the movements that took place in the 10th century.
So I had to go back and check and see when have there been movements of Muslims to Christ. So I’ll go all the way back to the year 6 22 really when Mohammed declared his religion, and in 632 when he died. And I wanted to see any time in history and any expression of Christianity, when we had at least a 1,000 baptisms. And you know the first 350 years, we finally see one movement that takes place up on the Syria Turkey border. We go 2 centuries later, we see 2 maybe movements.
One is taking place in the Levant during the occupied period of the the crusades. Another one takes place, a very cryptic one takes place down in Libya where 64100 Libyans are baptized. And then there’s this half a millennium of silence. No movements whatsoever until 18/70. And we see the first modern movement of Muslims to Christ.
It happens in Indonesia. And, over the next few decades, some 10 to 20 1,000 Indonesian Muslims are baptized to become followers of Jesus. And that begins something. A decade later there’s a movement in Ethiopia. Then you go into the 20th century.
The first half of the twentyth century there’s not a movement to be found anywhere in the world. Now meanwhile, let me back up and just say there are tens of millions of Christians who have been assimilated into the Muslim world during the same time frame. We can’t even find, you know, a single movement of a 1000 Muslims who went the other way, who became followers of Christ. Until 1960 5, a trigger takes place in Indonesia. It’s called the year of living dangerously.
When in an effort to stamp out communism in the country after an aborted communist coup. Muslims turn against their neighbors and they killed some 500,000 some say as many as a 1000000 Indonesian citizens wiped out in a door to door campaign that horrifies many people in Indonesia and leads to the largest turning of Muslims to Christ in history to that date. In the years 1967 to 1971, we have 2,800,000 Indonesians are baptized into churches. The vast majority of those, probably 2,000,000 of those are actually Muslims who come to Christ. By the end of the century across the Muslim world in Algeria and Bangladesh and Central Asia, we now have 11 movements of Muslims to Christ at the end of 20th century.
And that brings us if you will right up to the present. Well let’s ask about that first movement. So so just to recap we have 1300 years of virtually nothing. Yes. And then you said there’s a trigger where there’s that first significant movement there in Indonesia.
One of the things you talked about was the the violence that took place leading up to that was actually Muslim violence against fellow Muslim. Well, that’s one of the striking things about this. You know, we we often see the Muslim on Muslim violence and we’re horrified by it. We draw from it, we wanna just say, you know, what an evil religion or whatever. The fact is the people who are hurt the most by Muslim on Muslim violence is is Muslims.
And many of them who say, you know, I became a Muslim. I was born in a Muslim family. I never thought about having to kill someone for my faith. I didn’t consider that to be God’s will, it just can’t be. And so when they see this outbreak of violence their response is to say, you know, this is not the religion for me.
This cannot be God’s ideal. So what we saw happen in Indonesia with that massive turning back in 19 the the violence is in 1965. The the turning was 1967 to 71. We see that same pattern repeated in a place like Bangladesh. Where they were up until 1971 they were East Pakistan and West Pakistan is what we know of as Pakistan today.
They declared their independence. Bangladesh declared its independence in 1971. Horrible civil war broke out. Hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were killed. Many of them raped, others just execution style.
And it’s on the heels of that violence that we start seeing reports of 1000 of Bengalis coming to faith in Jesus Christ. So it sounds like the the the thing that’s happening over and over and over again is when Muslims are becoming violent, the there’s Muslims that come to the Lord. Yes and no. That’s a good question, Howard. Yes.
In the sense that that’s what we’re seeing today. And so you could jump over for example to Iran. 1979, the Ayatollah comes to power. Tremendous violence and then a big movement. The same thing in Algeria, the 19 nineties.
A civil war leaves a 100000 Algerians dead, and then there’s a big movement. The problem with that theory though is this, there’s been violence in the Muslim history for nearly 14 centuries? Why have there not been movements before now? Okay. So if you go back for example to the the 13th century and the 14th century, a time of Tamerlane.
Tamerlane killed 5% of the earth’s population. Why were there no movements then? Okay. There’s this is one of those points in the book where I actually wrote in the margins, no way. Because Tamerlane kills 17,000,000 people.
