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Islam in Our Backyard: A Novel Argument
WINNER: 2003 Australian Christian book of the Year
134 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2002
4 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Tony Payne
77 books22 followersTony Payne began work as Matthias Media’s first editor in 1988. Since then, Tony has been a busy guy: with his wife, Alison, he has grown a family of five children; he has completed a degree in theology at Moore Theological College; and he has written or co-written numerous ministry resources, and edited many others. Tony’s main responsibilities are to oversee everything we publish (including The Briefing), and to get as much writing done as possible.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 1, 2017
A really informative introduction to Islam and the wider question of how we relate to our neighbours who hold different beliefs. The unique approach of part-novel, part-explanation works well and helps to highlight the practical importance of thinking through these big questions of "how we are going to deal with the big questions of 'God' and 'truth' in a multicultural society".
October 27, 2014
Such a readable, engaging, informative look at the Islamic faith. Would recommend 10/10.
"...the author not only manages to outline succinctly the main doctrines and practices of Islam, and explain the main groups within the faith, but seeks to answer honestly some of the pressing but contentious questions about Islam that face us today. These questions include whether militancy and violence are essential and inevitable ingredients of Islam, and (even more basically) can and should religions be critiqued and tested for their truthfulness or otherwise. The answers are refreshingly honest and not fashioned by political correctness."
"...the author not only manages to outline succinctly the main doctrines and practices of Islam, and explain the main groups within the faith, but seeks to answer honestly some of the pressing but contentious questions about Islam that face us today. These questions include whether militancy and violence are essential and inevitable ingredients of Islam, and (even more basically) can and should religions be critiqued and tested for their truthfulness or otherwise. The answers are refreshingly honest and not fashioned by political correctness."
June 9, 2025
This cracking little book isn't quite what you'd expect from the title. While it briefly outlines the main aspects of Islam, in reality, it's a book about the questions that Islam asks of our secular, relativistic, liberal Western societies. The style is also quite unusual, as it is part essay and part novel. The analytical sections of the text are woven together around a fictional story of Payne meeting up with his neighbour to discuss Islam, life and faith, and it's a style that works very well to drive both the narrative and the argument forward.
After summarising Islamic belief and practice, Payne turns to look at radical Islam and its interaction with the West.
A Category Error: Islam as a Private Religion
In many respects, the radical Islamic reform movements have had as their goal not so much the conquering of the world for Islam, but resistance against the encroachment of Western power and influence - politically and culturally - into Islamic lands. Very often, the enemy that Islamic radicals despise most is the 'moderate' Muslim leader of their nation, who may be allowing Western ideals and practices to flourish within the country, and who co-operates with Western nations for political and economic purposes.
The religious motivation of Islamic radicals is thus all of a piece with a desire to establish and maintain their ethnic and political identity. And since Islam does not distinguish the religious and the political, it is a creed in which the potent mix of tribal pride, political frustration, and religious zeal can bubble and ferment.
In effect, the rise of radical Islamism and its expression in acts of violence and terrorism stem from two historical realities. The first is the universalistic nature of Islam and the doctrine of jihad, which is intrinsically connected with this. Violent military means have always been central to the progress of Islam in the world, and it is simply dishonest to pretend otherwise. Moreover, this methodology is explicitly embraced and recommended in Islam's foundational documents. Theologically, historically, and culturally, Islam has always been an aggressive, militarist religion. The second is the long, steady decline of Islam at the hands of the West and the consequent assault on Muslim identity and pride. When a proud, militant and once triumphant religion finds itself downtrodden and oppressed, it is to be expected that there will be resistance.
Historically, submission to Allah was not limited to one sphere - the private, the personal, the 'religious', the devotional; it was to encompass all of life - the political and legal as well as the personal. Muhammad's programme was to establish a theocracy, a state in which God ruled through his messenger, his prophet, and in which God's law was indistinguishable from the law of the state. This is why the attempt by some modern commentators to distinguish between the inner spiritual jihad, by which Muslims struggle to submit personally to Allah, and the outward military jihad, whereby the Muslim community struggles to defend itself and expand the borders of Islam by force of arms, ultimately fails. This is an imposition of Western categories, whereby religion is properly private, upon an Islamic worldview in which religion is never private. The personal spiritual jihad and the communal political jihad are but different aspects or applications of the one idea: that the world, and all the individuals in it, should submit to Allah and his just rule.
