Inside Islam

Good morning, everyone! It's good to see all of you here. A little less than five years ago, on November 9, 2005, I was sound asleep in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan. Darris McNeely and I had gone to Jordan for the feast with our wives and about 120 other church members. Darris and I had stayed over after the feast to do some research on some different archaeological sites and historical sites there in Israel. We had gone to bed early that night because we had to catch a morning flight back here to the States the next morning. Around 10 o'clock that evening, we were startled awake by a pounding on the door. Wake up! Wake up! Get out of the emergency! We must evacuate! We must evacuate! Get up! Get up! Wake up! I was hurriedly grabbing on my pants, bringing them on, and trying to make it to the door, stumbling there.

Just about the time I got to the door, it burst open and a hotel employee ran into the room and said, Get out! Get out! We must evacuate! This is an emergency! Leave! Please hurry! Please hurry! Quick! Then he went to the next door, all the way around the rooms there. So I quickly tossed on a shirt, grabbed my shoes, and about 300 of us hotel guests rushed down the stairs, out through the lobby, and out into the street, and down to a vacant parking lot, about a block or two away. Initially, we thought there must have been a fire or something, because that's what you would normally think of in a circumstance like that. But I didn't see any fire, couldn't smell any smoke of any kind, no fire trucks showed up, nothing like that. And then, considering the neighborhood that we were in, the neighborhood being the Middle East, we thought that it must have been a bomb scare. So Darris and I tried to find some of the hotel employees to find out what was going on, what's really happening here. But they didn't seem to know what was happening either. They just knew we had to evacuate the hotel in a hurry. Often in the distance, we could hear some sirens, and finally some police and military personnel arrived and went into the hotel, and apparently started searching it there. After waiting around several hours, this was again in November, and it can be quite cool there in the night. The hotel employees had distributed blankets for us to stand around out there, because a lot of people were half-dressed there in the cold November air. But we finally found out from the hotel manager what had happened. Three American-owned hotels about a mile away had been struck by suicide bombers. That's why we had been rushed out in such an emergency situation out of the hotel in the middle of the night. A few minutes later, after the police and military had finished searching the hotel, we were allowed to go back in to return to our rooms and try to get some semblance of sleep after that.

I immediately turned on the only English-speaking news channel that we had there, which happened to be CNN. Darris immediately called back to the states to notify our wives that we're okay and safe, and so on. It was when I started watching CNN that I learned that 60 people had been killed in those suicide bomber attacks, and another 115 had been injured and maimed, some blinded, some having arms, legs blown off, this type of thing. In the worst of these three suicide bombings, a suicide bomber had detonated his explosives in the middle of a wedding, and both the fathers of the groom and the bride were killed in that attack. Ironically, the majority of the dead in these suicide bombings, though they were at American hotels, the majority of the dead were Jordanians and Palestinians, because that's the people who lived there in Amman. They were killed by three Iraqi suicide bombers. The suicide attacks would have been much worse, but in one of the cases, the wedding celebration there, there was one female suicide bomber who was there, and apparently she could not get her explosives vest, which was packed with nails and ball bearings to detonate. So she was captured, and they were able to interrogate her later and find out what had happened there. So it was a very, very, very sad, tragic situation. As a reminder of that, here's a copy of the Jordan Times newspaper I picked up the next morning talking about those suicide bombings. It says here that killed 57. Actually, the death toll was higher than that, as more people died after the original reporting took place there. If any of you would like to look at this later, you're welcome to. But why did this tragic event happen here? Why did the 9-11 attacks happen in September 2001, when 3,000 Americans were killed in New York City and Pennsylvania? Why were 52 British citizens killed and over 800 injured in attacks on the London subway system and on their famous red double-decker buses there in London? Why did that happen a few months before that attack that took place there in Amman, Jordan, that came too close for comfort to me? Why is it that 190 Spaniards were killed and more than 2,000 injured in train bombings in Madrid a year earlier?

Why were almost 1,000 Indians killed or wounded in commuter train bombings in India on July 11, 2006? Why, a month after that, did Hezbollah forces in Lebanon attack northern Israel with a barrage of rockets and missiles kidnapping two Israeli soldiers, killing a number of brothers, and starting yet another war in the Middle East? Why also in that summer of 2006 was a plot uncovered in Britain to blow up several airliners traveling from Europe to the United States? Which is why now we're all limited to just a few ounces of liquids that we can carry on board the planes. That's what started this, this plot that they uncovered to try to blow up airliners crossing the Atlantic Ocean there. Why, for that matter, a year after that, in the summer of 2007, did two British doctors, British doctors of Pakistani descent, try to blow up cars packed with explosives outside nightclubs in London? And when that failed, they tried to blow up their cars in the middle of the Glasgow-Scotland Airport. Why, in November, a year after that, did a group of Pakistani gunmen come in on boats and infiltrate and kill 174 people in Mumbai, India? Why, for that matter, just, let's bring it up to more recent times. These were several years ago. Why, just last September, did a man who lived here in Denver, although he was born in Afghanistan, why was he charged with a plot to set off explosives to blow himself up? And who knows how many people in the New York subway system? He's been charged in that potential attack. Why, last November, did a U.S. Army major whose parents were of Jordanian descent murder 13 of his fellow soldiers and kill 30 some odd others in Fort Hood, Texas?

Why, on December 25th, Christmas Day, did a Nigerian with explosives hidden inside his clothing try to blow up a jet as it approached to land in Detroit? And why, just seven weeks ago, did another American citizen, also born in Pakistan, try to blow up an SUV that was packed with propane tanks and explosives, other things, gasoline, on a street in New York's Theater District? Which could have killed or maimed, again, hundreds of people, had he been successful with that? What is it that connects all of these things? And how can we connect the dots and try to make sense of this? You know, here in the Western world, all of this just seems unfathomable to us. What is it that is motivating people to do things like that?

What's behind all of this? Is there a common theme to so many of the wars that we see around the world of violence, kidnappings, terrorism, all kinds of terrible events that take place? Well, the one thing that all of these events have in common is that they are all attacks by Muslim fundamentalists. It's amazing how Islam has gone from a rigid religion that hardly anyone had heard of or knew anything about before September 11, 2001, to a religion that is now in some form, when it's mentioned, that is in the headlines virtually every day, sometimes multiple times a day.