It’s unfathomable to us today to think of 17,000,000 people being slaughtered. With no weapons of mass destruction. Right. And and Muslims, Christians, Hindus, he’s just murdering everybody he comes across. And then I read in the book this story about this anthropologist.
Could you share that story with us? Because that really just I had goosebumps and I thought I’ve gotta verify this thing and I’m sure you’ve done it, so I would just like to hear it from you. Well, the anthropologist, I believe it was, Gerasimov, as I recall. They unearthed, Tamerlane’s, sarcophagus, and they wanted to study this guy. You know, he’s all under Soviet control.
This was in 19, what, 42, something like that. And, so they they pry the lid off of his, coffin to look at his body to study it. And there, inscribed in the inside of his coffin, it says, whoever disturbs his coffin, a, a, an attacker or something Unleash a Unleash a person twice as vile as me or wicked as me. Even greater than than Tamerlane, that they’ll unleash some force. And so, sure enough, it was like 2 days after they opened up the tomb that, Hitler, turned.
Alright. This week’s sponsors. CIU. CIU. CIU educates people from a bib Biblical.
Biblical world review World view. Real world review. Kids say. CIU educates people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ. They unearthed, Tamerlane’s, sarcophagus.
And they wanted to study this guy. You know it was all under Soviet control this was in 19 what 42 something like that. And so they they pry the lid off of his coffin to look at his body to study it. And there inscribed in the inside of his coffin it says whoever disturbs his coffin a, a an attacker or something, unleash a a person twice as vile as me or wicked Even greater than than Tamarlane. That they’ll unleash some force.
And so, sure enough it was like 2 days after they opened up the tomb that, Hitler, turned on his Soviet ally and led Operation Barbarossa, which was the largest invasion of any country that we’ve had in history. And by the end of the war it had extracted some 20,000,000 Soviet lives, which is 3,000,000 more than, Tamarlane’s reign had extracted. And at the end of the war they actually near the end of the war they sealed Tamerlane back up in his tomb and buried him. Actually, they put him back in a sarcophagus and sealed it with full Islamic ceremony. And within just a few days after that, Hitler was defeated and, it was the end of the war.
So there’s some weird stuff going on. Yeah. Like, I’m kinda like I’m squinting a little bit. I’m like, But it but super interesting. Mhmm.
But wouldn’t you say that, Tamalein is not not a good example of, Muslim violence because it was a person that was I can make a list. I can give you a list of Muslim violence. It’s just it’s been endemic to Islamic history. Violence has the difference and this is what we’re getting at Howard. The difference is today Mhmm.
The bible has been translated into the language of these people. The Musalmani Bingali bible translation was done just as they were emerging out of their war of liberation. So they were starting to get portions of the New Testament, and then finally the entire New Testament. The same thing was happening over in Algeria where they were starting to get radio broadcast. They even did a walk through the Bible in the local language of the people in Algeria.
Wow. So they were getting the scripture just as they were asking the questions. Can this really be the will of God, this horrible violence? The same thing was going on in Iran. Just as the Ayatollah was coming to power, we were starting to see new translations in the Farsi language, Persian language that were being widely disseminated underground over a 1000000 copies now inside Iran.
So that’s that’s a part of the secret here. It’s not just the violence. It’s the violence coupled with an alternative. Right. And the alternative is now coming in through satellite television, through radio broadcast, through Jesus films, through internet, etcetera.
So this is one of the parts of the book I found fascinating is that the king of Saudi Arabia is funding to see or, you know, former king’s funding to see, the the Quran translated into every, you know, tribe, tongue, and language. Essentially, he has his own desire for Quran translation. And you mentioned that this is actually having a negative effect for the Muslim communities. How is that so? Well, it’s amazing isn’t it?
I think, King Fahd, peace be upon him, he passed away a few years ago. He saw the tremendous advances that were being generated by indigenous language translations, colloquial language translations of the bible into every language of the world. And he said, you know, that’s why these Christians are expanding going into places. Our Arabic is stuck in 7th century Arabic. Theologically they believe it cannot be translated because that’s the language of God.
