Islam

The Arabia That Islam Came From

To understand Islam one must first understand the religious world into which it came, because Islam did not arise in a vacuum and did not leave that world behind.

Sixth-century Arabia was a land of tribal polytheism. Every tribe and nearly every household had its deity. The peninsula was dotted with sanctuaries which, as the historian Robert Hoyland describes them, “were often little more than open-air enclosures containing a sacred stone.” The worship of sacred stones — what scholars call baetyls — was among the most characteristic features of Arabian religion: a rock outcropping or a large black basaltic boulder, set up, anointed, circled, and kissed.

At Mecca stood the most important of these sanctuaries, the Kaaba, a cube-shaped structure at the center of a haram or sacred precinct where tribal fighting was forbidden to facilitate trade. Within and around it, according to the earliest Muslim historians themselves, stood some 360 idols. The presiding deity was Hubal, a large carnelian statue; Muhammad’s earliest biographer Ibn Ishaq records that “the Quraysh had put Hubal over the well in the middle of the Kaaba,” and that sacrifices were made to him. Alongside him were the three great goddesses of Arabia — al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat — whom the pagans called the daughters of Allah, and whom the Quran itself names in condemning (Surah 53:19–20). Ibn al-Kalbi’s Book of Idols preserves the details: al-Lat at Ta’if was a cubic rock with a building raised over it; human sacrifice was offered to al-Uzza.

Two further facts about this period matter. First, the word Allah was already in use before Muhammad; it is simply the Arabic for “the God,” cognate with the Hebrew Eloah and the Aramaic Alaha. Pre-Islamic Arabs acknowledged Allah as a high creator god and bringer of rain, but worshipped him alongside subordinate deities. Arabic-speaking Christians used the word for the true God before Islam existed, and Arab Christians use it in their Bibles to this day. Second, both Jews and Christians were present in Arabia, and Muhammad had contact with both — which accounts for the many garbled biblical names and narratives in the Quran.

Muhammad and the Rise of Islam

Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born at Mecca around A.D. 570 into the Quraysh, the tribe that held custody of the Kaaba. Orphaned young, he worked in trade and married a wealthy widow, Khadijah. Around 610, at about forty years of age, he began reporting visitations in a cave on Mount Hira by a being he came to identify as the angel Gabriel, who delivered recitations — qur’an — over the following twenty-three years. These, collected after his death, became the Quran.

His preaching of one God against the Meccan pantheon brought persecution, and in 622 he and his followers withdrew to Medina — the Hijra, from which the Islamic calendar dates. At Medina the movement changed character decisively. Muhammad became not merely a preacher but a head of state and a military commander. He initially courted the Jewish tribes of Medina, even directing prayer toward Jerusalem; when they rejected his prophetic claims, he turned the direction of prayer to Mecca (Surah 2:144), and the three Jewish tribes of the city were dealt with in turn — the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir expelled, and the Banu Qurayza, according to Islam’s own earliest sources, besieged and their men executed.

In 630 Muhammad returned to Mecca as a conqueror. He cleansed the Kaaba of its idols. He did not, however, abolish the shrine or its rites. He kept them.

The Kaaba Before Islam: What the Record Shows

Muslim tradition holds that the Kaaba was founded by Abraham. The historical record tells a different story, and it is worth laying out, because apart from Muslim myth remarkably little is known of the shrine’s origins — but what is known points consistently in one direction.

The earliest possible external notice comes from the Roman historian Diodorus Siculus, writing around 60 B.C. and drawing on the earlier report of Agatharchides of Cnidus, who described a temple in Arabia “which is very holy and exceedingly revered by all Arabians.” Edward Gibbon took this to be the Kaaba, though it should be said that the identification is contested, some scholars placing Diodorus’ temple further north. In the second century A.D. the geographer Ptolemy listed a site in western Arabia which he called Macoraba, long identified with Mecca; G. E. von Grunebaum observed that the name Ptolemy gives it “allows us to identify it as a South Arabian foundation created around a sanctuary” — that is, a settlement that grew up around a shrine, not the reverse. This identification too has lately been questioned. But the direction of the evidence does not depend on either citation.

