"more Muslims have come to religion in Jesus Christ over the remaining thirty years—and above all over the last seven to ten years—than at some other time in human background," wrote Joel Rosenberg in 2008, and the pace has intensified due to the fact that then. Uwe Siemon-Netto confirmed in 2016 that "a world phenomenon is underway: Muslims are converting to a number of Christian denominations in droves in each a part of the world." indeed, Christian missionaries have even coined a name and an abbreviation for them: Muslim-heritage believers, or MBBs.
Why is that this fashion taking region, what are the numbers involved, and what are the penalties?
history
historically, pretty much all conversions involved Christians fitting Muslim, now not the reverse. Islam has for 1,400 years been the "hotel California" of religions ("which you can assess-out any time you like, but which you can on no account leave"), because it prohibits adherents from both declaring themselves atheists or contributors of an additional religion, which from the Islamic factor of view volume to the equal element. This perspective goes back to the faith's origins (a Hadith quotes Muhammad, "Whoever changes his faith, kill him") and the sense that leaving Islam is comparable to becoming a member of the enemy and, accordingly, equals betrayal. additionally, to reside as a correct Muslim has a magnificent social factor, taking part in the preservation of communal harmony.
for this reason, apostate Muslims all over face rejection by using their families, social ostracism, and lack of employment; in Muslim-majority international locations, moreover, their governments can also neatly persecute, imprison, torture, and kill them. Skeptical Muslims traditionally have therefore overwhelmingly stayed inside Islam's boundaries; even new religions deriving from Islam (the Druze, Nusayri/Alawi, Alevi, Babi, and Baha'i) in the beginning do the equal and lengthy preserve a murky relationship to it. The sample still holds nowadays, as an example, with Interuniversal Mysticism (Erfan-e Halgheh), a brand new-age version of Islam founded in Iran by using Mohammad Ali Taheri.
as a result, traditionally only a trickle of Muslims grew to become Christians. One accounting, via Church historian David Garrison, finds 5 actions of Muslims to Christianity in advance of the twentieth century and 69 such movements in exactly the first 12 years of the twenty-first. at least one of the vital first 5 actions befell below duress or to benefit a selected improvement. Most well-liked of the former have been the Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain, compelled to convert via their Catholic rulers. On infrequent occasions, complete communities have transformed to benefit advantages, as I actually have up to now defined:
In seventeenth-century Russia, a rules prohibiting non-Christians from owning serfs led to the conversion of prosperous Tatars, together with the ancestors of such luminaries because the musician Sergei Rachmaninoff, the poet and historian Nicholas Karamzin, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev. round 1700, some ruling families among the Sunni Muslims in Lebanon converted to Christianity to boost their political standing.
Egypt's rule over Syria in 1831-41 changed into a time of mass conscription when "each eligible Syrian Muslim become recruited to the Egyptian army." Yvette Talhamy explains:
This become not welcomed by way of the local inhabitants. … while some Syrians selected to flee the nation or maim themselves so as to keep away from conscription, others turned to the missionaries and declared their willingness to profess Christianity, seeing that Christians have been exempt from conscription in change for paying an exemption tax. The American Protestant missionaries have been flooded with requests to settle for Druze and others into their church.
(alas for the converts, this ploy failed, for they were conscripted "inspite of even if their conversion was real or feigned.")
The same disinclination held unless these days. travelling Sudan in February 1972, I stayed with an American missionary who had lived in Khartoum for twenty years, educating and discreetly keeping Sunday capabilities. but he gained most effective five converts in all that point, or one each four years. in a similar way, in a 1984 ebook, Ten Muslims Meet Christ, an American missionary tells the story of the meager outcomes of missionizing in Iran.
Numbers of Converts
MBBs can be notoriously problematic to quantify because of their discretion and even dissimulation. nevertheless, some startling estimates exist. Duane Alexander Miller and Patrick Johnstone estimate the total number of MBBs in 2010 at virtually 10 million, marking a 50-fold raise over the fewer than 200,000 converts of fifty years prior. reports of frequent conversions of Muslims to Christianity come from regions as disparate as Algeria, Albania, Syria, and Kurdistan. countries with the largest indigenous numbers consist of Algeria, 380,000; Ethiopia, four hundred,000; Iran, 500,000 (versus best 500 in 1979); Nigeria, 600,000; and Indonesia, an excellent 6 ,500,000 (as a result of pleasing situations). in response to Andrew van der Bijl and Al Janssen, there are "even Christians in Medina and Mecca."