The problem is nobody speaks 7th century Arabic, not even Arabs. You know they can understand it to some extent, but most Muslims, the vast majority Muslims, to them it’s a mystery. So King Fahd got the idea, let’s set up a foundation and a big printing translation center and let’s get the Quran into all the languages of the Muslim world and beyond. What he did not anticipate is that when Muslims began reading the Quran in their own language and they saw what it was, it was no longer a mystical, magical, mysterious holy book. It was something they understood and frankly it offered no salvation.
In fact, the only promise of salvation is if you die in the cause of Jihad, in the cause of defending or advancing the faith. So other than that they’re left with that when you ask a Muslim, do you know if you were to die tonight that Allah would let you into heaven? They can only say Insha’Allah. You know, God willing. And as Christians, of course, we have a very different, relationship with God because it’s based upon not what we do, but based on what God did for us in Jesus Christ.
And Muslims are finding that that that they need that same assurance of Salvation. We had so many Muslims we talked to, we asked and said, how did you come to faith in Christ? The guy said, well, you know, I’d I’d read the Quran, I’d memorized it in Arabic, but I didn’t really understand it. And then someone said, oh, it’s now been translated into Bengali, the Bangla. And I read it in Bangla, and for the first time I realized I was lost.
Wow. Okay. So a a question I have is what kept them in the Muslim faith when they didn’t have understanding? Was it the imams, the teachings, the the culture? Well the very fact that, to convert from Islam is a capital offense is a pretty good incentive to stay a Muslim.
Yeah. That’s a good incentive. That’s pretty effective. Yeah. That’s that’s been a pretty effective tool.
I tell people that Islam is like a superhighway that’s been growing over years. It’s got all on ramps but no off ramps. There’s many, many incentives to become a Muslim but there’s really no way off of that highway. That’s a good way of explaining it. When we’re thinking about the Quran there was another part that I thought was really interesting because I’ve heard rumors of this, and I’m so glad that you went and researched it and found out that it’s actually credible.
But we have Imams, Muslim leaders, sheikhs, scholars that are coming to faith in Christ in in in certain places. Tell us a little bit about that. We saw that in several places. It has been kind of a surprise. I think we often think about going after the low lying fruit, the person’s non literate, the person’s marginal, or person is unemployed.
I don’t know why but I reminded him why when we called it hunting evangelism, you kinda look for the lowly guy that looks lonely and maybe he would be open to the gospel and you go and you pull him aside and we’ll tell him the gospel. But you’re saying it’s the it’s the high learned scholars. Well, it’s it’s probably happening all over the all over the place, and so you’re probably getting every sector of society. But I was struck many times. I was taken to to meet a sheikh or an imam.
I talked to a sheikh in the Horn of Africa who I said tell me your story because he had had he came to breakfast with me. It was a day after Christmas back in 2011. He had, 9 guys, I think it was with him and he had led about 7 of them to Christ and those 7 were imams and shakes. So I asked him, I said, tell me, how did you come to faith? And he said, well, someone, this in this case, it was, an African evangelist gave him a new testament in Arabic.
Now Arabic is not the language of that culture, so it’s a little bit strange. But because he was a a sheikh and he had been studying the Quran since he was 2 years old, he understood Arabic. Furthermore, it created a bit of a conflict because he says, you know, I knew Arabic was God’s language. This could not be corrupted. So he started from this basis of here’s an Arabic, New Testament.
He begins reading it that night. He put it in Arabic, New Testament. He begins reading it. That night, he put it under his pillow, went to sleep, and he had a dream. In his dream, he said, I saw, there was this minaret at the top, it had a big loud speaker on it, and someone was working on the loud speaker, it was broken but the the minaret started shaking.
And I looked down at the bottom and see why was it shaking? And someone at the bottom of the minaret had an axe and they were chopping down the minaret. And I looked at the person and I looked closely at his face and it was me. So the show wouldn’t be possible without sponsors, and this week’s sponsors are Swammer Center. Swammer Center.
The Swammer Center. The Wammer Center. Zwemer Center. And what does the Zwemer Center do? Talks about Muslims and and tells them on computers that we love you.