The underlying problem is that the basic structures of Islamic thought, articulated in the Qur'an, the hadith, and in centuries of Islamic jurisprudence and tradition, see little place for a 'privatising' of religion. Society should be one in submitting to God's law, which regulates all of life for the good of mankind. This framework stubbornly resists the relativising or marginalising of religious belief to the private sphere. In a theocracy, God cannot be shut up in private, but must be on the throne and rule through his appointed representatives and by his divine law.
Islam, Christianity and Secular Societies
In this way, the Islamic perspective has much in common with the Judaism of the Old Testament. The New Testament, on the other hand, contains a different paradigm of 'church' and 'state' from the Old Testament. It's a paradigm in which God’s kingdom and rule are 'hidden' in this present age, and spreads slowly through society by preaching and persuasion, and the formation of communities of faith (or 'churches'). It is also these Christian concepts that gave rise to our modern Western idea of the separation of church and state, minister and magistrate. Even St. Augustine, who sanctioned the use of state force against heretics, saw that there were always two 'cities' in operation - the city of God, which was heavenly and eternal, and the earthly city that belonged to this age, and which would ultimately come to nothing. As long as this age lasted, the two would be intertwined and ultimately not discernible. An important distinction is between state and society. The state is the government or authority (king, dictator or elected) that sets laws and rules for the good of all, while society refers to the nation or country, meaning the sum of the individuals under the rule of a particular state.
It is very important to note that the two are conceptually different and one does not necessarily entail the other. A secular state is one in which the state/government is not allowed to establish any particular religious belief as normative, nor compel its citizens to adopt any religious belief, nor implement a legislative program to institutionalise and promote religious belief. It is a form of political arrangement where the state neither promotes nor persecutes religious belief. However, a secular state does not have to govern a secular society. The laws, constitution and traditions of a state will inevitably reflect the religious beliefs of its citizens. A secular state does not imply anything about the actual beliefs of its citizens, who may be religious to a greater or lesser extent, and will bring to their public life together a set of values shaped and formed by their religious convictions, whatever they may be.
With this being said, we must ask what the role and place of religion should be within society as a whole, in a modern nation with a secular state (or government). The answer that most Western societies have come to over the past 200 years has been: 'very little or none at all'. The trend in the West has been not only towards secular states but towards secular societies. Beginning with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, and accelerating through the last 100 years or so, there has been a movement to secularise society as a whole and not just the state. That is to say, religious belief has not just been disestablished; it has been relegated entirely to the private sphere and excluded from a place in the 'public square'. Indeed, it has become increasingly common in Western societies for the secular state to seek actively to secularise society as a whole; that is, to use its power to exclude religious belief and practice from public life.
A good case in point is the current debate in Ireland about the status of the unborn. That an embryo is a clump of cells is a matter of observation and fact; that it is just a clump of cells is a philosophical value judgement for which no evidence is presented. It is a declaration of what the speaker deems to be the truth, based upon the framework of beliefs and ideas with which they see the world. This kind of secular value judgement is welcome and respected in the public square, whereas a value judgement based on any form of religious belief (particularly Christianity) is deemed unacceptable. The assumption is that religious beliefs belong in an entirely different category to secular beliefs, a category of the private, the non-rational, the non-factual. We have consigned religion to the realm of the personal and the unknowable, to those things that are matters of 'faith' but about which we cannot make judgements of 'true' and 'false'. Where all matters of God and religious belief are consigned to the realm of the unknowable and non-rational, it is impossible to critique religious belief rationally or to debate its claims. In the pursuit of tolerance, we have ended up with relativism.
Relativism and Tolerance
As the above hints at, the secularisation of society has a number of problems. One of these is raised explicitly by Islam: what if the religion you wish to consign to the private realm has no intention of staying there? Islam presents a serious problem for the Western secular worldview as it stubbornly refuses to stay in the private realm of the unknowable. Not to put too fine a point on it, when certain practitioners of Islam come roaring into the public square with rifles in their hands, we are forced to a decision, to a value judgement, as to whether we join their cause or oppose it. The problem for the secular worldview is that to do so is to admit that we can make rational judgments about religion and that one religion might be wrong. Further, if one is wrong, then another may be right. This re-established connection between the world of facts, evidence and truth and the world of beliefs and God is fatal to secularism as it involves admitting, at least in theory, that it is possible to know the truth about God and faith in the same way as science and natural events.
