Historical Islam

In Old Testament times God not infrequently used heathen nations to judge the degeneracy of His own people. There are incidents in the history of the Church which may well be interpreted as a divine intervention to blot out that which had become a reproach to the name of Christ. By the seventh century, the organized, hierarchical Church had degenerated in its practices to the point that it was ripe for judgment. Did God use Islam to judge the Church?

Muhammad was born in Mecca in 571 of an elite family. In his youth he traveled with trading caravans along the main trade routes of the Arabian peninsula, and in Syria and Palestine had considerable contact with Jews and Christians. He was not impressed by his encounter with Christianity, mixed as it was with superstition and idolatry. A visionary, and one who was incensed by the degradations of the idolatrous polytheism of his own race, he embarked upon a life of reform. His efforts were spurred on by direct revelations which he claimed to receive from God and which were committed to writing to form the Qur’an.

Whatever may be said of Muhammad, and there can be no doubt as to the contradictions of his own character, he instigated on a social level a much needed reform among the Arabs of his day.

God, he said, was One, and he was His prophet. His fierce denunciations of idolatry and other blatant evils so stirred up opposition in Mecca that, with a company of his followers, he fled in 622 to Medina. From that year the Muslim era is dated, and indeed his flight, or “hijra” as it is called, proved to be the turning point of his career. By the time of his death in 632 practically the whole of Arabia lay at his feet.

Muhammad’s successors as Kaliphs took up the cause, and Islam spread with bewildering rapidity. Damascus fell to the Muslim forcers in 635, and then the great bastions of Christianity, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. Thousands of church buildings were destroyed or turned into mosques. The tide swept across North Africa practically obliterating Christianity. Few communities survived. Those who refused to deny Christ died, and of those who denied Him many served to sell the ranks of the Islamic forces. Across Spain and into France swept the apparently invincible tide, to be met at last by the determined forces of Charles Martel at Tours in 732. In one of the most important battles of all history, the invaders suffered a crushing defeat.

In less than a hundred years from Muhammad’s death, the dominion of Islam stretched from India to Spain, and its conquests were by no means over. That such a catastrophe should have overtaken the Church almost defies the imagination, yet it was not the spiritual movement of the Church that suffered near extermination, but the proud ecclesiastic hierarchy which claimed dominion over the souls of men and offered to sacraments and idols the reverence that was due to God alone.

ISLAM BEGAN AS A JUDGMENT UPON PAGAN IDOLATRY. IT GREW AS A JUDGMENT UPON CHRISTIAN IDOLATRY AS WELL.

So far had the Church departed from the teachings of Scripture, and so blatantly was idolatry practiced, that in 726 Leo III sought to deal with these abuses. He forbade that reverence be given to images and to pictures. This was strongly resisted by many, both common people and clerics. The dispute resulted in shameful violence on both sides, for neither had any appeal to spiritual motives.

Yes, just as God’s people, Israel, received judgment for their sins and disobedience from heathen nations like Assyria and Babylonia, it is highly probable that God used the uprising of Islam in judgment against the abuses that had developed within His Church.

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