And yet, ironically, in spite of this, most people know very little at all about Islam, what it is, its history, what is motivating people to do things like this. Well, today I would like to help you understand some facts that you won't hear hardly anywhere else, and that's why the title of today's sermon is Inside Islam.

This will be part one. Plan to go through three separate parts in this, going through different backgrounds and history, so that we can understand. Because if you really do not understand the background, you cannot understand what is taking place in the world today and why. And toward the end of this series, we'll get into how this might play out in terms of Bible prophecy as well.

Again, there's a vast amount of information that we need to understand about this, about Islam, to try to make sense. I'll tell you in advance that a great deal of what I'm going to be telling you is not politically correct at all. A lot of what I'll be telling you are things that have been diligently ignored, suppressed, covered up, not reported by the mainstream media for reasons of political correctness. If you would like to educate yourself on this, I can refer you to a number of books about the subject that will give you quite a bit of detail about the things I'll be talking to you about in this series here. Let's talk first about the magnitude of the Islamic religion. Out of a world population of 6.8 billion people, approximately one in every four to five people is a Muslim. One in four to five. So that translates into 1.5 to 1.6 billion people who are adherents of Islam. However, I have read accounts that place that number as high as 2 billion out of a world population of 6.8 billion. Now, in comparison to that, there's about 2.2 to 2.4 billion professing Christians in the world. So there aren't quite as many Muslims, but they are catching up fast. Two reasons for that is they have a very high rate of conversions, people converting to the Islamic religion, and they also have a very high birth rate. The average birth rate among Muslim women is 6 children per woman. Now, you might compare that to Europe, for instance. A lot of the birth rates in countries like Italy, Spain, Britain, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, a lot of these countries, each woman, only has 1.1 to 1.5, 1.7 women. You compare that to an average of 6 women, 6 children, for each Muslim woman, and you can see where the demographic trends are going to take the world and where they're taking Europe, which is in itself a long story to talk about there. Muslims make up more than half of the population in 50 countries, which you can see is illustrated on this map. The green countries, predominantly North Africa and the Middle East, are more than 50% Muslim, and the yellow countries are 10 to 50% Muslim there. So you can see that on the outlying edges of Islam, there's also a substantial Muslim population as well. The entirety of the Middle East, here with the exception of Israel, is overwhelmingly Muslim. By overwhelmingly, I mean 90% to 99% Muslim.

It is illegal to leave the Islamic religion in most of those countries, perhaps all of them. I'm not sure about every single one. It is illegal to change your religion. You can leave Christianity and become a Muslim, but you cannot convert the other way in some countries on pain of death.

It is actually a capital offense to leave Islam because you are leaving the true faith and are then worthy of death in a number of countries like Saudi Arabia and some of the others that are more extremist. Most of the northern half of Africa, here, is also overwhelmingly, again, 90% to 95% Islamic as well.

Quite a few of the former Soviet republics, what used to be the USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a number of those, the United States of Muslims, and a lot of those have become Islamic republics now as well. Muslims control most of the supply of the lifeblood of the world economy, which is oil. Something else that's in the news. There isn't just oil on the Gulf Coast. Muslims control the entirety of the Middle East virtually, as well as its oil supply, which is where most of the world's oil comes from.

And all of these facts combine to make Islam a huge and growing factor when it comes to world geopolitics. Does Islam affect your life? Let's talk about that briefly here. Well, it does. Every time you go to an airport, as I mentioned earlier, you have to take off your shoes. Why do you do that?

Because a Muslim, British citizen, Richard Reed, smuggled in plastic explosives hidden in his shoe and tried to blow up a Delta flight coming from Europe to the United States. It's why you can't take much hairspray, mouthwash, any liquids, gels, anything like that on your airline flights because of a plot to blow up several airplanes flying again from Europe to the United States. On September 11, 2001, to harken back to that, 19 Muslim hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center in the Pentagon on that day. And the one that crashed in the field in Pennsylvania was apparently headed for either the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building to try to decapitate the United States government at that time. We'll talk more about that in a future sermon here. They killed 3,000 Americans on that day. All of the 19 hijackers were Muslim, and 15 of those were from Saudi Arabia, which is the heart of Islam and also the world's largest oil producer. So how did we get to this point where it seems like Islam is at war with the rest of the world? What is it in Islamic teaching, in Islamic history that has brought us to this point to find out why Islam is in its current state and understand what's going on? We actually have to go back to its history. And that history starts more than 1,400 years ago in what is today Saudi Arabia. There weren't many things such as national borders that far back. It was basically the Saudi Arabian Peninsula was just a few scattered towns, cities, trading centers, and so on. And tribes there fighting, competing against one another, raiding each other, and that sort of thing. So it's in those roots that an individual by the name of Muhammad comes along. He was born in the year 570 AD in Mecca, one of Islam's holy cities, Mecca and Medina, in what is today Saudi Arabia again. Muhammad was born into a poor family. His father died before Muhammad was born. And his mother died when he was about age 5 or 6. So Muhammad was an orphan. He was passed around to live with various relatives after both of his parents had died. And really seems to have had a fairly normal childhood, normal as you can, under the circumstances there.

He seems to have been fairly inquisitive. Saudi Arabia, or the city that he lived in, Mecca, was one of the famous caravan routes and stops there, trading spices, bringing different goods and so on through that parts of the world. There were very few areas that the caravans could safely travel there because of the harshness of the desert environment there.

So he seemed to particularly enjoy when the caravans would stop in town to talk with the camel drivers, the merchants, the people like that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later, but keep that in mind that his contact with these different people in the caravans coming through. He's a boy. Like most boys, he likes to get outdoors. He loves to explore the desert. He was particularly drawn to caves because Saudi Arabia is quite a rocky place.

A lot of caves in it, that sort of thing. Mohammed's mother was a little bit different. Again, his father died before he was born, so he never knew his father. But Mohammed's mother was reported to have an excitable nature, character to her. She often claimed that she was visited by spirits.

She was involved in what we would today call the occult, dabbling in the dark side, the spirit world, this type of thing. This is a new development. It's gone back for many, many centuries. And this likely had some impact on her son, Mohammed, before he died. At age 25, Mohammed married a wealthy widow who was 15 years older than he was. Together, they had two sons, both of whom died young, and that would influence events later in history. He also had four daughters. After he married the wealthy widow, Mohammed was able to live a, for what was the time, relatively a life of leisure. Because living off her wealth, his duties were basically confined to running a merchant stall there in the local town marketplace.