Another assumption of our secular, relativist Western societies is that religious claims and beliefs are trivial compared with the rational, the factual and the practical. For the relativist, everything is a form of opinion, and there is no such thing as truth (think Pontius Pilate). We must all simply allow each other to claim mutually contradictory things as being true, and then get on with life as if it doesn't matter. While the logical impossibility of this position is clear from a moment's reflection, the practical impossibility of relativism was made equally clear on 9/11. Claims to truth - religious or otherwise - cannot be separated from their political, historical and social consequences in the world. It may be possible, for a short time, to pretend that all claims to 'truth' and 'right' are equally valid and that it doesn’t matter. However, when based on my 'truth' I do something which is profoundly offensive to you (such as kill thousands of people), all of a sudden it does matter, and matters a great deal.
The question of whether Islam as a system of religious belief is true or not is a vital one. It is especially important if we are to maintain the hard-won Western tradition of a tolerant and open society, as tolerance is very different from relativism. Tolerance is the willingness to live side by side with people with whom you disagree. Relativism, on the other hand, is the removal of the possibility of either agreeing or disagreeing since there is no 'truth' to agree about. A tolerant society values discussion, disagreement and persuasion, and allows freely for the possibility of changing one's position, since the truth is something we can argue about. Relativist societies often cease to be tolerant because they outlaw disagreement. In a relativist society, the statement "You are wrong" is not allowed. Since rational argument and debate about truth claims are put to one side, all that is left is prejudice, cultural preference, tribal/family allegiance and political power. The phenomenon of 'political correctness' is a manifestation of the intolerance of relativist societies. Certain thoughts, ideas or philosophies are not allowed to be expressed in some contexts because they are utterly offensive to the ruling group in that context. The irony of this situation is one of the features of modern Western society - that those who most vehemently deny the concept of absolute truth are the ones who most vehemently suppress open debate and the expression of alternative viewpoints.
Further, tolerance is the only means by which different faiths and belief systems can peacefully coexist in the long term. The alternative, as increasingly seen in the West, is a relativistic worldview that does not extend to any belief system the freedom to be wrong, and seeks to repress anyone who claims that such a question (of truth in the religious/ethical realm) is even a valid question. What we need is to be able to scrutinise and critique all beliefs, testing their internal coherence and external evidence. In other words, we must love and respect others enough to argue with them about the truth. When we are not allowed to discuss the truth or otherwise of religious claims, we end up with the suppression of debate and dissent, where certain opinions and views are the authorised ones that are allowed to be expressed, determined by whoever happens to be in charge. The irony is that in our supposedly liberal Western democracies, we are increasingly seeing the retreat of truth and freedom and the emergence of a raw exercise of power.
Truth Claims and Faith
The distinction between faith and religion on one hand and facts and truth on the other ultimately doesn't hold up, as the claims of religion and ethical systems can't be partitioned off from the real world. They exist in the world, make claims, and assert certain things to be true about the world and the God (or gods) who made and rule it. These claims are either valid or not, true or not, and it is nonsensical to say otherwise.
One way to test this is to examine a religious or ethical system by asking two questions:
1. Is it internally consistent?
2. Is the available evidence for or against it?
As Islam clearly states that Jesus was not really crucified, an obvious application of the second question is to look at the evidence for this claim. By any reasonable test, the claim of the Qur'an that Jesus was not crucified is false. It has no evidence in its favour and a mountain of evidence against it. This presents real problems for the integrity of Islamic belief, as the Qur'an claims for itself a status of absolute perfection. It is deemed to be absolutely without error or discrepancy. To make such a statement - that Islam, based on the available evidence, is wrong - is, of course, deemed by many to be the height of rudeness, arrogance and intolerance. On the contrary, it is honourable and polite to meet and address Islam on its own terms, taking seriously its claims to be a revelation of absolute truth. Arrogance would be to say, like the Western relativist, that these kinds of questions are invalid and irrelevant. The claim that all religions are much the same is offensive and insulting to both Christians and Muslims.