Very nice. The Wehmer Center equips the church to reach Muslims. The Swimmer Center has been educating people about reaching Muslims before it was cool. He said I had the same dream four times and so the next morning I went and I found that evangelist who gave me the new testament. And I told him my dream and I said, what does this mean?
He looked at me and he smiled and he said, you are going to win many shakes to faith in Jesus Christ. That is so cool. So I was baptized. I I don’t even know if we would we would probably say you probably you had some bad pizza, you ate too late last night. We have to open our our eyes to the fact that God is doing miraculous things in the Muslim world.
Things that we don’t have categories for sometimes. And yet it’s, you know, we have dismissed dreams in the West. When you read the Bible though, dreams just they’re pervasive through the bible. From from old testament Joseph, you know, who had dreams and interpret them, to new testament Joseph who saved the baby Jesus. Because in a dream he was warned to go to Egypt.
Right. Okay. So back to that first point when we were talking about why Muslims were coming to the Lord. And we’re saying that it’s more than just violence. It’s violence coupled with actually having truth Mhmm.
And that they’re finding that the Bible does have salvation in it as opposed to the Quran when they look at the Quran and they read it in their own language and see. But what about the argument that, whenever it’s translated, the Quran is translated from Arabic, that it is no longer the truth or not the truth, but, skewed. I would use that story too because you gotta have some reason to explain why this thing no longer has the power. And and it is frankly, it is more powerful not understood than understood. And I to try to help Christians understand, I point to to our own history.
In the middle ages, when the Bible was in Latin, originally you know it was translated in the Latin to make it available to the people because that was their language. It was called the Vulgate Right. Or the the common language. By the middle ages no one was understanding Latin anymore except the priests, and the people were illiterate yet they revered the Bible as somehow a magical holy book. And when they would go into the the the mass, each week on Sunday, they would go in and they would see the priest.
He would take the host. He would take the body or or the bread and he would lift it up over his head and he would speak scripture in Latin. Here’s what he would say. In Latin he would say, hoc est corpus meum. This is my body.
Sounds like hocus pocus. Exactly. That’s what the people heard. They heard hocus pocus. And that’s the origins really of our magical formula.
Because at that point when he said this is my body, hocus corpus mayum. What was happening in their understanding was that bread was being magically transubstantiated into the body of Christ. Well if we had the same misunderstanding, imagine how Muslims are when they hear formulas. In fact in some places when you go to a pharmacy in an Islamic market and you tell them what’s wrong, they’ll take a Koranic verse, write it on a piece of paper, burn it, drop the ashes in water, and you drink the water and that’s your medicine. So it’s a real mystical, magical, not logical understanding.
So it’s not just that, you know, common people are coming to faith. It’s not just that imams are coming to faith. We even have some testimony in this book about radical Al Qaeda, mujahideen trained fighters coming to faith. I’m thinking of, in particular, Ahmed, but and, obviously, names have been changed for their protection. But that story, I mean, that was a riveting testimony.
Would it be okay to share that testimony? Yeah. Sure. In fact, that one blew me away as well. I remember sitting next to Ahmed.
He was my translator while we were doing a number of interviews by Skype. We had to do that because they said David you can go in and get these interviews. I’d been in that country where we were getting interviews many times. But they said today if you go in there you’ll probably get these guys killed. It’s better for us to put them in a safe house.
Let us do the interviews by Skype. Ahmed was sitting next to me. In between the power going out and guys going by with Kalashnikov shooting over the roof and throwing bricks through the window, I listened to Ahmed tell me his story. It was a fascinating story and I had several corroborators. The fellow who baptized him had actually told me one side of the story and another fellow who was one of our Baptist missionaries told me another side of the story.
So then hearing it from Ahmed himself, I was able to hear the amazing things that happened to him from the time that he was he’s just a young boy, I think he’s about 4 years old when he said his father threw him into the mosque or into the madrasa. I said what do you mean he threw you in? He said well he took me to the madrasa which was in a neighboring village. He took me at night, early early in the morning when it was dark so I couldn’t find my way out. He wanted to make sure I didn’t run away and come back home.