What is not in doubt is the character of the place in the centuries immediately before Muhammad. The accounts of the campaigns of Abraha record the Kaaba as a site of pagan worship in the sixth century. The records of how the offices of the sanctuary were distributed among the sons of Kusayy show that worship there had already developed into a regulated cult, with hereditary custodial functions, several generations before Muhammad was born. The Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje suggested that sacred veneration gathered around the site in the first place because of the Zamzam spring — water in a waterless place, the ordinary origin of a shrine in the ancient Near East.

And the cult was astral. Golden suns and moons are repeatedly named among the votive gifts presented at the shrine, and some pagans regarded the Kaaba as a temple devoted to the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets. This is worth stating carefully, since it is often confused with the discredited claim that Allah was a moon-god: the sound point is not about the name Allah but about the sanctuary. The Kaaba appears to have begun as a place of star-worship — and the seven circuits, the sacred precinct, and the votive offerings belong to that world.

The Black Stone itself stood at the center of the pagan rite in the most literal way. Animal sacrifices were offered at the shrine, and the stone functioned in place of the altar: on it the worshippers smeared the blood of the sacrificed beasts. Stone veneration of this kind was widespread among the Arabian tribes, a fact recorded in Islam’s own hadith literature (Sahih al-Bukhari, vol. 5, no. 661) and condemned repeatedly in the Old Testament wherever the peoples around Israel practiced it.

The Paganism That Was Kept

This is the point at which the history becomes theologically serious, and it is established not by hostile speculation but by Islam’s own canonical sources.

Muhammad threw out the 360 idols — and retained the Black Stone, kissing it as the pagans had kissed it. Every Muslim pilgrim has kissed or reached toward it since. That the practice troubled thoughtful Muslims from the beginning is recorded in Islam’s most authoritative hadith collection, where the second caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab says at the stone:

That is stone-veneration defended on no ground but precedent. And the Black Stone was only the beginning. Consider what else was carried over intact from the pagan sanctuary:

• Tawaf — the sevenfold circumambulation of the Kaaba. Pre-Islamic Arabs circled their shrine stones. Bukhari preserves the testimony of one convert, Abu Raja al-Utaridi, describing the old practice: “We used to worship stones, and when we found a better stone than the first one, we would throw the first one and take the latter … and perform the Tawaf around it.”
• Ihram — the state of ritual consecration and the white garments. Bukhari records Aisha explaining that a Quranic passage concerned “the Ansar who used to assume Ihram for worshipping an idol called Manat.” The consecration rite was borrowed; only the object of devotion was renamed.
• Safa and Marwah — the running between the two hills. The Quran itself concedes the pagan association and simply authorizes the rite anyway (Surah 2:158).
• Stoning the pillars at Mina — connected in pre-Islamic practice to the driving off of spirits, later reinterpreted as Abraham stoning Satan.
• The sacred precinct, the sacred months, the animal sacrifice, and the pilgrimage season itself — all pre-Islamic institutions of the Meccan cult, preserved in the new religion.

The continuity extends even to the words spoken and the steps taken. As the pagans circled the Kaaba they called out the names of their gods; the Muslim pilgrim circles the same structure calling out the name of Allah. The pagans ran between the two nearby hills; Muhammad authorized the Muslim to do the same in the Quran, and by all accounts ran between them himself. The pagan pilgrimage season became the Muslim pilgrimage; the pagan white garments became the pilgrim’s ihram; the pagan sacrifice remained a sacrifice. Change the name on the lips and the rite is the same rite.

One nineteenth-century observer described the result as a “curious set of ceremonies of pagan Arab origin which Mohammed has incorporated into his religion” — the rites of the Kaaba retained, stripped of their idols, and left hanging “a strange unmeaning shroud” around the new faith. That is precisely what happened. The idols went; the idol-house, the idol-stone, and the idol-rites stayed.

The Abraham Claim — and Where It Came From

Islam does not present the Kaaba as a repurposed pagan shrine. It presents it as the original house of God on earth, and it does so on Muhammad’s authority alone. Three Quranic claims carry the weight:

• That Abraham and Ishmael built it. “And when Abraham and Ishmael raised the foundations of the House” (Surah 2:127).
• That God ordained it a sacred house. Surah 5:97 establishes the Kaaba as the sacred house appointed for mankind.
• That it was the first temple ever built. “Verily, the first House appointed for mankind was that at Bakkah” (Surah 3:97).