The idea of 'faith' as a leap into the dark in the absence of any evidence or facts is not at all how the Bible uses the word. The 'leap in the dark' definition is, in fact, precisely a product of the modern idea that subjects like God and religion are unknowable, held onto regardless of evidence, facts or history. According to the Bible, however, faith is trusting the truth of something or somebody based on the available evidence.
Militant Islam and Us
If what has been said above about Islam is true, an interesting question is whether, given the provocation, circumstances and opportunity, would a great many more Muslims (including those living in the West) rise up and fight in the name of Allah? Would they be ready to do violence to protect themselves or to achieve their goals?
The answer to that is found simply by looking in the mirror. Islam is a vehicle for violence and aggression for precisely the reason that the human heart is so commonly violent and aggressive. In other words, perhaps we are looking for something in the actions of the 9/11 terrorists that we should equally expect to find buried somewhere in our psyches: The desire to lash out at those we blame for our troubles. The tendency to rationalise the harm we do to others in the pursuit of what we see as our legitimate rights. The obsession with our freedom and happiness obliterates our respect for others and their desire for the same. The willingness to do violence (emotional, verbal, physical) to break down any barriers that stand between me and my desires. In a word, sin. I do not for a moment want to flatten out all distinctions and say that the 9/11 terrorists are precisely morally equivalent to everyone else, but they are still more like us than not. For fallen sinners, terrorists and everyone else, there is only one hope of salvation, and that is found in the cross of Christ. And so I finish on a truth claim, and invite you to examine the evidence and decide for yourself.
After summarising Islamic belief and practice, Payne turns to look at radical Islam and its interaction with the West.
A Category Error: Islam as a Private Religion
In many respects, the radical Islamic reform movements have had as their goal not so much the conquering of the world for Islam, but resistance against the encroachment of Western power and influence - politically and culturally - into Islamic lands. Very often, the enemy that Islamic radicals despise most is the 'moderate' Muslim leader of their nation, who may be allowing Western ideals and practices to flourish within the country, and who co-operates with Western nations for political and economic purposes.
The religious motivation of Islamic radicals is thus all of a piece with a desire to establish and maintain their ethnic and political identity. And since Islam does not distinguish the religious and the political, it is a creed in which the potent mix of tribal pride, political frustration, and religious zeal can bubble and ferment.
In effect, the rise of radical Islamism and its expression in acts of violence and terrorism stem from two historical realities. The first is the universalistic nature of Islam and the doctrine of jihad, which is intrinsically connected with this. Violent military means have always been central to the progress of Islam in the world, and it is simply dishonest to pretend otherwise. Moreover, this methodology is explicitly embraced and recommended in Islam's foundational documents. Theologically, historically, and culturally, Islam has always been an aggressive, militarist religion. The second is the long, steady decline of Islam at the hands of the West and the consequent assault on Muslim identity and pride. When a proud, militant and once triumphant religion finds itself downtrodden and oppressed, it is to be expected that there will be resistance.
Historically, submission to Allah was not limited to one sphere - the private, the personal, the 'religious', the devotional; it was to encompass all of life - the political and legal as well as the personal. Muhammad's programme was to establish a theocracy, a state in which God ruled through his messenger, his prophet, and in which God's law was indistinguishable from the law of the state. This is why the attempt by some modern commentators to distinguish between the inner spiritual jihad, by which Muslims struggle to submit personally to Allah, and the outward military jihad, whereby the Muslim community struggles to defend itself and expand the borders of Islam by force of arms, ultimately fails. This is an imposition of Western categories, whereby religion is properly private, upon an Islamic worldview in which religion is never private. The personal spiritual jihad and the communal political jihad are but different aspects or applications of the one idea: that the world, and all the individuals in it, should submit to Allah and his just rule.
The underlying problem is that the basic structures of Islamic thought, articulated in the Qur'an, the hadith, and in centuries of Islamic jurisprudence and tradition, see little place for a 'privatising' of religion. Society should be one in submitting to God's law, which regulates all of life for the good of mankind. This framework stubbornly resists the relativising or marginalising of religious belief to the private sphere. In a theocracy, God cannot be shut up in private, but must be on the throne and rule through his appointed representatives and by his divine law.