Because he had had siblings that he had tried to do the same thing and they just kept coming back home. Yeah. So his strategy was to get him there at night. You don’t know your way back home. You’re stuck.
They had an understanding in their village that a, an imam is spiritually, substantial enough to take 7 people to heaven with him. And they said we had 7 people in our family and so it was important that one of us become an imam so that we could get the other 7 into heaven. And, it’s actually pretty practical. It is. You know, there’s such an internal logic to all this.
It’s just very sad. It’s what happens when you’re the youngest though. He’s the last hope for the whole family in some sense and so they have to have him there. So anyway, sorry. He he’s at the Wait.
No. Wait. I have a question. So they threw the dad was throwing him into the mosque because he He was madrasa. Okay.
Because he wanted him to become an imam. Yeah. Yeah. Madrasa is a Islamic school. Oh.
So he basically was like a boarding school. He lived there for the next several years without ever once going home from the hospital. Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know how to get home. Where he lived.
Yeah. Exactly. Wow. Really sad. And so they would beat him and make him memorize the Quran.
He’d memorize, I think by the age of 9 he’d memorize the Quran and went on and studied the Hadith and learned all about the life of Mohammed and the ideals. At the time the area he was in there was a lot of war going on. There was war in Afghanistan, there was war up in Kashmir, There was war with various tribal factions. And so after he finished his formal training, his, his leader said to him, now we’re gonna give you practical training, which, you know, for a Christian, that would mean now we’re gonna teach you how to knock on doors and or how to be a cross cultural communicator. We’re gonna teach you things like bible translation.
Well, for him Short term outreach time or something. Yeah. Exactly. So when he finished his formal training, he said, we’re gonna teach you practical stuff. Now they taught him all kinds of ways to kill people.
And he’s only 12, 14 years old at this point. He says he’s 12 when he begins his Al Qaeda sort of connections, and then 14 when he begins some of this stuff. Once he’s being up to carry a gun. Wait. So was this madrasa a different kind of madrasa?
No. Not in that area. Now now the thing is every part of the Muslim world is different, and you that’s one reason I divide the Muslim world into these 9 rooms in the House of Islam. Right. His room had been in war and conflict for generations.
So I was amazed. I think every one of the testimonies I got out of that room, someone had been involved in killing someone or had someone close to them murdered. And I I asked later, I asked around, I said, is this normal? Is are these been are these cherry picked because of their drama? And they said, no.
It’s really just where they are. This is a very, very, war torn area. And I think it’s a good example too that the diversity of Islam also is represented in the diversity of cultures that we see some cultures that are more, you know, violent and that they’ve been in war. They had a lot of violence in this particular room that we’re we’re discussing in Ahmed’s story comes from a long history of violence. Exactly.
And, you know, with 1,700,000,000 Muslims in the world today, now it’s important that we not try to treat them all the same. Some are very, very even pacifist, you know, and very intellectual. Some are very pro women. Some women are very outspoken as Muslims. That’s certainly wasn’t the case in the room of Islam that, that Ahmed was found in.
So what what ends up happening with Ahmed? How does he get to the point where you’re talking today? Story short, Ahmed’s brother had gone for a job in one of the big cities there in Western South Asia. And in the course time he met a couple of American missionaries who had shared the gospel with him, loved him, shared their life with him and led him to Christ. When Othman found out about this, he was determined to kill that missionary.
So he arranged an ambush and was gonna, they were gonna cut off his head. Alright. So this show wouldn’t be possible without sponsors. And at this point in the show is where if you wanna partner with us, we would put your ad. So if you wanna be a part of the show, you wanna partner with us, you like what we’re doing, you wanna be on our team, what have you, Bringing this show to the world.
Email. Then email us and let us know. And something happened. Yeah. He was somehow stopped and he stood put the missionary in the back of his motorcycle.
They rode away. So he got the missionary? He did. The missionary actually went out to his village to witness to him. And, the first time Ahmed drove him drove him and his brother away he said, you know, if you come back here again we’re gonna kill him.