Now weigh those claims against the Scriptures. The Old Testament records Abraham’s life in considerable detail — his call from Ur, his journey to Canaan, his sojourn in Egypt, his dealings with Lot and Abimelech and Melchizedek, the covenant, the birth of Ishmael and of Isaac, the purchase of the cave at Machpelah where he was buried. It records the altars he built and where he built them: at Shechem, at Bethel, at Hebron, on Mount Moriah. It contains not one word about Abraham traveling some eight hundred miles into the Arabian desert to build a house of worship at Mecca. Nor does any other ancient source outside Islam. The claim rests on Muhammad’s testimony and on nothing else, six hundred years after Christ and some two and a half thousand years after Abraham.

What makes this more than an argument from silence is that the point has been pressed by Muslim scholars themselves. Taha Hussein — the blind Egyptian polymath known as the Dean of Arabic Literature, and one of the most eminent Arabic scholars of the twentieth century — concluded that the Abraham-and-Ishmael tradition was a late development rather than an ancient memory:

That is a devastating judgment from inside the Arabic scholarly tradition, and Taha Hussein paid for such conclusions: his critical work on the pre-Islamic period provoked a national scandal in Egypt and was withdrawn from circulation under pressure. He was not a Christian polemicist. He was an Arab Muslim scholar reading the sources.

If he was right, the sequence is this. A pagan astral sanctuary with a blood-smeared stone at its heart stood at Mecca for centuries. Shortly before Islam arose, a tradition attaching it to Abraham came into circulation. Muhammad then adopted that tradition, cleared out the idols, kept the building and every rite performed around it, and declared the whole arrangement the primordial worship of the one true God. That is not a reformation of paganism. It is a re-labeling of it.

Is Muhammad Foretold in the Bible?

Islam does not merely claim that Muhammad was a prophet. It claims that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures predicted him, and it rests part of its case on that assertion. The Quran states that the believers are those who follow “the unlettered Prophet, whom they find written in what they have of the Torah and the Gospel” (Surah 7:157), and puts into the mouth of Jesus a prophecy of “a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad” (Surah 61:6).

This is a testable claim, and it is the great weakness of the whole system, because the Bible is a public book. Anyone may open it and look. And when the passages traditionally offered are examined, every one of them collapses — usually because the Bible itself names the person in view.

Deuteronomy 18:15–18 is the passage most often cited: “The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.” Muslims read “thy brethren” as the Ishmaelites, and so as the Arabs. But Moses is addressing Israel, and the phrase “from the midst of thee” already excludes a foreigner. Deuteronomy itself defines the term one chapter earlier, where Israel is told to set a king over itself “from among thy brethren” and expressly forbidden to set “a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother” (Deuteronomy 17:15). “Brethren” in this book means fellow Israelites, and nothing else. More decisively, the New Testament identifies this prophet by name and does so repeatedly: Peter quotes the passage and applies it directly to Jesus (Acts 3:22–26), as does Stephen before the council (Acts 7:37); Philip says of Christ, “We have found him, of whom Moses in the law … did write” (John 1:45); and the Lord Jesus says plainly, “For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me” (John 5:46). The question is closed by the text.

The Comforter of John 14 and 16 is the second claim: that Christ’s promise of one to come after Him refers to Muhammad, and that the Greek parakletos (Comforter) was corrupted from periklytos (“praised one,” a rendering of Ahmad). Two answers dispose of this. First, there is no manuscript evidence whatsoever — not one Greek New Testament manuscript anywhere on earth reads periklytos. The claim is asserted, never documented. Second, and more simply, Jesus identifies the Comforter Himself in the same discourse: “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name” (John 14:26). He is “the Spirit of truth” whom “the world cannot receive” and who “dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:17) — language that cannot describe a man born five centuries later in Arabia, and that no Muslim would apply to Muhammad, who indwelt no one. And the promise was fulfilled within days, not centuries, at Pentecost (Acts 1:5; 2:1–4).

Song of Solomon 5:16 is sometimes pressed because the Hebrew word rendered “altogether lovely” is mahamaddim, said to resemble “Muhammad.” But mahamaddim is a common plural noun meaning “desirable things” or “loveliness,” not a proper name, and the verse describes the Beloved of the Song. By the same method one could find “Muhammad” in any Hebrew text using the ordinary word for what is desirable. Isaiah 42 fares no better: Matthew explicitly applies that Servant passage to Jesus (Matthew 12:17–21), and the Servant there has God’s Spirit put upon him and does not strive nor cry nor lift up his voice in the street — hardly a description of a military commander.