Islam, Christianity and Secular Societies
In this way, the Islamic perspective has much in common with the Judaism of the Old Testament. The New Testament, on the other hand, contains a different paradigm of 'church' and 'state' from the Old Testament. It's a paradigm in which God’s kingdom and rule are 'hidden' in this present age, and spreads slowly through society by preaching and persuasion, and the formation of communities of faith (or 'churches'). It is also these Christian concepts that gave rise to our modern Western idea of the separation of church and state, minister and magistrate. Even St. Augustine, who sanctioned the use of state force against heretics, saw that there were always two 'cities' in operation - the city of God, which was heavenly and eternal, and the earthly city that belonged to this age, and which would ultimately come to nothing. As long as this age lasted, the two would be intertwined and ultimately not discernible. An important distinction is between state and society. The state is the government or authority (king, dictator or elected) that sets laws and rules for the good of all, while society refers to the nation or country, meaning the sum of the individuals under the rule of a particular state.
It is very important to note that the two are conceptually different and one does not necessarily entail the other. A secular state is one in which the state/government is not allowed to establish any particular religious belief as normative, nor compel its citizens to adopt any religious belief, nor implement a legislative program to institutionalise and promote religious belief. It is a form of political arrangement where the state neither promotes nor persecutes religious belief. However, a secular state does not have to govern a secular society. The laws, constitution and traditions of a state will inevitably reflect the religious beliefs of its citizens. A secular state does not imply anything about the actual beliefs of its citizens, who may be religious to a greater or lesser extent, and will bring to their public life together a set of values shaped and formed by their religious convictions, whatever they may be.
With this being said, we must ask what the role and place of religion should be within society as a whole, in a modern nation with a secular state (or government). The answer that most Western societies have come to over the past 200 years has been: 'very little or none at all'. The trend in the West has been not only towards secular states but towards secular societies. Beginning with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, and accelerating through the last 100 years or so, there has been a movement to secularise society as a whole and not just the state. That is to say, religious belief has not just been disestablished; it has been relegated entirely to the private sphere and excluded from a place in the 'public square'. Indeed, it has become increasingly common in Western societies for the secular state to seek actively to secularise society as a whole; that is, to use its power to exclude religious belief and practice from public life.
A good case in point is the current debate in Ireland about the status of the unborn. That an embryo is a clump of cells is a matter of observation and fact; that it is just a clump of cells is a philosophical value judgement for which no evidence is presented. It is a declaration of what the speaker deems to be the truth, based upon the framework of beliefs and ideas with which they see the world. This kind of secular value judgement is welcome and respected in the public square, whereas a value judgement based on any form of religious belief (particularly Christianity) is deemed unacceptable. The assumption is that religious beliefs belong in an entirely different category to secular beliefs, a category of the private, the non-rational, the non-factual. We have consigned religion to the realm of the personal and the unknowable, to those things that are matters of 'faith' but about which we cannot make judgements of 'true' and 'false'. Where all matters of God and religious belief are consigned to the realm of the unknowable and non-rational, it is impossible to critique religious belief rationally or to debate its claims. In the pursuit of tolerance, we have ended up with relativism.
Relativism and Tolerance
As the above hints at, the secularisation of society has a number of problems. One of these is raised explicitly by Islam: what if the religion you wish to consign to the private realm has no intention of staying there? Islam presents a serious problem for the Western secular worldview as it stubbornly refuses to stay in the private realm of the unknowable. Not to put too fine a point on it, when certain practitioners of Islam come roaring into the public square with rifles in their hands, we are forced to a decision, to a value judgement, as to whether we join their cause or oppose it. The problem for the secular worldview is that to do so is to admit that we can make rational judgments about religion and that one religion might be wrong. Further, if one is wrong, then another may be right. This re-established connection between the world of facts, evidence and truth and the world of beliefs and God is fatal to secularism as it involves admitting, at least in theory, that it is possible to know the truth about God and faith in the same way as science and natural events.
Another assumption of our secular, relativist Western societies is that religious claims and beliefs are trivial compared with the rational, the factual and the practical. For the relativist, everything is a form of opinion, and there is no such thing as truth (think Pontius Pilate). We must all simply allow each other to claim mutually contradictory things as being true, and then get on with life as if it doesn't matter. While the logical impossibility of this position is clear from a moment's reflection, the practical impossibility of relativism was made equally clear on 9/11. Claims to truth - religious or otherwise - cannot be separated from their political, historical and social consequences in the world. It may be possible, for a short time, to pretend that all claims to 'truth' and 'right' are equally valid and that it doesn’t matter. However, when based on my 'truth' I do something which is profoundly offensive to you (such as kill thousands of people), all of a sudden it does matter, and matters a great deal.