In Egypt, a Coptic supply informs me, "extremely good numbers of Muslims transformed to Christianity after the 2011 rebellion and the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power. The Coptic Church called Islamist President Mohamed Morsi the 'super evangelist' and stopped counting the converts. Go to any church and also you'll essentially actually find former Muslims, specifically women, attending."
Most dramatically, in a plenty-stated December 2000 interview on Al Jazeera tv, the director of Libya's Companions' Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic legislations (منارة الصحابة للعلوم الشرعية, Manarat as-Sahaba li'l-`Ulum ash-Shar`iya), Ahmad al-Qat'ani, mentioned devoid of proof that 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity each 12 months. He reported that the Muslim inhabitants of Africa had gone from over half to only 1-third and raised the chance of Islam disappearing from sub-Saharan Africa. perhaps he exaggerated for fundraising functions, however his numbers have had wide circulation.
MBBs also are living within the West, with the united states internet hosting by way of far the most (450,000) and Bulgaria probably the most in Europe (forty five,000). on account that 2014, Liverpool Cathedral has hosted a weekly provider in the Persian language (called "Sepas") led by means of a deacon of Muslim origins; the Anglican bishop of Chelmsford, England, is an Iranian-born daughter of a convert. Muslim conversions accelerated the size of Berlin's Evangelisch-Lutherischen Dreieinigkeits-Gemeinde congregation from one hundred fifty to basically seven-hundred in barely two years. New associations have been centered, such as the Pars Theological Centre in London, which considering that 2010 exists "to equip and mobilize the Iranian church by way of practicing a brand new generation of servant leaders to steer the church and transform the Persian-talking world for the glory of God."
indistinct and divergent numbers imply that while no person has a good idea of the variety of Muslims changing to Christianity, the magnitude is colossal. Christians have a good time this phenomenon; Joel Rosenberg exalts that "the Church is being in reality resurrected within the lands of its delivery."
Why Muslims turn into Christians
Duane Miller notes that "Christ's converts from Islam are often pushed faraway from Islam as tons as they're drawn to Christ or Christianity." Focusing here handiest on the components that propel Muslims principally towards Christianity finds the list to be long.
goals and visions, specifically of Jesus, doubtless draw about a quarter of MBBs. Mike Ansari, an Iranian convert, experiences that many individuals "are in reality having desires and visions a couple of shining man dressed in white some distance earlier than we are obtainable telling them about Jesus." Dabrina bet Tamraz notes that Iranian converts regularly ask each and every different, "have you ever seen the white[-robed] man, have you ever seen Jesus?" The leader of a Presbyterian church in Pakistan found that Afghan imams were traveling a whole lot of kilomete rs to examine the Bible with him. When asked what triggered them to do so, the minister spoke back: "dreams! Christ had appeared to them in their sleep and instructed them to return here to hear the fact." And in Colorado, Pastor George Naeem who conducts courses in Arabic by way of the radio and the information superhighway reviews that "basically all [his students] came following dreams."
Michael Stollwerk tells of the time after a service at the cathedral of Wetzlar north of Frankfurt: "I stood at the exit, still vested, bidding the worshipers goodbye when a veiled girl approached me. I fumbled via a slit in my robe for my wallet, thinking she became a beggar. 'No, no,' she talked about. 'I simplest have a question: Are you the imam here?' I answered: 'well, in a method i'm – i am the pastor.' She went on: 'in that case, you are the appropriate man. God commanded me in a dream to head to the massive church on the market rectangular and ask the imam for the certainty'." She changed into baptized a number of months later. Siemon-Netto, who recounts these reviews, goes on:
subsequent, I heard of identical episodes from a Lutheran theologian whom imams visited through his back door within the center of the evening in Egypt for a similar applications; I heard it from a Catholic missionary who had labored in Algeria, from a Baptist whose shock company advised him that Christ had looked as if it would them of their tents in Saudi Arabia. An Anglican priest observed lots of of Persian girls attending secret Bible experiences in Tehran following desires. Pastor Gottfried Martens in Berlin estimated that at the least two-thirds of his Persian and Afghan converts had adopted the guidance of a "determine of gentle" choosing himself because the Jesus of the Christian Bible and never the "Isa" of the Koran.
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