So the honest summary is this: Muhammad is not in the Bible. Not by name, not by description, not by implication. Every text advanced either names someone else or requires a philological trick that cannot survive examination.

When Scripture Will Not Cooperate: The Manufactured Gospels

What does a religion do when the book it appeals to does not say what it needs said? Historically, Islam has taken two routes. The first is the doctrine of tahrif — the charge that Jews and Christians corrupted their Scriptures, conveniently removing the passages about Muhammad. This is asserted without evidence and against evidence: we possess Old Testament manuscripts from before Christ (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and thousands of New Testament manuscripts from centuries before Muhammad, in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, scattered across three continents and impossible to coordinate. Not one of them contains the missing prophecies. There is no textual space for the theory.

The second route is to supply the missing gospel. Two documents illustrate it.

The Gospel of Barnabas. Widely circulated in Muslim apologetics, this work survives in an Italian manuscript from the late sixteenth century and a Spanish version known from an eighteenth-century copy. It presents Jesus denying that He is the Son of God, denying the crucifixion (Judas is substituted and crucified in His place), and explicitly naming Muhammad as the Messiah. Its medieval European origin is not seriously in question, and the internal evidence is conclusive: it describes a feudal society of vassals and lords; it has wine stored in wooden casks, a medieval European practice, in a first-century Palestine that used wineskins; it speaks of a jubilee every hundred years — which was the interval decreed by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, not the fifty years of Leviticus 25; and it contains material drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy, written around 1320. A first-century apostle did not quote a fourteenth-century Italian poet. Note also that the book defeats its own purpose: by having Jesus deny He is the Messiah and assign that title to Muhammad, it contradicts the Quran itself, which calls Jesus al-Masih, the Messiah, repeatedly. It should not be confused with the genuine early Christian Epistle of Barnabas, an authentic document of the late first or early second century that says nothing of the kind.

The Gospel According to Islam (1979). This more recent work, by Ahmad Shafaat, is remarkable chiefly for its candor. Shafaat does not present his book as a discovered ancient text; he states in his own introduction that he intends it as “a new Gospel, a Muslim equivalent of, and alternative to, the existing Gospels,” one “derived mostly from the New Testament and sometimes transformed according to the Qur’anic revelation.” He synthesized the four Gospels, removed what conflicted with Islamic doctrine, and added scenes and phrases — including an account of the Transfiguration in which a Moses-like figure is identified as “that prophet who will come after me as light and mercy for all the nations,” for which no source is given anywhere in his notes.

Read that admission again, because a Christian could not have written a more damning one. The four Gospels were transformed to agree with the Quran, and what contradicted Islam was removed. That is a confession that the actual Gospels do not teach Islam — which is precisely the point at issue. When a man must write a fifth Gospel to find his prophet in the New Testament, he has already conceded that the four do not contain him.

The Bible’s Own Test of a Prophet

Scripture does not leave the identification of false prophets to intuition. It supplies tests, and it applies them without regard for sincerity, success, or the size of a following. Set Muhammad beside them.

The first test is doctrinal, not evidential. Moses laid down that even a prophet whose signs and wonders come to pass is to be rejected if he turns the people to another god: “Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet … for the LORD your God proveth you” (Deuteronomy 13:1–5). Miracles are not the standard. The identity of the God preached is the standard. A prophet who directs men to a god who has no Son fails at the threshold, whatever else he accomplishes.

The second test is the sharpest, and it was written as though for this case. Paul the Apostle, addressing the possibility of a later revelation overturning the gospel already delivered, wrote:

Consider how exactly that fits. Muhammad’s entire claim is that an angel from heaven delivered to him a message correcting the gospel Christians had received — that Christ is not the Son of God, that He was not crucified, that salvation is by submission and works. Paul anticipated precisely this scenario six centuries in advance and pronounced the verdict in advance with it: let him be accursed. Not disputed, not dialogued with. Accursed. And Paul supplies the mechanism elsewhere, warning that Satan himself “is transformed into an angel of light” and his ministers into ministers of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:13–15). An angelic visitation is not self-authenticating; it is exactly the form the deception is predicted to take.

