Islam: Modernist or Rationalist Critique

Islam is on the way to being the largest world religion, as husbands and wives in Christendom disobey the Biblical pattern to have as many children as possible (Psalm 127:5) while Muslims have many children.  Are you equipped to evangelize Muslims?  How much do you know about the history of Islam?  I believe the content in the pamphlet The Testimony of the Quran to the Bible (also available in Arabic here) is very useful, and would commend it for use in Biblical Baptist churches (see the Word document here.)  I also thought it was worth mentioning what the results of rationalistic, modernistic, or higher critical theory to the Quran leads to.  Tom Holland has an easy to understand video with useful information:

The video approaches the Quran from a secular, rationalistic perspective and contains some (unjustified) digs at the Bible, but it demonstrates that the sources for Islam are late and unreliable.  Indeed, the sources are weak enough that a rational person can even make the case the Muhammad did not exist.  While I am not convinced that he did not exist--I think he definitely did for reasons such as those explicated by David Wood below--the Quranic and other Islamic material has serious problems with reliability.  The debates below demonstrate these facts (of course, the music in the debates is not endorsed, nor are the authors, etc.):

(Note: Robert Spenser in this video convincingly wins this debate with the Muslims over whether Muhammad existed or not, but that does not mean that his conclusion is correct.)  Better reasons, for those who do not accept the god of Islam as the real God, to conclude that Muhammad did exist, while still demonstrating the unreliability of the Islamic sources, can be found in this debate between Robert Spenser and David Wood:

Christians should be aware of what the application of rationalistic skepticism to the Quran leads to in terms of history, because:

1.) Unlike with the Bible, the Quran was not a product of Divine intervention, so there are much better reasons for higher critical analysis to be correct.

2.) Muslims argue against Christianity by borrowing from higher criticism, but were they to apply the same sort of criticism to their own religion they would find theirs melts away in a way that Biblical Christianity does not do so in fact.

Thus, I commend the videos above to you, to assist you in proclaiming the gospel and tearing down spiritual strongholds with Muslims.

TDR