From childhood, one thing had been quite unusual about Mohammed. That is, he experienced strange visions. In one of the earliest visions he reported, he claimed that a heavenly being had split open his stomach and stirred up his insides and then sewn him back together. A rather bizarre thing.

He actually came across this and researched this material in a lot of early Christian art. For instance, the period of Michelangelo and so on. You'll find different depictions of Mohammed, and he's inevitably placed in hell. Another subject there. But he's also depicted quite often with his belly split open and his innards, his entrails spilling out. And that apparently goes back to this vision that he had seen.

So a lot of early Christian artists were familiar with this and depicted him this way in artwork.

Some researchers have suggested that Mohammed's early visions were the result of a combination of epileptic seizures and an overactive imagination.

Early Muslim tradition says that when Mohammed was about to receive a divine use, in quote marks, a revelation that he would fall down on the ground, that his body would begin to jerk, his eyes would roll back in his head, and he would sweat profusely. And this is a good description. Medical doctors have looked at this and said that sounds a lot like an epileptic seizure.

And perhaps that is what was going on when Mohammed would supposedly receive these revelations from Allah. What he was, he would then go into a trance with this seizure, trance-like state, and he claimed that then he was receiving divine revelations. After the trance, he would then get up and state what he had seen or heard during these, what he called, were divine visitations.

Now, in the culture of the time, the Arab culture of that part of the world of Mohammed's day, these kinds of seizures were viewed as either, well, as a visit from the spirit world, either the divine side, the godly side, or a demonic visitation. And Mohammed himself was worried about the possibility that he might be demon-possessed.

And he thought that to the point that he apparently, at one point, seriously considered committing suicide, to rid himself of what he thought might be demonic possession. And he might have, except that his wife told him that he was such a good man that it could not possibly be demons that were troubling him, that it had to be divine visitations there. So eventually he came to accept that, that these were indeed divine visitations, and at about age 40, Mohammed again experienced one of these visitations, and as a result of these experiences, he claimed that the god Allah had come to call him. And the way he related the story, there's actually several different versions. The most popular is that he was asleep in a cave, and here's a photograph of the cave in Saudi Arabia today.

When the angel Gabriel spoke to him and began revealing the word of Allah to him. Now, actually, I might point out that we'll cover this more later in the sermon, but Islam is a very confusing religion, and its holy book, the Quran, is a very confusing book, because the Quran actually gives us four different conflicting accounts of how Mohammed was supposedly called to be a prophet. The first account, chronologically, as best we can tell, is Mohammed first stated that Allah, the god Allah, had personally appeared to him in the form of a man, a human being that Mohammed saw and heard. Later, Mohammed stated that his call was through this Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit appeared to him. Still later, he said that angels, plural, more than one angel, came down to him and announced that God had called him, God Allah had called him to be his prophet. And then last of all, which is the most popular version, which is that the angel Gabriel came down, and this is the story that most people have heard about Mohammed's original calling.

Apparently, why did he change his story? Why did he come up with four different versions of his calling? Well, he apparently came up with this last account of his original call after hearing that the angel Gabriel had played a significant role in the births of both John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. Now, Mohammed apparently assumed that it was only appropriate that the next great prophet in line, because Islam does view John the Baptist and Jesus as great prophets, so it was only appropriate that the next great prophet in line, which was Mohammed himself, would also be called, or that the angel Gabriel would be involved in his calling as well.

So then he told people that he had been asleep in this cave when the angel Gabriel spoke to him and began revealing the word of Allah to him. Not surprisingly, he didn't make many converts at first. After four years, he only had 70 followers, but he persisted, and he claimed, he taught, that he was sent to restore the original religion of Abraham and that he was the last in a long series of prophets that included Adam, the original prophet, Noah, Moses, Jesus, John the Baptist, many of the Hebrew prophets, and others. So he was the last in line. He was the last final, the penultimate prophet there in Allah's interaction with mankind.

He started then reciting his visions, his revelations to his disciples and claiming they were the actual words of Allah, which he repeated word for word after receiving them in these trances. His disciples then memorized his words and started writing them down. Some were written down while Muhammad was still alive, and many would be written down after his death. And this would form what came to be known as Islam's holy book, the Quran. We'll talk about that here in just a few minutes. Initially, Muhammad seems to have been a genuinely kind and good man. His initial teachings focus on things like caring for the poor. One of the fundamental teachings of Islam, we'll talk about this in the future, is caring for the poor, supporting them financially.

He talked a lot about social justice, about patience under trials and persecution, because he was under trials and persecution, teaching his brand of monotheism in a world that was heavily idolatrous. There, we'll talk about that more later here, too. But over time, his teaching that there was only one God began to really get him in trouble with people there in Mecca, where he lived. Mecca had a very famous idolatrous shrine that's called the Kaaba. It's existed for... Actually, we're not sure exactly when. It may go back as far as 2,000 years, possibly even earlier.

Kaaba is a word from which we get the word cube, meaning a box, essentially. This is a photograph from the early 1900s showing the Kaaba. You can see this big cubic structure covered with fabric drapes and so on. It gives you some idea of the size of it by these figures around it here. This was located there in Mecca.

It was a very famous destination spot. People would come from literally hundreds of miles away to visit the Kaaba, the shrine, because it was a center of idol worship. The people of the city made a good living off of all of these visitors and caravans coming into the city here to do this. They did not take too kindly to Muhammad, saying, There is only one God, Allah!

All of these other gods are just worthless idols that you are not to worship there. That did not keep him in good stead with the city there. It created a lot of hostility. They drove Muhammad out of the city of Mecca. So he went to what is today the second holy city of Islam, which is Medina.

Mecca and Medina, both in Saudi Arabia. This flight came to be known as the Hajira. Hajira. It's a very important concept to us, or to Muslims, I should say, because the Muslim calendar starts from this time. Here, according to our calendar, it's the year 2010. According to the Islamic calendar, it's the year 1431, because their calendar dates from Muhammad's flight from Mecca to the city of Medina. Once Muhammad got to Medina, everything started to change, because there he started to accumulate greater power. He announced a new revelation that God had now ordered Muslims to fight the unbeliever.