The question of whether Islam as a system of religious belief is true or not is a vital one. It is especially important if we are to maintain the hard-won Western tradition of a tolerant and open society, as tolerance is very different from relativism. Tolerance is the willingness to live side by side with people with whom you disagree. Relativism, on the other hand, is the removal of the possibility of either agreeing or disagreeing since there is no 'truth' to agree about. A tolerant society values discussion, disagreement and persuasion, and allows freely for the possibility of changing one's position, since the truth is something we can argue about. Relativist societies often cease to be tolerant because they outlaw disagreement. In a relativist society, the statement "You are wrong" is not allowed. Since rational argument and debate about truth claims are put to one side, all that is left is prejudice, cultural preference, tribal/family allegiance and political power. The phenomenon of 'political correctness' is a manifestation of the intolerance of relativist societies. Certain thoughts, ideas or philosophies are not allowed to be expressed in some contexts because they are utterly offensive to the ruling group in that context. The irony of this situation is one of the features of modern Western society - that those who most vehemently deny the concept of absolute truth are the ones who most vehemently suppress open debate and the expression of alternative viewpoints.
Further, tolerance is the only means by which different faiths and belief systems can peacefully coexist in the long term. The alternative, as increasingly seen in the West, is a relativistic worldview that does not extend to any belief system the freedom to be wrong, and seeks to repress anyone who claims that such a question (of truth in the religious/ethical realm) is even a valid question. What we need is to be able to scrutinise and critique all beliefs, testing their internal coherence and external evidence. In other words, we must love and respect others enough to argue with them about the truth. When we are not allowed to discuss the truth or otherwise of religious claims, we end up with the suppression of debate and dissent, where certain opinions and views are the authorised ones that are allowed to be expressed, determined by whoever happens to be in charge. The irony is that in our supposedly liberal Western democracies, we are increasingly seeing the retreat of truth and freedom and the emergence of a raw exercise of power.
Truth Claims and Faith
The distinction between faith and religion on one hand and facts and truth on the other ultimately doesn't hold up, as the claims of religion and ethical systems can't be partitioned off from the real world. They exist in the world, make claims, and assert certain things to be true about the world and the God (or gods) who made and rule it. These claims are either valid or not, true or not, and it is nonsensical to say otherwise.
One way to test this is to examine a religious or ethical system by asking two questions:
1. Is it internally consistent?
2. Is the available evidence for or against it?
As Islam clearly states that Jesus was not really crucified, an obvious application of the second question is to look at the evidence for this claim. By any reasonable test, the claim of the Qur'an that Jesus was not crucified is false. It has no evidence in its favour and a mountain of evidence against it. This presents real problems for the integrity of Islamic belief, as the Qur'an claims for itself a status of absolute perfection. It is deemed to be absolutely without error or discrepancy. To make such a statement - that Islam, based on the available evidence, is wrong - is, of course, deemed by many to be the height of rudeness, arrogance and intolerance. On the contrary, it is honourable and polite to meet and address Islam on its own terms, taking seriously its claims to be a revelation of absolute truth. Arrogance would be to say, like the Western relativist, that these kinds of questions are invalid and irrelevant. The claim that all religions are much the same is offensive and insulting to both Christians and Muslims.
The idea of 'faith' as a leap into the dark in the absence of any evidence or facts is not at all how the Bible uses the word. The 'leap in the dark' definition is, in fact, precisely a product of the modern idea that subjects like God and religion are unknowable, held onto regardless of evidence, facts or history. According to the Bible, however, faith is trusting the truth of something or somebody based on the available evidence.
Militant Islam and Us
If what has been said above about Islam is true, an interesting question is whether, given the provocation, circumstances and opportunity, would a great many more Muslims (including those living in the West) rise up and fight in the name of Allah? Would they be ready to do violence to protect themselves or to achieve their goals?
