Posted on 06/14/2013 7:29:15 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
This translation of a televised conversation reveals a rare glimpse into the outlook of Muslim scholars who are concerned about Christianity’s growth. The invited guest is Sheikh Ahmad Al Katani; the president of The Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, which is an institution specializing in graduating imams and Islamic preachers.
Katani starts off describing the overall problem:
Islam used to represent, as you previously mentioned, Africa’s main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150 million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century. On the other hand, the number of Catholics has increased from one million in 1902 to 329 million 882 thousand (329,882,000). Let us round off that number to 330 million in the year 2000.
As to how that happened, well there are now 1.5 million churches whose congregations account for 46 million people. In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Ever year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed.
From what I have heard from reliable sources, six million may be too low. Reliable accounts say that one hundred thousand Africans convert to Christianity per day, though not all of them come from Islam. Then Katani says Muslims should build schools before mosques, in order to build the worshipper (Muslim) before the building. Why? To stop the the dangerous “Christian missionary octopus”
This happens often! The wealthy Arab builds a mosque for himself or one of his parents of his friend, but my dear sir, building a mosque comes as a second stage. In America, the price of building an Islamic school is 5 million dollars. In Africa, 50 thousand dollars are enough to build a very reasonably sized school. I say this and I take full responsibility for it; building a school comes before building a mosque. Build the worshiper before you build the mosque. Take for example yourself; you go to the mosque five times a day and if you added all that time it would equal an hour or maybe two hours if you include the Friday prayer. However, if I ask you how long you stayed at school, you will reply that you spent years in middle school and years in high school. Likewise the African goes to the mosque, but if we built him a school where he could spend most of his time, and provided specialized educators we could at least stop this dangerous Christian missionary octopus.
Katani states the purpose of his school:
The truth is, the institution that I administer is considered pre-college. As for the subject of attracting and preparing specialized missionaries to bring them from their countries to Libya in order to train them and return them back to their countries, that is done through the Islamic Propagation Organization. This organization has graduated a number of classes, some of whose students had masters and doctorate degrees. These efforts were fruitful in that these graduates were able to attract people from their lands and countries because they spoke the language and understood the customs of the people they were proselytizing. This way, the missionary is not a foreigner to the community he is working with, contrast that to what would happen if I went to the Philippines for example. I can’t speak a single Philippino word; much less invite people to the faith.
By now other Muslim leaders have joined in. Abbas Hamid lives in Holland, and he deplores the un-Islamic way of life:
My brother may Allah reward you. We muslims in Holland suffer a lot when we see issues like this and we really suffer when we see a muslim, as the sheikh said, who spends millions in bars and entertainment while other muslims are lost and cannot find a translation of the Koran. Even their children who are able to learn cannot memorize the Koran, they can’t find a translated Koran or even any translated book. The first thing we must do is mend our selves; the Islamic countries must fix themselves first and then they can look at Africa. May Allah reward you and this issue is interesting.
Later, an Arabic-speaking Christian discusses how Islam must preach peace and love. No one denies, as none of the Muslim scholars do, that a religion has the right to spread his faith (except in hard line Islamic countries), but these leaders seem panicky. They express frustration at Islam’s disorganized efforts to maintain Africa. But this one idea eludes them: Islam itself is the problem because it is a burdensome and harsh religion. This is apparent when one Muslim scholar talks about implementing Shari’ah as if it is self-evident that it benefits society.
The whole conversation is fascinating. We must educate ourselves about Islam, and with the worldwide web, we have unprecedented opportunities.
This has the effect of being the one that will destroy Islam IF we take the opportunity to humiliate Islam utterly and totally. Islam works on being a "join us, we win" religion.
To go a bit deeper, at its founding, Islam actually *was* more civilized than the tribalism that existed around it. This both gave it a selling point to about anyone, and the organization to overcome the existing systems.
However, this belief in its superiority is still there, even though it is plainly obvious to about everyone that it is an inferior way, compared to civilization. The end result is that Islam has taken up the mantle of barbarism against civilization, while still furtively asserting it is superior.
What really crippled Islam, however, was the Persian philosopher al-Ghazali, in the 11th and 12th Centuries. His philosophy was paradoxical, and ultimately fundamentalist: that Muslims should seek knowledge, which they were doing, but they should not seek knowledge outside of the Koran, the Tafsir and the Tawil, the books that explain it in detail, because “all knowledge” is contained within them.
It was with his philosophy and its related Persian xenophobia, that was the end of Islamic learning. It didn’t happen immediately, but spread throughout the ummah, and fortunately did not reach the great Islamic libraries in Spain until after the Christians had retaken the place.
In those parts of Islam already prone to primitivism, al-Ghazali was preceded by Salafism, best described as reverting in behavior and knowledge to the time of Mohammed, and then in the 18th Century by Wahhabism, which is also the embrace of severe primitivism, and utterly destructive of anything else, since. As soon as Wahhabis take over a decorated mosque, for example, they destroy all the art and whitewash the walls. They control Saudi Arabia, as well, and have even obliterated all historical traces of Mohammed and other artifacts. History bad.
And unfortunately for Muslims, the vast majority of Sunni Imams are trained in Pakistan, in Wahhabi madrassas schools. So no matter what Sunni sect, nor how modernist it is, they will likely get radical fundamentalist clergy, who will try to radicalize them, and recruit their children to go on violent jihad.
Fortunately, when barbarism fights civilization, barbarism almost always loses, for the simple reason that everyone can tell what works better. While this is less obvious in the West, in Africa, Islam is hemorrhaging followers who convert to Christianity. Voting with their feet.
And if you are reliant on brutality to keep your followers, you have already lost.
ping to a very informative post by yefr
to debate -- I wonder if that is always true -- after all the Moslem hordes invaded and took over the higher civilisations of India, Iran
Persia is an unusual case, because it is the crossroads of southern Asia, as Turkey is the meeting point between Asia and Europe. Both have been frequently overrun.
The first conquest of Persia was by Alexander, then with the end of his empire, they were dominated by Greece for a while longer, during which both Zoroastrianism and Buddhism held sway. Though the Arabic conquest at the time was fierce, it was only partially successful, as the Persians could not abide dominance by Arabs, to the point of creating the great schism of Islam, becoming the Shiites. The Zoroastarians still dominated the upper classes to modern times, with Islam being the religion of the poor.
India was even more haphazard, Islam having only limited force, and meeting a brick wall of Hindu and Buddhism. For a long time there was coexistence, with various kings vying for which religion would be more advantageous. The last example of this was in modern Kashmir, in which the king refused to choose, resulting in contention that exists to this day.
A similar thing happened with the Islamic conquest of western Europe from Africa. Almost making it to France before being turned back, there was generally modest to moderate instability with Christians until the Muslims were finally booted out during the Reconquista in 1492.
Yet during all of this, determining which force was *more* civilized is problematic. They were not profoundly different, a choice between civilization and barbarity, as were the (western) Romans and the tribes of Gaul, so the contention was more between equals.
And this is a great example of barbarism vs. the decline of civilization. It took a very long time for the tribes to conquer the western Roman empire, and in that time they had become far more civilized.
Excellent news, although I’d like to see the numbers independently verified. Plus, I thought a large majority of North African Muslims were Berbers, not Arabs.
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