So his religion changed from one of peace and tolerance and social justice to one that ordered them to fight against the Kafirs, the non-believers, the non-Muslims there. So the man who had initially been patient, humble, began to actively persecute others. And Medina, the first person he killed, was a woman who had composed poems that made fun of Muhammad, that mocked him. And one of Muhammad's followers stabbed her to death while she slept. He began to drive away people who didn't agree with him, and he arranged for opponents to be assassinated by his followers. Muhammad then began to test his own power in making war. He first sent out several of his followers who attacked and looted one of the caravans. They killed some of the people in the caravan, the others they took for slaves. And this proved to be so successful that Muhammad eventually began to lead the battles and the attacks on the caravans in towns himself. And these successes, he was quite good at it, and this attracted more and more followers who wanted to get in on the plunder, the loot, getting slaves, this sort of thing. It became a self-perpetuating movement there. It was around this time that Muhammad decided that the Jews, and a little historical side note, Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and again in 135 AD, that had scattered the Jews throughout the Middle East. Of course, some were scattered earlier by the Assyrians and the Babylonians and so on. But there was quite a hefty Jewish population in that region as well. So around this time, Muhammad decided that the Jews were not going to convert to his new religion. He had initially tried to encourage the Jews to convert, to accept him as a prophet because, after all, he taught monotheism. He believed in one God, Allah. The Jews believed in one God, Yahweh. He also, apparently, initially observed the Sabbath, which is an odd quirk in history. Initially, apparently observed the Jewish Sabbath. You may hear that Muslims today pray facing toward Mecca, and they do. But, initially, apparently, they were praying toward Jerusalem until Muhammad finally turned against the Jews and reversed the direction from praying toward Jerusalem to praying toward Mecca then. He also changed their Holy Day, if you will, from the Sabbath, Saturday, the seventh day of the week, to Friday, which was one of the pagan holidays at that time. You may have heard, if you've ever traveled the Middle East, that most Muslims observe the dietary laws of the Bible. They don't eat unclean animals. And that's true for the most part. They do consider camels as clean. They do consider shellfish, crabs, lobsters, that sort of thing as clean. But apart from that, they observe the laws of clean and unclean meats. And, apparently, this goes all the way back to when he was trying to curry the favor of the Jews back there so long ago. Eventually, however, it became obvious that the Jewish people, many of whom were merchants involved in trades and so on, were not going to become his disciples. So he turned against them again and changed the rites and rituals that he had in common with the Jews. It was also around this time that he began to actively persecute and kill the Jews. At first, he set out assassins to kill individual Jews, but later he expanded it to target entire Jewish settlements and towns. As we see in this graphic here, we see a depiction of a walled city. And here is Mohammed and some of his followers coming and meeting to essentially demand that they surrender there. And there was a financial reason for these attacks to be blunt about it, because many of the Jewish settlements were centers of the gold and silver trade.

So by conquering such places, Mohammed and his followers could gain a lot of wealth for themselves. One of the famous stories it cited, that Muslims cite to show the hostility toward the Jews, is I don't remember the name of the particular town, but Mohammed and his followers surrounded a Jewish town, demanded that it surrender. When the inhabitants surrendered, he took all of the men of the city. It was between 700 and 1,000, took them all out and beheaded every single one of them. And they took the women and the children and sold them into slavery. And then his followers looted the town and stole everything in it. So he was able to get the entire wealth of the town, plus income from several hundred, perhaps several thousand Jewish women and children. They were able to sell as slaves or take to themselves as slaves. Around this time, Mohammed had also established a peace treaty with the leaders of the city of Mecca, the city where he had earlier been driven from. And this treaty was to last for 10 years. But within two years, Mohammed had gained enough power that he broke the treaty. And then he went, surrounded the city of Mecca with an army of thousands of followers and forced the city to surrender. Now, it's important to know that a lot of these examples that are bringing up about Mohammed, it's important to realize that in Muslim theology and belief, Mohammed would hold a role very similar to what we would attribute to Jesus Christ. They routinely refer to Mohammed as the perfect man. You'll see, if you read Islamic writings, references to the perfect man. They're not talking about Jesus Christ. They're talking about Mohammed. So they use his example as a precedent for anything that they want to do or believe. So when they read historically about Mohammed breaking this treaty that was supposed to last 10 years, they look at that and they say, well, Mohammed did it, therefore we can do it. And the implications of that are quite serious there. And the lesson that Muslims draw from this is that Muslims are free to make agreements with the kafirs, the infidels, the non-Muslims, so long as the treaty lasts for no more than 10 years, because that was Mohammed's example. He set a treaty for 10 years. However, they are also free to break any agreement they make with the unbelievers, because that's what Mohammed did. Now, how does this translate into real-world geopolitics today? Basically means that Muslims can make any agreements that they want with the West. You might be thinking about what's been going on in Iran for years now, where they'll sign this or that agreement to avoid sanctions from the UN or the EU or the US or Soviet Union or whatever, and what happens. They'll make a verbal agreement to it, and then they'll just go on doing what they were doing that brought the sanctions to begin with. That's why nothing is happening. Everybody knows that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, but the Iranians deny it because, again, it's all right to lie to the kafirs, the unbelievers, the infidels, because Mohammed did that. So you understand this. You see all of this playing out in world events, and that's really what's going on. The Iranians have no compunctions whatsoever about lying to the West, because that's what Mohammed did, and he was the perfect man. So if he did it, we can do it as well. So these things that sound so quaint and happen back in the 600s AD are actually being repeated on the world stage right now. You might think of the example of Yasser Arafat, one of history's most despicable figures.