Well, the missionary comes back again. And this time, Achmed is prepared to kill him. He tries to be acts like he’s friendly with him so he can lure him into an ambush, takes him up on a dirt road up in the mountains. Had 2 of his friends waiting there are gonna jump out and cut off his head. And then, at the last second, Ahmed just has this change.
He said, I put him on my motorcycle and drove away. But I told him, said, you get out of here. Don’t ever come back. Ahmed then is constrict conscripted into the military. They they tell him, basically, you can go fight in the Afghan front, or you can go fight up in Kashmir.
But you’re now prepared to go and give your life for Allah. He chooses the Afghan front. He just does some horrible things, including wiping out an entire village. Everyone in it, they kill. He talks about picking up this little one and a half year old little baby girl, holding her in his arms that already killed her parents, and how she held his finger in her hand as he stuck a knife, a poison knife into it and killed her.
That was one of the things that began eating his soul. Later, they captured a guy and they told, Ahmed, you’re gonna have to cut off his head. Got a bag over his head, they had him on his knees, and they had made a circle around there. They’re chanting, and they give him this long knife to cut off the head, and he just drops it. He says, I can’t do it.
And they grabbed him. They said, either you do it or we’re gonna cut off your head. And he says, and you’ll have to cut off my head. I can’t do it. And he runs away.
He ends up going AWOL, finds his way by train all the way back to that city where the missionary who had, he had almost killed was living. He said, I spent the next few days sleeping on his couch. And, when I finally got over my extreme fatigue, I just started talking to him. Over the next few months, extreme fatigue, I just started talking to him. Over the next few months, Achmed began reading the bible.
God began working in his heart. And finally, not only did he come to faith, he gathered his family together. He said, you know, you put me you threw me into the madrasa because you wanted me to become an imam. You said, whatever I would do, you would follow me as your spiritual leader. I said, do you still feel that way?
And they all said, yes, whatever you say, we’ll do it. And they said, well, I’m becoming a follower of Jesus. I want you to follow Jesus too. So, the whole family joined him in following Jesus. And he has a story there as well of having a dream and a light coming through a window and saying, I’m gonna send to you 3 messengers that are gonna bring you the truth.
This is a reoccurring testimony that we’re hearing out of the Muslim world, dreams and visions. Yeah. I think he had that dream like the day before. These these two missionaries and his brother showed up. And, they had actually been praying that God would reveal himself to Ahmed and it’s like this convergence of things happening.
The dreams are so common. One of my good friends Kevin, who wrote a book called The Camel. Kevin, loves to to talk with muslims about Jesus and he’ll often ask him, you know, have you had any dreams lately? And invariably there’ll be some guy in the group who’ll say, yeah I’ve got this dream, it keeps coming back. There’s this being.
He’s glowing bright light and I can’t quite make out his face, but he seems so loving and he’s reaching out to me. And Kevin has taught me, he says what I’ll do is I’ll take Matthew’s gospel, and I’ll flip over to chapter 17. And that’s the story you know of the Mount of Transfiguration. And I’ll just turn to those first two chapters. I won’t read it to them.
I’ll hand it to them. I’ll say, hey why don’t you read these first two verses in Matthew 17. Tell me what you think. And they’ll be reading that Jesus, went up with his disciples into the mountain and, while they were watching him there, he was transfigured. His clothing became bright as the light.
His face shone like the sun. And this Muslim has been having these dreams. So look at that. He goes, that’s the guy. That’s That’s the one of my dreams.
Who is this? And Kevin said, why don’t you just keep that book and read the rest of that and and let’s get back together and talk next week. So it’s a wonderful bridge. God doing his part, us doing our part for the sake of the kingdom. That’s an amazing testimony.
I can’t even get over the the baby one. I mean, you know, the the eroding of the soul, I think that that, I think I’ve heard much of that lately with, ISIS. I’ve read a report about an ISIS soldier coming to the Lord, but I I you know, I I bet it has more to do with the eroding of the soul, just the things that people do. There’s Well, that’s the message, Howard. I hope people will keep in mind when they see Boko Haram in and the horrors of what’s going on or they see ISIS or Al Qaeda or Hamas and the list goes on and on.