The answer to that is found simply by looking in the mirror. Islam is a vehicle for violence and aggression for precisely the reason that the human heart is so commonly violent and aggressive. In other words, perhaps we are looking for something in the actions of the 9/11 terrorists that we should equally expect to find buried somewhere in our psyches: The desire to lash out at those we blame for our troubles. The tendency to rationalise the harm we do to others in the pursuit of what we see as our legitimate rights. The obsession with our freedom and happiness obliterates our respect for others and their desire for the same. The willingness to do violence (emotional, verbal, physical) to break down any barriers that stand between me and my desires. In a word, sin. I do not for a moment want to flatten out all distinctions and say that the 9/11 terrorists are precisely morally equivalent to everyone else, but they are still more like us than not. For fallen sinners, terrorists and everyone else, there is only one hope of salvation, and that is found in the cross of Christ. And so I finish on a truth claim, and invite you to examine the evidence and decide for yourself.
Read
November 14, 2020I bought this at Lifeway bookstore feeling safe in the knowledge that this would be a Christian take on Islam. I had read quite a bit about Islam years prior as battles against ISIS raged on and Osama Bin Laden was on the way to being snuffed out. The title says a lot. It's a warning that Islam starts as a "religion of peace" when Muslims are small in number, but that the end goal is global domination and elimination of infidels like me. Islamophobic? Maybe. The point is not to be afraid of Islam but to fear God only. This is more educational on who's-who among Muslims and not as alarmist in tone as you might suppose. Christians would rather convert them and not kill any of them as an act of defense ("not wishing that any should perish.")
December 11, 2018
I really like the format of this book. It flips back and forth between a pseudo-biographical novel and essays.
It goes into the history of the Qur'an and Muhammad, the various streams of Islam, the roots of Islamic terrorism, the separation (or not) of church and state, and finally the nature of truth itself and how certain truth claims of different religions can't all be the true - eg Islam says that Jesus wasn't crucified, whereas Christianity says he was. Only one of those can be true. (Or he didn't exist at all - but that's flat-earther/holocaust denier territory.)
An enjoyable, easy and quick to read overview.
It goes into the history of the Qur'an and Muhammad, the various streams of Islam, the roots of Islamic terrorism, the separation (or not) of church and state, and finally the nature of truth itself and how certain truth claims of different religions can't all be the true - eg Islam says that Jesus wasn't crucified, whereas Christianity says he was. Only one of those can be true. (Or he didn't exist at all - but that's flat-earther/holocaust denier territory.)
An enjoyable, easy and quick to read overview.
January 11, 2019
Easy to read but thought provoking
Fascinating book, conversational in style so such an easy read but well researched and deep so I went back and re read some sections twice. Don’t miss this.
Fascinating book, conversational in style so such an easy read but well researched and deep so I went back and re read some sections twice. Don’t miss this.
Read
June 4, 2025really interesting and helpful little book
July 20, 2014
Ok to read. Nothing difficult throughout the book in terms of thought and idea. The idea of presenting this in a novel type is worthwhile.
However, it would have been more appropriate to title this "Why being Christian provides a healthy response to the false nature of Islam." Not a punchy title, but it seems closer to the reality of Payne's intent. This is not a criticism. Simply an observation that Payne approaches the conversation from a particular way of life which colours this book more than the author suggests.
The end does provide a healthy approach to living with Islam in our backyard, although those who disagree with some of Payne's argument throughout, may not be so easily inclined.
However, it would have been more appropriate to title this "Why being Christian provides a healthy response to the false nature of Islam." Not a punchy title, but it seems closer to the reality of Payne's intent. This is not a criticism. Simply an observation that Payne approaches the conversation from a particular way of life which colours this book more than the author suggests.
The end does provide a healthy approach to living with Islam in our backyard, although those who disagree with some of Payne's argument throughout, may not be so easily inclined.
May 22, 2016
I reckon this is a brilliant book that deals deftly with some of the questions and issues that people have about Islam. I enjoyed it's warm, personal feel and *novel* approach.
It doesn't *do* everything, or answer every question, but it never sets out to be a definitive work. But the approach to thinking through the issues sets the trajectory for further thinking on the topic.
It doesn't *do* everything, or answer every question, but it never sets out to be a definitive work. But the approach to thinking through the issues sets the trajectory for further thinking on the topic.
January 16, 2015
Easy read with a challenging reminder that there is a difference between being tolerant and seeing all things as relative. A great reminder of what we, as Christians in a secular world, face when we aren't even supposed to bring up the argument.
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