Yasser Arafat specifically cited the example of Mohammed when he would make agreements with the Israelis, because he would get flack from his own people about that. Why are you making agreements with the infidels, the hated Jews? And Arafat's response to him was, I'm only doing what Mohammed did, because he made agreements with the infidels when he was in a position of weakness, but then when he became strong, then he broke the agreement. And that's all that I'm doing. You might think about the Oslo Accords and so on, where the Palestinians made agreements with the Israelis that supposedly would lead to peace. And what happened? The Palestinians turned around and broke the agreements just within weeks or months. And again, Arafat would say this in Arabic to his people, would say, I'm only doing what Mohammed did, but none of this ever gets reported in the Western media. All the Western media reports is what Arafat says in English, which is, oh, I'm all for peace. I renounce terrorism, this kind of thing, when he's telling his own people in Arabic the exact opposite. But again, that's perfectly allowable in Islamic thinking, because that's what Mohammed did. So anyway, once you understand that, then what you see coming out of the Arab world, and the Western nations trying to negotiate with the Arab or Muslim world, then it all starts to make sense. When you realize they have no intention whatsoever of keeping those agreements there, because again, that's what Mohammed did. After breaking his agreement there with the city and capturing the city, Mohammed then became the undisputed leader of the city of Mecca. I mentioned again earlier that the Ka'ba was a center of idols, had literally hundreds of idols in it. This is an illustration that shows around the outside of it, you see these different figures, some that are broken in pieces here. And you see men attacking them with clubs, looks like baseball bats or something, and they're breaking down the idols in there. Because now again, monotheism, belief, and Allah was to be the one religion that was going to be rigorously enforced here. So some of the people, also then he began taking his vengeance, killing people with whom he had a personal vendetta. One of the people who was killed there in the city of Mecca was a woman poetess who had ridiculed him in some of her poems. She also pointed out that some of the material that Muhammad claimed to be his own divine revelation from Allah was actually material that he had stolen from her father, who also was a poet. And she was put to death in order to silence her. So Muhammad now was the undisputed head of Mecca and Medina, and Arab tribesmen again to get in on the loot, the plunder, the growing wealth, and power began joining him by the hundreds and thousands. And Islam was now off and running.

But by this time, Muhammad started to get older, and up in his years. And Muhammad had by now developed two great weaknesses. One, which we've touched on, was greed by looting the caravans, by attacking the settlements, stealing the property, selling people off into slavery. He had amassed fabulous wealth for himself and for his family and for his tribe. And again, that attracted a lot of people to him.

His next greatest weakness was women.

Because although in the Quran he would state that Allah said a man should have no more than four wives, Muhammad himself took 22 women to be his wives and mistresses. The first 16 of these 22 were wives, but he also took two others who were slave women.

He took another four who were neither wives nor slaves, but simply devout Muslim women who gave themselves to Muhammad to satisfy his sexual desires.

One of these women was originally Muhammad's adopted son's wife. Now again, Muhammad had two sons who died in childhood, but he did adopt a son later. And this son married and took a wife.

So Muhammad supposedly had a divine revelation that his adopted son should divorce his wife.

So Muhammad relayed that revelation to his adopted son, who then, yes, divorced his wife. And then what happened? Muhammad turned around and then married her and took her as one of his wives as well.

Muhammad's third wife, Asha, is her name, was actually only eight or nine years old when he took her as a wife.

You may remember several years ago, a prominent American evangelist stirred up a hornet's nest of criticism when he called Muhammad a pervert and a child molester.

And this is what he was referring to. He created a firestorm in the media here. How could he say that? That Muhammad was a pervert and a child molester. Well, he's referring to the fact that Muhammad took as a wife, with all that entails, an eight or nine year old girl.

And where was the criticism of Muhammad for being a pervert? No, it was the American evangelist who pointed this out. It was viewed as a hate monger, somebody spreading hate. Again, what I'm telling you is not politically correct here, but it's the truth. It's the absolute truth, and you can look it up for yourself.

After accumulating great power and wealth through his strategies, Muhammad died in AD 632.

Since his two sons, as we noted, had died young, he had no living son, and he made no arrangements for a successor.

Neither had he gathered or put together the various revelations that he had received.

He died suddenly, so they didn't have time to put all of this together before he died.

And because Muhammad did not expressly spell out what was to be done after his death, Islam then broke up into two major competing factions of Islam, and that's where we get the Shia, or the Shiites, that you hear about, and the Sunnis, the Sunni Muslims and the Shia, or Shiite Muslims. They traced back as to a conflict over who was to be the designated successors of Muhammad.

We won't get into all that history, but that is why there is, to this day, all the violence that we see in Iraq, which is largely between, again, the two main branches of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shiites there, fighting for control and power there.

I should mention also that Islam is, in that sense, a lot like traditional Christianity.

Islam is not a monolithic religion. They don't all believe the same thing or practice the same thing.

It's divided into literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of different sects and beliefs, just like traditional Christianity is there.

They do not all believe the same thing. They do not all teach the same thing.

That's why there are a number of different religious leaders claiming authority within Islam today.

Again, the Sunnis and the Shiites are quite regularly at each other's throats.

Most Islamic countries are predominantly 80 to 90 percent one faith or the other.

That's why Iraq has been such a bloodbath there, because it's roughly 60 percent Shiite, about 30 percent Sunni, and about 10 percent other religions.

Because it's not dominated so heavily by one group, that's why both sides are fighting so much for power and control there.

After Muhammad died in 632, his successors continued to spread Islam with a vengeance.

Here's a map that illustrates that. Within about 100 years, the armies of Islam had spread from the Arabian Peninsula, which is right here, Mecca and Medina.

They spread out over across North Africa and all the way up and took most of Spain.

You may wonder why Spain is a hot point, why there were the train bombings that I mentioned earlier.

We'll get into that a little bit in a future sermon here, but just remember that. They also spread up into Asia Minor, up into Asia and some parts of the whole area that's today. Pakistan, Afghanistan, that area.

Again, this was by about 700 AD. This is the area that Islam controlled, the part that's in the dark orange there.

Everywhere they went, Christians and Jews in Islamic teaching, they're called people of the book because they believe in the Bible, the Old Testament for the Jews, the New Testament for the Christians.

They're called people of the book in Islamic theology there.

Christians and Jews were, as Islam spread here, allowed to maintain their religion. However, they were forced into a condition, you might call it second-class citizens, but that really doesn't adequately describe it.

In Islamic terms, it's called demitude, D-H-I-M-M-I-T-U-D-E, or the people are called demis.

That means it's something between a slave and a free man. What that means is you are allowed to own property and have certain rights, but for instance, you might not be allowed to vote.

You could never hold any position that would put you over a Muslim. So if you were in the military, you could not be a commander, a sergeant, anywhere in the command structure in the military.

In government, in the towns or cities, you could not be the mayor or a town elder or anything like that. You would always be relegated to a permanent, not really second-class, but more like third- or fourth-class status there.

You could not testify in a court of law. If two Muslims came and testified against you that you had blasphemed Allah or something like that, you could be put to death quite easily. Your property confiscated on a whim, this type of thing.

In some countries, you could not raise your children as Christians or Jews, but you would have to turn them over to be raised in the local mosque as a Muslim.

This is some of the types of laws that existed under there.

So the Christians and Jews had it relatively good. The other people, who are pagans or nonbelievers, whatever, they had a very simple choice. It was accept Islam or die.