Violence within Islam is something that’s been going on since the beginning. The difference today is that now we know that if we do our part and we get the word of God to them, we keep pushing the gospel and the love of Jesus Christ to them, it can be the perfect formula to bring about a change. Right. And I think for maybe our listeners, at least for me, I think sometimes I forget the power of the gospel or the power of the word. Mhmm.
You know, when it comes to someone with a, you know, a machine gun or somebody that wants to kill you or a known terrorist or or whatnot, It just seems like the gospel sometimes pales. But with the stories that you’re telling, like, I am just overwhelmed by how much just that truth is just unleashed or opened the door for for a lot of these Muslims Amen. Regardless of who they are or what, you know, what level of, you know, extremism they are. So, yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah.
I think with that story with Ahmed, the thing that was striking to me was that God’s forgiveness is that big. I don’t know why, but when I heard the story there was something inside of me that just said, can you forgive him? I don’t know. Yeah. But God’s forgiveness is that big.
Well, I gotta admit, Ahmed was sitting next to me and when he got to that part of his story, I found myself scooting my chair over a little bit. I thought this is awful. What a horrible person. And here’s a guy that loves the Lord with all his heart, and he is truly repentant. And and God continues to to to to transform him.
He had a lot of baggage when he came into the faith, related to women, for example. He he had no comprehension of women as really having the the image of God in them. And it wasn’t until he began to let the word of God change his heart that he began to see women as needing salvation and needing, Jesus just as as much as men. One of the things that, maybe as we come to a close that was striking as well, and it’s something that we’ve known through church history, is that that martyrdom is is the blood of the martyr, the seed of the church. We’ve we’ve heard that, we’ve heard testimonies about it.
But when I was reading in the, in the book, I think it was in the house of Persia, there were a couple strong stories of martyrdom there that were very instrumental in in bringing movements. How has that been, used in historically or at least in some of these movements, martyrdom and suffering of Christians? Well, that is a very special place. You know, in Iran, they’ve they’ve long had an appreciation for a righteous martyr. Even within their branch of Islam, they think about Hussain, the son of Ali.
And they think about Ali both as somehow being righteous martyrs. Now, we would have questions as to how righteous they were. They were killed in battle for Pete’s sake. But nonetheless, every year they they commemorate those martyrdoms by having this flagellation where they’re beating each other on the back. Well, in Jesus they really have their true righteous, martyr.
The one who died for them and in their place. And and they see that when Christians step into the role of Jesus and function in the same way as a suffering servant, one who’s willing to lay down his life. The great example, that the book talks about is, is an Armenian, Armenian Pentecostal, from the start of the First Assemblies of God Church, or Bishop of the 1st Assemblies of God Church in Iran. His name’s Haik Hovsepian. And Bishop Haik was told because you’re an Armenian, you’re an ancient community here in Iran, you’re free to worship, you’re free to have church.
The one condition is you don’t mess with the Muslims. We don’t want you sharing the gospel, in Armenia, but instead, he learned about a a in Armenia. But instead, he learned about a Muslim background believer named Mehdi Dibadj. And Mehdi had been arrested just because he was a Muslim who’d come to faith in Christ. He’d been in prison for a number of years.
And, High Cove Sepion, Bishop Haike learned that, Mehdi Dibadj was to be executed. And it was all being done on the hush-hush because, the Iranian government didn’t want international opposition to this activity. And they told, Haykou Cipients that if you if you publicize this, if you embarrass us, we will wreak havoc on you. But, that created a crisis for Bishop Pike. He said, I could have been quiet and had a good life.
But here was a Muslim background believer who was about to die for his faith, and I refused to be quiet. He sent out faxes. He publicized. He spread the word everywhere. And, when he did it, he knew what he was doing.
He said, I put my hand over this the hole of the snake, the viper. And within a few days, bishop Hike disappeared just as Mehdi Debaj was released from prison. For a long time, the police said they couldn’t find Bishop Pike. They didn’t know what happened to him. He just must have left or or gone.