The third test is the confession of Christ. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist” (1 John 4:1–3). Islam confesses a Jesus who is a prophet and a creature. It denies expressly and repeatedly that God has come in the flesh, holding the very suggestion blasphemous (Surah 19:35, 88–91). By the apostle’s own test, the spirit behind that denial is named.

The fourth test is fruit. “Beware of false prophets … Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). We leave the reader to weigh the record already set out in this article: a religion whose founder took up the sword at Medina, whose law assigns Christians and Jews a subordinate and taxed status, and under which 388 million believers now live in high to extreme persecution and thousands are killed annually for the name of Christ.

One further item belongs here, and it comes from Islam’s own sources rather than from any Christian critic. The earliest Muslim biographies record that after the first encounter in the cave, Muhammad did not conclude he had met an angel. He was terrified, feared he was possessed by a jinn, contemplated throwing himself from a height, and had to be reassured by his wife Khadijah and her Christian cousin Waraqa. A believer may take that account at face value and simply observe: his own first instinct was closer to the truth than the conclusion he was talked into.

By every test Scripture provides — the god he preached, the gospel he contradicted, the Christ he denied, and the fruit that followed — Muhammad is a false prophet. This is not said with any pleasure. It is said because two billion people have staked eternity on him, and because “he that believeth not the Son shall not see life” (John 3:36).

Baal Worship and the Pattern of Syncretism

Here we must speak carefully, because a great deal of loose material circulates among Christians on this subject, and a believer who repeats a claim he cannot defend does the gospel no service.

It is sometimes asserted that Allah simply is Baal, or that Allah was a moon-god whose worship Muhammad renamed. We do not advance those claims, and we would urge readers not to. The moon-god thesis originated with a speculation of the archaeologist Hugo Winckler in 1901 and was popularized in America in the 1990s through the writings of Robert Morey. It has been rejected not only by secular scholarship but by careful Christian scholars, and for solid reasons: the crescent is an Ottoman emblem, not an early Islamic one; the historian Patricia Crone observes that if Hubal and Allah were identical, Hubal’s name would have survived in Islamic tradition, and it did not; and the word Allah is the ordinary Arabic word for God, used by Arab Christians for the true God before Muhammad was born and in their Bibles still. A Christian who argues that Muslims worship a moon-god will be refuted in five minutes by any educated Muslim, and will have surrendered the credibility he needed for the argument that actually matters.

What can be said, and said with force, is this. Baal worship is the Bible’s own paradigm case of syncretism — the sin of retaining pagan religious forms while professing to serve the true God. Israel did not, for the most part, formally renounce the LORD and adopt a foreign deity outright. Israel kept the name of the LORD and mixed His worship with the standing stones, the high places, the sacred pillars, and the fertility rites of Canaan. That is why Elijah’s challenge on Carmel was not “choose a god” but “How long halt ye between two opinions?” (1 Kings 18:21). The people thought they were serving Jehovah. God called it Baal.

Read that prohibition, and then read the account of the Black Stone. Read the commands against the matzevot — the standing sacred stones of Canaanite religion that Israel was ordered to break down — and then read of the baetyls of Arabia and what was preserved at the heart of Mecca. The structural parallels between Semitic paganism of the Baal type and the pre-Islamic Arabian cult are not imaginary: a high god acknowledged as creator, worshipped alongside female consorts and intermediaries (Asherah beside Baal; al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat called the daughters of Allah); worship centered on an anointed sacred stone in a sacred precinct; circumambulation, pilgrimage, and blood sacrifice. Islam swept away the idols of that system and kept its architecture.

It is also worth noting that Baal appears in the Quran by name, in a passage recalling Elijah’s ministry: “Will you call upon Baal and leave the best of creators?” (Surah 37:125). Islam thus condemns Baal explicitly — while performing the pilgrimage rites of the Meccan idol-shrine. That is the precise position of Israel under Ahab: the true God named, the pagan form retained, and the contradiction unseen by those inside it.

So we do not say Allah is Baal. We say the sin is the same sin, and it is the sin God hates most in the history of His people.

The Doctrines: What Islam Teaches

Islam rests on five pillars of practice — the confession (shahada), five daily prayers, almsgiving, the fast of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca — and on six articles of belief: God, angels, the revealed books, the prophets, the Day of Judgment, and divine decree. But its doctrinal core is tawhid, the absolute oneness and unshareable singularity of God, from which everything else follows and against which everything Christian is measured.