And it's a very effective evangelistic technique. They put a sword to your throat, tell you convert or die, and you convert or you die. That's one of the reasons why Islam is so pervasive in those regions today.

You might think back to the map we showed earlier, where the areas that are basically 90% plus Muslim are these areas that are in the original orange, and then the other areas 10 to 50% Muslim are a lot of the same areas, a lot of parallels with that map.

We don't have time to go back and look at it. But again, what we're seeing in today's geopolitics goes back to the 600-700 AD. That's what formed the structure of the world that we're dealing with today, and why there are still so many problems in those areas.

So this first wave of Islam stalled out again within a century or so of Muhammad's death.

Later, in the 12th century, Islam started spreading again, and that's where we see the yellow colors.

They spread out, took over basically the northern half of Africa, spread over into what is today India, spread further up into Central Asia, took over all of Asia Minor, took over Greece, and parts of Eastern Europe.

And you might think about, we'll talk about this more in the future, perhaps you've heard the term, the bloody borders of Islam. Any of you ever heard that term? Occasionally come across it in different books, magazines, and so on.

And what we're really seeing, if you read your headlines, and you think about, and you pull out a map and locate where these terrorist events are taking place, where there are train bombings, things like that, suicide bombings, a lot of them are along the bloody borders of Islam. In other words, along the fringes of Islam, where they are trying to break out and expand the territory.

The whole war back in the 90s between the Serbs and the Bosnians, if you remember that, you never heard in the Western media that that was a religious war. It was a religious war between the Christian Serbs and the Muslim Bosnians. That's what the war was all about.

It was about the Bosnians trying to take over the lands of the Christians by burning churches and beheading Christians. That's what the war was about. You never read that, though, in the Western media. Spanish train bombings that I referred to earlier took place in Spain. One of the Muslim beliefs is that once something was Islamic territory, it is essentially an abomination for it to stay in the hands of the infidels, that Muslims are obligated to go back and reconquer that territory.

That's why the existence of Israel in the heart of Muslim territory is such a stench in the nostrils of Muslims. Kenya, you may remember the various embassy bombings, things like that over there. Again, Nigeria, there's essentially a low-grade civil war taking place in Nigeria right in here right now. Again, it's between Muslims and Christians, but you do not hear about that. Kashmir region of India, again, it's the Hindu-Indians versus the Pakistani-Muslims, or Indian-Muslims, as the case may be.

So, nearly everywhere that you read about wars, terrorism, kidnappings, this type of thing, a lot of that is taking place along the bloody borders of Islam. We'll talk about that in greater detail in the future here, but I just wanted to point that out here on this map. Because, again, things that happened centuries ago are affecting the world we live in every single day. And without that background, you just do not understand why these things are taking place and how it might all play out in the end. I'd like to talk now a bit about Islam's holy book, the Quran.

I have a copy of it here if you'd like to look at it. It's fairly small. It's roughly the same number of words as our New Testament. You can buy a paperback copy or others. There's a number of different translations. I'm aware of about four or five different translations from Arabic into English. It claims to be the word of Allah handed down by Muhammad. But there was a real problem with that because Muhammad was illiterate. He never learned how to read or write.

So when it came to writing a holy book, you got a real problem if you're illiterate. So how did that come to be? What kind of problems did that create? We already talked about how Muhammad would go into trances or seizures. There were supposedly a divine visit from Allah or the angel Gabriel.

Then when he would come out of the trance, he would relate what he had seen to his followers. His followers would then try to either memorize what he said or to write it down on whatever happened to be handy. One resource describes some of the things that they wrote down on. Because again, they never knew when Muhammad was going to go into a trance like this.

So they just had to write down on whatever happened to be handy when he came out of the trance and related what he had supposedly seen or heard. So one encyclopedia says that some of the things that his divine words were written on were papyrus, which is an early form of paper, flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder blades and ribs of animals, inches of leather, like a leather belt or strap or bridal saddle, who knows what, and wooden boards.

So when nothing was available to write on, his followers simply tried to memorize what he had said to the best of their ability. So when Muhammad died unexpectedly at about age 60, his followers had a real challenge here. They had to gather all of this scattered material from over a fairly large region there. Some of this material was written on very fragile materials, palm leaves, pieces of bark, and so on.

And then there were a number of things. Muhammad's revelations were committed simply to memory of some of these followers. There was nothing written down at all. So this created a lot of difficulty. Some of the tree bark on which Muhammad's revelations had been written crumbled, disintegrated, as tree bark is wont to do. Some of the stones, the flat stones on which it was written, were lost.

Worse yet, some Arab historians themselves note that the animals at times ate some of the palm leaves on which these divine revelations were written down. Now think about that. This is supposedly a holy book. Can you imagine, for instance, God allowing that to happen to parts of the Bible?

You know, Joshua coming to Moses and saying, sorry Moses, we lost that chapter of the book of Exodus because the goat was hungry and ate it. Can you imagine? This is supposedly a divine book, and yet parts of it were eaten by goats and camels. It's just absurd. Absurd. Again, not politically correct, but the truth. Some of Muhammad's companions were the only ones who remembered a particular revelation, and some of them died in battle before it was ever written down. So that part of Allah's revelation was gone. He died with the man when he died in battle. Sometimes there was confusion because two of Muhammad's followers would remember what he said a different way. Again, it wasn't written down. They're just relying on memory, and their memory differs as desires. So which is right? Who knows? Who knows? No way to know for sure. Again, it took several years to gather all this material, and during that time, again, some of the other witnesses to these revelations died there, and were no longer there to state what had happened. So there are all kinds of...as a result of all of these difficulties, there was quite a bit of arguing as to what was, and whether there existed an accurate record of what Muhammad's revelations had actually been. So let's talk a little bit about the Quran itself, with that background of how it came to be put together. Again, about the same number of words as the New Testament. It's divided up into 114 chapters called Surahs. If you read quotes from the Quran, you'll see references to Surah 93, Surah 37, this sort of thing. It's the equivalent of chapters of the Bible. Now, you might naturally expect the Quran to be organized chronologically, or by subject matter, something like that. If you expected that, you'd be dead wrong, because the way the Quran is organized is simply by the length of chapter. Now, again, let's relate that to the Bible. If we had a Bible that was organized like the Quran, chapter 1 would be Psalm 119, longest chapter in the Bible. After that, you'd have the next longest chapter, which might be a chapter from the book of Corinthians, or a chapter from the book of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, something like that. That might be followed by another of the Psalms, or a chapter from Matthew, or a chapter from Esther. That's the way it would be organized, by the length of the chapter. So there is no chronology in it. There is no consistent story flow in it. There is no organization according to subject matter in it. It is organized strictly by length of chapter. So to try to understand what Islam really teaches, you have to hunt and peck throughout the entire book. Then you have a real problem, because the Quran contradicts itself. In some places, you'll find an instruction in the Quran, maybe in chapter 3, and that will be contradicted by what's in chapter 87, which is right. You would think that the later Revelation would trump the earlier Revelation, but you don't know, because you don't know when the chapters were written, because they're not organized by chronology. They're organized by length of chapter. So again, that's why I say that Islam is a very confusing religion, and its holy book is very confusing as well. There are just a lot of problems there.