But then there was a cemetery worker, a gravedigger, who said he remembered burying a body that had a cross on the lapel. And what he remembered about it was it had 27, I believe, stab wounds in the heart. And so they went following his story. They dug up this body and sure enough, it was high Kopechsepi. He had been abducted from the streets, stabbed 27 times, and buried in an unmarked Muslim cemetery.
The Christians gathered up that body, and they were weeping. And 1,000 of them turned out in a a rainy funeral service to rebury his body in the Christian cemetery. And one of the people, it was all videoed, one of the people, that was in the in the funeral, at the funeral was Mehdi Debaj. And he spoke up. He said, you know, when Jesus died on the cross, he said, there was one person there in the crowd who knew that Jesus died in his place.
He said, that person was Barabbas. He said, when high Cosephian died, it should’ve been me. Wow. He went on from there and began preparing to be a missionary to Afghanistan. And it just galvanized the hearts and spirits of everyone.
They said, we will not be silent. We will stand up for Jesus. Mehdi Debaj prepared to be a missionary. And within a few months, his body was found hanging in a tree. He too had been murdered for the gospel.
Today in that country, there are well, there’s a new book that says it well, a book by Mark Bradley. It’s called Too Many to Jail. Too many to jail because he said, interviewing 1 of the prison, guards there, he said, look, we don’t arrest everybody. If we did, there’d be too many to jail. We can’t get them all in here.
We don’t have enough room. So that’s what God is doing in Iran today. So that should change the way in which we view the world and we’re living in in this very moment where we do see violence and we do see a lot of fear, but it seems like 35 years ago, a lot of Americans were probably in the same place with Iran. And we’re now seeing the fruit where there’s too many to jail. Should that change the way in which we view the world we live in right now?
Absolutely. You know, I interviewed a fellow, actually, several years ago. His name was, Akbar al Masih, which means the messiah is the greatest. Such a cool name. Ain’t that a great name?
I know. Why don’t we have names like that? Well, you know, that was a name he took after he became a believer. But his name at birth was Mohammed Akbar. Mohammed is the greatest.
And I said, well, tell me your story. How did you come to faith? He said, well, I was actually in a free country. This is he told me before the Shah of Iran fell. He was actually in Iran as a guest worker from Afghanistan.
He said, I was looking for work. I was unemployed and there was a sign that said free movies. I went in and I sat down and I watched this movie. And I was watching, it was about the life of Isa Al Masih, Jesus the Messiah. And I watched the Jesus film from start to finish.
And he said there was one point when I became a believer. I said when was that? He said when Jesus was hanging on the cross and they had done all these horrible things to him. I thought oh he’s a prophet of God. He’s gonna call down fire.
He’s gonna destroy them. He’s gonna do all this revenge because in my country, revenge was the way that we lived. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And Jesus hanging on that cross looked down at them and he said, father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.
He said, at that instant, I said, that’s for me. He said that’s what my people need. They need that kind of forgiveness because we don’t have that in my country. And that is when he changed his name to Akbar al Masih. The Messiah is the greatest.
Wow. Listeners, I know that you guys are enjoying this as much as me and Trevor have. David Garrison, thank you so much for, coming in. You’ve, you’ve blessed us so much, and the book is called A Wind in the House of Islam. I’m going to be putting that on our website, so that you guys can see a link, to Amazon to purchase.
David, you had one more thing to say? Yeah. Let me give one last shout out to 30 days of prayer for the Muslim world and just encourage our listeners. We have an opportunity every year to join with Christians around the world during the month of Ramadan when Muslims are praying, they’re seeking, they’re hungry, they’re they’re wanting to get God’s message to them, and so we join them during that month. It begins this year, June 17th.
I invite you to join in 30 days of prayer for the Muslim world. You’ll find a website. Do a little Google search 30 days of prayer and you can get your own little brochure to follow day by day as you pray for the Muslim world. So we’ll put that link on the website as well and, if you’re interested in getting the book as I said right now there’s no book I would recommend more. I say that with all integrity.
When in the House of Islam has been an encouragement to my soul completely, just changed even my own views of how I’m looking at history and what God is doing, and I’ve just been encouraged. And you can go to wind in the house dot org, wind in the house dot org. Thanks so much, David, for being with us. Thank you, guys. God bless you.