The Question	Islam Teaches	The Bible Says
Who is God?	One in absolute singularity; to associate any partner with Him (shirk) is the unforgivable sin	One God eternally existing in three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (Matthew 28:19; 1 John 5:7)
Does God have a Son?	Emphatically no. “It is not befitting to Allah that He should beget a son” (Surah 19:35); those who say so utter a monstrous thing (Surah 19:88–91)	“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16); “This is my beloved Son” (Matthew 3:17)
Who is Jesus?	A prophet and messenger, born of a virgin, but a creature only — not God, not the Son, and inferior to Muhammad in finality	The Word who was God and was made flesh (John 1:1, 14); “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28)
Did Christ die on the cross?	No. “They killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them” (Surah 4:157)	“Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3); “It is finished” (John 19:30)
How is a person saved?	By submission and works, weighed in the balance at judgment; no assurance, and the outcome subject to God’s inscrutable will	By grace through faith, not of works (Ephesians 2:8–9); the believer may know he has eternal life (1 John 5:13)
What of sin and a mediator?	No original sin requiring atonement; no mediator between God and man	“All have sinned” (Romans 3:23); “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5)

Notice where the weight falls. The dispute is not primarily about how many Gods there are; on the bare arithmetic of monotheism a Muslim and a Christian would agree. The dispute is about the Son. Islam is constructed around the explicit, repeated, formal denial of the very thing on which salvation depends, and Scripture names that denial with a precision that leaves no room to negotiate:

This is why the popular formula that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God, just differently” cannot stand. A god who has no Son is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whatever name is used for him. “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:12). And a Christ who did not die did not atone; a Quran that denies the crucifixion denies the gospel itself, for “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22).

The Present Impact on Christians

The doctrine has consequences, and they are being counted in bodies. The 2026 Open Doors World Watch List reports that 388 million Christians now face high to extreme levels of persecution worldwide, up from 380 million the year before, with more than 315 million in the top fifty countries alone. Of the categories Open Doors uses to classify the source of persecution, the foremost is Islamic oppression, defined as any action, violent or otherwise, used to bring countries, communities, and households under Islamic control.

During the 2026 reporting period, 4,849 Christians were killed for their faith. Of these, 4,491 — some 93 percent — died in sub-Saharan Africa, and 3,490 in Nigeria alone, up from 3,100 the previous year. Nigeria accounts for roughly 70 percent of all faith-related killings on earth, at the hands of Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and militant Fulani herdsmen. Open Doors records the words of the attackers themselves as reported by survivors: Fulani militants saying, “We will destroy all Christians,” and Boko Haram captors telling kidnapped believers, “If you were Muslim, you would not be tortured like this.”

Somalia stands second on the list for the fourth consecutive year. Syria has vaulted back into the top ten for the first time since 2017 after the jihadist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham took power — a suicide bomber striking worshippers, churches desecrated, believers driven into hiding. Sudan rose to fourth as both sides of its civil war targeted Christians while competing to establish Islamic credentials, with 9.6 million now internally displaced. The same pattern repeats across Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Mozambique, and the Central African Republic wherever governance collapses and Islamic militancy fills the vacuum. In Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan, the pressure is legal and systemic rather than merely insurgent: conversion from Islam is apostasy, punishable in several jurisdictions by death, and blasphemy accusations can end a life without any trial at all.

This is not a novel development but the working out of a legal framework laid down at the beginning. Under classical Islamic law, Jews and Christians occupy the status of dhimmi — a protected but subordinate class, permitted to survive on payment of a tax and acceptance of humiliation, on the authority of the Quran itself: “Fight those who believe not in Allah … until they pay the jizya and are humbled” (Surah 9:29). Where Islamic law is applied consistently, that verse governs, and the treatment of Christians follows from it.

The Present Impact on the Jews

The pattern with the Jewish people runs from Medina to the present hour. The Quran contains sharply hostile material regarding Jews who rejected Muhammad’s claims, and the hadith literature includes traditions of end-time conflict with them. Historically, Jews under Islamic rule lived as dhimmis — at some times and places in relative security and cultural flourishing, at others in degradation and violence. Honesty requires acknowledging both.