Again, to illustrate, the first chapter in here has about 300 verses in it. Over in the middle, you have various chapters of maybe 30 to 50 verses, and then over at the end, you have a dozen or so chapters that only have two verses. So that's the way it's organized. Just a terribly confusing jumbled mess with no real logic or flow. So again, to reconstruct what Islam believes, or even try to reconstruct the life of Muhammad or his beliefs or teachings, you have to jump all over the Quran from one chapter to another to make sense of it. There, so just really, you can read this. I've read a fair amount of it, and to be blunt, it makes my head hurt after a short time, just trying to make sense of it there. The Bible, on the other hand, has a very logical story flow. It starts, Genesis 1.1, with the creation, creation of everything, the entire universe. Then it starts dealing with God's interaction with mankind, with Adam and Eve. And then there's the story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the people that God has worked with through the centuries, culminating in Jesus Christ's ministry, and then the teachings and writings of his followers, and the Apostle Paul, and so on, and then ending with a book of Revelation, when God is, again, when the Earth is essentially returned to the state that we find it in Genesis, of an Eden-like state with God communing with humankind again. So, again, even though the books of the Bible were written by dozens of authors over about 15 centuries, it's still very logical, very organized, easy to catch the story flow there. It does not contradict itself, and that cannot be said of the Quran. There are many factual mistakes in the Quran and many conflicts between it and the Bible. Again, you won't read about this in most places, but you can find them documented in some places on the Internet or in a number of different books. You might keep in mind that, again, Muhammad claimed to be the final prophet, successor of Adam, of Abraham, of Moses, of Jesus Christ, and so on, and that he was simply continuing their teachings. And yet, as we'll go through here in the next few minutes, there are many conflicts between the Quran and the Bible that show that there's no way that Muhammad was a prophet of God, and certainly not a continuation of God's work and revelation of mankind. I'll talk quickly about a few of these mistakes and inconsistencies.

One, Surah 41 states that there were eight days of creation. Eight days. The Bible itself says there were six days of creation, or seven, if you want to include the Sabbath in that. However, other chapters in the Quran also state that there were six days of creation that agree with the Bible. So the Quran not only disagrees with the Bible, it disagrees internally with itself, whether there were six days or eight days of creation.

Another contradiction is about Noah and his sons in the flood. The Bible, of course, says that all three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth went onto the flood, and they became the progenitors of the major racial groups that we have today, and they were saved from the flood. However, the Quran says that one of Noah's sons refused to go into the ark and was drowned in the flood.

Also, the Quran claims that the ark came to rest in what is today Saudi Arabia, and not in the mountains of Ararat there, like the Bible says. Abraham is a major figure in Islam, and the Quran makes many statements that are in conflict with the Bible about Abraham. For instance, it claims that Abraham lived and worshipped in the Valley of Mecca, which is totally contrary to the Bible. The Bible gives no indication he ever came close to Saudi Arabia. Much less lived there. The Quran claims that Abraham went to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son Ishmael, and not Isaac, as the Bible says. It's one of the reasons why there's this ongoing conflict, again, going back almost 4,000 years, the conflict between the sons of Ishmael and the sons of Isaac there, that hatred. They don't even know why the hatred is there, but it's there. That's why a lot of the Arabs hate the West, and hate Israel, and they don't even know why. It goes back 4,000 years. A few others. The Quran says that Abraham rebuilt the Kaaba, the cube there in Mecca that we talked about earlier, and that it was actually originally built by Adam. Wrap your hand around that. Apparently, Garden of Eden must have been in Saudi Arabia. Don't think so. Another one that really is mind-boggling is that Abraham was thrown into a fire by Nimrod. This illustrates a very frequent problem that you run into in the Quran, because Nimrod lived many centuries before Abraham, not long after the flood. So how did Nimrod manage to throw Abraham into a fire there after Nimrod had been dead for centuries? How did that happen? What we see is that throughout the Quran, if you read through it again, this is one reason it makes your head hurt, is you find all of these people and places and events just all jumbled up together. You have Nimrod interacting with Abraham. You have Haman, who lived in the time of King Xerxes and Queen Esther. You have him interacting with Moses and Pharaoh. You have Mary, mother of Jesus, interacting with Aaron, the brother of Moses. All this kind of jumble of people and places and so on, who are pictured as living and working and interacting together simultaneously. You find the flood happening in the time of Moses, for instance. You find Pharaoh working on the Tower of Babel, again, as if all of these things happen at the same time. And how did this happen? How did he get all of this so screwed up? Remember back when I talked earlier about Muhammad as a young boy and young man interacting with all of these caravan traders passing through there? Who were the caravan traders? Well, a number of them were Jewish merchants. A number of them were Christians, traditional Christianity. And they would gather around the fires at night. The campfires are there at the local inn in Mecca or Medina. And they would swap their stories. All those would be biblically-based stories. So what happens, obviously, is that over the years, Muhammad had heard these various stories, events, the flood, the exodus, Jesus, the angels visiting Elizabeth, and John the Baptist's father, and so on. He'd heard all of these stories, and later these became regurgitated and supposedly divine revelations. But they're all totally mixed up, geographically and chronologically, to where they make no sense and where you have so many conflicts with the Bible there. So all of these errors and contradictions prove that the Quran was never remotely, divinely inspired.

A few other mistakes briefly about Moses. I mentioned the Quran states that the flood took place in Moses' day when actually they were separated by about a thousand years. The Quran says that Ha-Haman of the time of Xerxes and Esther lived in Egypt at the time of Moses and worked for Pharaoh building the Tower of Babel. But he actually lived about a thousand miles away in Persia and lived about a thousand years later. So a lot of these things contradict not just the Bible, but secular history as well. You can easily disprove the Quran just by secular history. The Quran describes crucifixion as being used in the time of Pharaoh when it actually would not be invented for about a thousand years later.

