In Cairo last month, our president, seeking to show that we in the democratic west have much in common with Islam, told a listening world,

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. (Emphasis mine)

And then this month, Newsweek editor, Jon Meacham, opines that, in the face of the juggernaut called “modernity, theocracies “are doomed.” He writes,

However strong they may be for a time, theocracies cannot finally survive modernity, because one of the key features of modernity is the shift of emphasis from the privileges and power of institutions (a monarch, a clerical establishment, the state itself) to the rights and relative autonomy of the individual…In an imperfect world, there will never be a complete end of theocracy any more than there will ever be a complete end to tyranny. Power will ebb and flow, regimes come and go. But in the main, history’s path leads to more liberty, not less—to what Jefferson thought of as the bursting of chains, a sound you could almost hear in the crisis of Tehran.

The problem for our president and Mr. Meacham is that they have ignored or failed to understand the truth about the Koran, its founder Mohammed and the Islamic history that has flowed from them. To be sure, this is not a monolithic history, any more than “Islam” is a monolithic religion or civilization. But there is a great central tradition in Islam as there is in other religio-cultural traditions. Would that Mohammed and the Koran promulgated “justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” Would that “modernity” could erase the true contents of the Koran and Islamic aspirations based upon it. But no amount of saying so will actually make it so, an assertion that Don Richardson brings home with great clarity in Secrets of the Koran: Revealing Insights into Islam’s Holy Book.

Richardson is well known as the author of Peace Child, a book that chronicles his life spent among the Sawi, a Stone Age tribe of Irian Jaya. Over the course of his life he has become quite an expert in studying and understanding human cultures, looking for ways to understand people and relate the love of Christ to them.  He has brought these skills to bear on this most important topic of the Koran and Islam. In fact, it is Richardson’s specific focus on the Koran and Mohammed themselves that sets his work apart from much commentary on Islam these days. Richardson does not mince words, and he does not seek to avoid offense. He simply sets about to give the Koran a fair reading, based on seven different translations, and to show that no amount of western “whitewashing” can make the Koran a book that teaches things such as peace, tolerance, and “the dignity of all human beings.”

Richardson exposes the profound mistake most westerners make when they repeat the mantra that radical, violent Muslims have hijacked a “religion of peace.” In fact, such radical Muslims are those who have actually read the Koran and are following it. We may feel reassured (for a time) if we only look at the “non-offensive” verses in the Koran, but the problem is that there are too many verses, in context, that sanction polygamy, slavery, plunder, misogyny, and violence against all non-Muslims. Muslims must follow all of the Koran, not some of it. In other words, “moderate” Islam is not Koranic Islam, but rather, is a pseudo-Islam. Yet this is the exact opposite of what we continually hear in America. The alarming Koranic passages are simply waived off, and those who speak of them are called scaremongers.

Not only does Richardson sound the alarm about the true nature of the Koran, but he describes the forces at work to unleash its practice upon the world. He writes,

Consider this: If we add up all the universities, colleges, high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools in the United States, we find the total is about 24,000 institutions. Yet [Indonesian parliament member, Mochtar Buchori] counts 37,362 Muslim madrasas in Indonesia alone! Of these only 8 percent have any input from Indonesia’s government. In 92 percent, the teaching agenda is controlled by Muslim clerics. Buchori warns that 4.6 million Indonesian students are enrolled in the privately run madrasas. He further cautions that government offers to provide courses teaching math, English and science are strongly rejected by most private madrasas. He concludes that the potential for a majority of such schools to train terrorists is high.

Additionally, Richardson describes Muslim and non-Muslim attempts to defend the Koran, how both Old and New Testaments of the Bible stack up against the Koran, how Koran-adhering Muslims are infiltrating our important western institutions, particularly our educational system, Islam’s Koranic plan for world domination, and how this plan is being carried out in the western world as we speak.

Some of Richardson’s ideas will sound alarmist, and he sometimes comes off like an anti-Islamic crank. Some of this is justified, which is unfortunate, especially for a man who has spent his life sharing the love of Christ with those of different cultures. Yet we cannot be too hard on him, for upon reflection, Richardson sometimes sounds a bit fanatical in our ears only because our acceptance of the tropes and falsehoods about Islam and the Koran have become so pronounced that we can barely stand to hear the truth. And this is the real problem. As I read through the book, my frustration was primarily with westerners who have drunk so deeply from the springs of false pluralism and multiculturalism that they plug their ears when any kind of hard truth about Islam must be considered. We back away from any kind of facts that we think might offend others, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in connection with Islam. And it is far too simple to say, “Well, all religions have been violent.” That’s not the issue. The issue is what the Koran commands and allows both from its inception and now. Almost none of our political leaders or cultural commentators are actually interesting in wrestling with what the Koran actually says and what the history of Islam has actually been (Richardson has sympathy for those who cannot make it through the entire Koran, given how repetitive, heavy, and poorly written it is). Richardson gives a good example of “hard-to-stomach” Islamic history when it comes to slavery. In his chapter, Louis Farrakhan, Islam, and Slavery, he explains,