The modern era has been harsher. Following the founding of Israel in 1948, the ancient Jewish communities of the Islamic world — in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Algeria, and elsewhere, some of them older than Islam itself — were almost entirely uprooted, some 850,000 people driven out or fleeing. Since then Israel has faced repeated wars and unremitting hostility from Islamic states and movements, most recently the Hamas assault of October 7, 2023, and the Iranian confrontation that erupted into open war in 2026, in which Iran fired more than a thousand ballistic missiles at the Jewish state and Iranian media has published material calling for the assassination of American and Israeli figures. Iran’s stated aspiration to eliminate Israel has been open policy for decades.

Here the Christian must be careful of a second error, opposite to indifference. Some professing Christians defend Israel on the basis that the modern Jewish nation remains God’s covenant people regardless of its rejection of Christ. That is not the teaching of Scripture. “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6); the true Israel of God is the whole company of believers in Christ from both Testaments (Galatians 6:16; 3:29), and a rejection of Messiah places a man outside it whatever his descent. But neither may a believer be indifferent to the persecution of the Jewish people, nor forget that the gospel came to us through them, nor cease to pray that the veil be taken away and they see the Christ their fathers pierced.

A Word About Muslim People

Everything written above concerns a system of doctrine. It is not a verdict on individuals, and it must not become an excuse for hatred.

The Muslim world contains something like two billion souls, the overwhelming majority of whom inherited their religion as we inherit our language — without choosing it, without examining it, and often without any real access to a Bible or a faithful witness. Many are devout, disciplined, generous, and hospitable, and many live in genuine fear of the enforcers of their own religion. They are not our enemies. They are the mission field, and they are made in the image of God as surely as we are. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12). The Christian who despises Muslims has not understood his own salvation, for “such were some of you” (1 Corinthians 6:11), and every one of us was once without hope and without God in the world.

A Call to Come Out

To any Muslim reading this: we do not write to insult the sincerity of your submission, your prayers, or your fasting. We write because a lifetime of submission to a god who has no Son cannot save you, and because the very thing your religion most firmly denies is the one thing that could.

Consider what Islam offers at the end of it all — a scale, a weighing, and no assurance. There is no Muslim alive who can say with settled certainty that his sins are forgiven and that he will be received, because in that system the debt is never declared paid. The gospel of Jesus Christ declares exactly that, and declares it as a finished fact: not a prophet with a message about God, but God Himself come in the flesh, bearing sin in His own body on the tree, rising bodily from the dead, and now living to make intercession for all who come to Him. “Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him” (Hebrews 7:25).

Come out from the rites of a shrine that was a house of idols. Come out from a scale that will never balance. Come out to the God who does not merely demand submission but gives sonship — who is not ashamed to be called Father, and who sent His only begotten Son to purchase that name for sinners at the cost of His blood. There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5); and the Mediator is the Son that Islam denies.

The cost of coming out, in much of the Muslim world, is the loss of family, livelihood, and often life itself. We do not minimize it. But the Lord Jesus counted that cost aloud and told His followers plainly what following Him would mean, and then said this: “Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). Thousands in Islamic lands have made that exchange and have not regretted it. The Christ they found is worth infinitely more than everything it cost them.

Historical material drawn from Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, Ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam (The Book of Idols), Sahih al-Bukhari (including vol. 5, no. 661 on stone veneration), and the scholarship of Robert Hoyland and Patricia Crone on pre-Islamic Arabian religion; the notices of Diodorus Siculus (c. 60 B.C., via Agatharchides of Cnidus) and Ptolemy’s Geography (2nd c. A.D.), noting that Gibbon’s identification of the former and the traditional identification of Macoraba with Mecca have both been challenged in recent scholarship; the Encyclopaedia of Islam on the Kaaba, the campaigns of Abraha, the offices of the sons of Kusayy, and Snouck Hurgronje on the Zamzam spring; Taha Hussein as quoted in Anwar al-Jundi, Mizar al-Islam; Ahmad Shafaat, The Gospel According to Islam (1979), quoted from the author’s own introduction; the standard scholarly assessment of the Gospel of Barnabas as a late-medieval European composition; Quranic citations by surah and verse; persecution data from the Open Doors 2026 World Watch List. The moon-god thesis is discussed in order to caution readers against it; see the assessments of Winckler’s and Morey’s claims in current scholarship.