The Quran says that a Samaritan helped build the golden calf when the Israelites fled Egypt, but Samaria did not even exist by that name for about 400 years after the split between Israel and Judah after the death of Solomon. The Quran also contains a lot of serious historical errors just from history alone that disproved that could have been inspired. It says that Alexander the Great was a Muslim and that he lived to an old age. We know that he was an idolater. He worshipped all kinds of Greek gods, Egyptian gods, Syrian gods, various others, and he also died young at about age 30.

The Quran repeats. Some of you may have heard of the thousand and one knights, the tales. Arabian knights goes by different types of terms about all these Arabian fables. That was very common in that period because a lot of people were not literate, so they would tell all of these stories and so on. What we find is that this culture of storytelling actually migrates into the Quran as well. For instance, there's the story in the Quran of an entire village of people who are turned into apes because they were fishing on the Sabbath day. They were turned into apes. This was a popular legend in Muhammad's day and it made it into the Quran as supposedly divine revelation.

There's what's called the Rip Van Winkle story, which describes how seven men and their animals slept for over 300 years in a cave and then woke up with no ill effects after having slept for all that time, having neither eaten or drunk water or anything. This is actually a Greek legend, also an early Christian legend, fable, I should say, and it also found its way into the Quran as supposedly inspired truth. Muhammad also picked up material from early heretical Christian sects from sources like the Gospel of Barnabas, which has later been found to be an absolute fraud.

And yet it was circulating at that time, even though it was a fake. He also picked up some ideas from Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. And all of these things are recorded in the Quran as though they were true. Muhammad apparently thought they were true at the time, but subsequent events in history and research have shown them to be false. Quran also contains many false teachings about Jesus Christ. For instance, it denies His death and resurrection. It's quote directly from Surah 4 and verse 157. It says, They said, We killed Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah.

But they killed Him not, nor crucified Him, but so it was made to appear to them. So in other words, the official Islamic teaching is that the crucifixion was an illusion and that Jesus Christ was never really crucified for the sins of mankind. It also denies that Jesus is the son of God.

It says, quote, That is a saying from their mouth. In this, they but imitate what the unbelievers of the old used to say, Allah's curse beyond them, how they are deluded away from the truth. So here, the Quran not only denies the deity of Christ, but it also puts a curse on any who would acknowledge Christ as Lord. Surah 5 and verse 75 says that, well, they believe that Jesus was a prophet, but that He was simply a human being. It says in Surah 5, 75, Christ, the son of Mary, was no more than a messenger, a messenger of God, a prophet.

In other words, not the son of God, not the divine son of God, or the one who gave up His divinity to came to earth. Now, what do Muslims say about all these contradictions here? Basically, they just do not accept that the Quran could possibly be wrong. Their official teaching is that the Old Testament and the New Testament were corrupted along the way, and those are wrong. So the Quran can be right. And if you don't believe it, actually, every time we run some articles on Islam, like we did in the last Good News, I'll get a couple of emails from Muslims in various places, Iraq, Egypt, Philippines, whatever.

And they'll take me to task and say, don't you know, why are you criticizing the Quran? The Quran's the holy book, and you Christians have got it wrong in your Bible. Don't you know that the Bible is corrupted and the Quran is right? I see this regularly. I've got three or four messages like this after the last Good News here. I should also point out that many and probably a majority of Muslims really have little knowledge of the Quran itself.

Now, that sounds strange, but if you think about it, it's true of Christians. How many Christians really know their Bibles the way we in the Church of God have been taught to understand and know the Bible. They also do not understand much about the history of Islam. Their knowledge is based mostly on tales and stories that have been handed down to them by their parents or what they've learned at their local mosque.

And there are two reasons why Muslims know so little about their own holy book, the Quran. One is that most Muslim nations are very heavily illiterate. Many Muslim nations, particularly in Africa and Asia, 75 to 85 percent of the people are illiterate. You might think of Afghanistan. I think there's been several months since I've read the figures, but I believe only about half of the men know how to read and write.

And among women, it's only 5 to 10 percent who are literate there. That's why there's such an emphasis on building schools for girls and women there. But because of this illiteracy rate, they cannot read the Quran. They cannot read history books.

They cannot read newspapers. They cannot read the Bible. The Bible is banned in most Muslim countries. You cannot take a Bible into those countries without having it confiscated out of your luggage if they find it. Muslims also believe the Quran must be read in the Arabic language for the purity of it. And, of course, the Arabic language is only spoken by the Arab Muslims, who are actually only about a fifth of the total number of Muslims in the world.

Arabic is a foreign language, so therefore they cannot read and understand the Quran there because they do not read, write, or speak Arabic. So because of this, a lot of Muslims do not understand the Quran. They do not understand their history. They do not understand what I just told you here about Muhammad here. They do not understand the fundamental teachings of Islam. So this makes them very vulnerable to the radical mullahs, the radical teachers, the radical imams, the leaders and teachers in the local mosques.

So what we see is that in places like Saudi Arabia, where things are so heavily oriented toward a very fundamentalist type of Islam, because that is so dominant and that is taught everywhere in the mosques, that dominates the thinking and the culture of the country there. In other areas where that influence isn't quite so dominant, Islam is a little more mellow, not quite as harsh as we see in a lot of those countries. So what we see is that Muslims, many Muslims, are simply following a tradition of their ancestors, what they've been taught, what they've heard at the synagogue. So they have a faith that is actually a blind faith in a religion and a God about which they really know very little because of these problems here. I should also mention there is a whole other category of official Islamic teaching, and that is where we're called the Hadiths, and we'll go into that a little bit more in the future. These are other sayings or teachings of Muhammad that weren't part of the Quran, but nonetheless they have been collected and are considered authoritative teachings for a lot of Muslims. And it's in the Hadiths that you find some of the truly bizarre and strange teachings about Islam. And again, maybe I can share some of that in a future sermon. So with this background, we've laid a foundation for beginning to understand Islam. It's obviously a very large subject, a very complex subject, but again it does affect what we see taking place in the world around us. And next time I'll go into more of the contrast between the Bible and the Quran and how Muslims view their God, Allah, versus what the Bible teaches us about the true God.