Once Islam had spread across North Africa in the 600s, however, Muslim slavers in the 700s tested caravan routes across the Sahara. They came to areas now called Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Burkina Faso. There they found African tribes already raiding each other for slaves. The only thing Muslim slavers had to do was arm and equip the northernmost black tribes – Hausas, Fulanis, Kolofs and others – with swords, crossbows, manacles and chains, giving them both military and slave-grabbing advantage over more southerly tribes…By trial and error, Muslim slavers found that if large numbers of slaves were force-marched northward across 1,200 miles or more of Sahara sand, enough would survive to guarantee a profit when they were sold in North African slave bazaars. Slavers from Muslim Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt began launching thousands of trans-Saharan caravans. The wholesale enslavement of the black race was under way. Europeans would not get into the act until the 1600s – by finally following the example that their North African Muslim neighbors had been virtually taunting them with for 900 years.

Richardson’s last few chapters issue a call to action. The reality of a virulent Islam, stoked by the contents of the Koran, compel our sober assessment, looking it square in the face. He warns that “for many liberal-minded Americans, the mere fact that 1.3 billion Muslims believe in the Koran makes the message in the book as good as true. They think we must call it good out of respect for the sheer masses of people whose minds are umbilically linked to it.” Yet when we actually look at the Koran, we will know that we can no longer be passive. One arena where Richardson calls for concrete action regards U.S. citizenship for Muslims. True allegiance to the Koran is not consistent with citizenship in America. Richardson argues that when Muslims are asked about citizenship in America, they should be questioned about their allegiance to the Koran (as he was questioned about his allegiance to the Bible). In other words, a Muslim who thinks that America would be benefited by submission to Islam’s Sharia Law should be denied citizenship. We cannot afford to indulge the kinds of falsehoods about Islam that our former president did when he called it a “religion of peace”, or our current president did in Cairo when he said, “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace.”  Richardson exhorts,

We live in a day when every president, every congressman, every prime minister, every governor, even every mayor, college president, school principle, editor, media interviewer, pastor and rabbi in the Western world must have objective knowledge of Mohammed, the Koran, the hadiths and Islam’s supremacist goals. Readers may object: When we were threatened by facism and later by communism, no one said allied leaders must peruse Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Why should our leaders today care what is in the Koran and the hadiths? Mein Kampf and Das Kapital were never virtually deified by 1.3 billion people. Nor did Axis powers or communism ever achieve the microinfiltration that politicized Islam has already achieved through massive immigration into all Western nations. Dispersed among millions of Muslims who are peaceful, nonideologized immigrants are a few million others who are fanatically loyal to Mohammed’s goal of total Islamic supremacy. These Muslims are more than religious. They are politico-religious.

I intend to take Richardson’s exhortation to heart and practice. At times I found him to be somewhat heavy-handed and speculative (for example, when playing out what he course he thinks Islamic imperialism will take). Further, I regularly questioned whether his broadsides would be a profitable way to engage Muslims in their own cultures and geographies. I’m not convinced they would be. But here in the west, I think we need a whole lot more of what Richardson is saying. We are the ones who still have freedom of speech and still have the ability to objectively consider the Koran and the history of Koran-inspired Islamic practice. We should not solely focus on the negatives, but we certainly need to stop treating Mohammed and the Koran as though they are sacrosanct. Our culture has no trouble spitting all over Jesus, but we speak about Mohammed with hushed, reverential tones. This needs to stop. We don’t need to insult anyone, religious leader or not, or fall into the trap of being written off by our inflammatory talk. But we certainly need to start articulating the truth about Mohammed and the Koran without flinching.

So, our final task, according to Richardson, must be to “plead earnestly” with Muslims we know. We must “reason patiently. Welcome Muslims to your neighborhoods and into your homes. Rejoice over them if they forsake Islam. Never threaten or insult them, no matter how angrily they respond…Let’s wage truth on Islam – because truth is the doorway to genuine peace. Peace not founded upon truth cannot last.”

-D