25AR30-32

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AR 30:32 - Historical questions, Islam's emergence and major claims

In this issue:

ISLAM - Now surpassing Christianity as the fastest
growing world religion?

 + its "doubtful origins," according to three influential books

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM - "the chief background for the First Amendment's religion clauses was experience of religious war"

WORLD CHRISTIAN ANALYSIS - detecting important outliers as we analyze current developments

Apologia Report 30:32 (1,721)
August 29, 2025

ISLAM

"How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020: Muslims grew fastest; Christians lagged behind global population increase" by Conrad Hackett, et al (Pew Research Center, Jun 9 '25) <www.tinyurl.com/bdf944h7> -- apparently missions analyst Justin Long received a lot of questions about this Pew report. The second paragraph of his response (Justin Long's Weekly Analysis #439, see "About that Pew Report") <www.tinyurl.com/bdcvvc63> begins by announcing "That Muslims are growing faster, currently, is not actually all that new...." 

   A lengthy discussion follows, with Long's noteworthy conclusion: "I'll stick with the global estimates from the World Christian Database." <www.tinyurl.com/5n74pf2v> (Note: Our attempt to open this link results in a warning which indicates that the World Christian Database site has an "expired certificate" and does not allow browser access.)

"The Doubtful Origins of Islam: Three books that shaped my thinking" by A.S. Ibrahim (World, Aug 1 '25) -- "For generations, Muslims have wholeheartedly embraced an account derived from their sacred texts, including the Quran and the Hadith. Are these texts reliable? Do they provide authentic information dating to seventh-century Arabia, where Muhammad is said to have received divine revelations through the angel Gabriel? These questions sparked my curiosity and guided my research across two Ph.Ds focused on Islam, its history, and its texts.

   "Rather than taking its stories at face value, we should scrutinize the reliability and authenticity of this religion followed by over 1.8 billion people. Three books - one by a medieval Muslim authority and two by modern secular scholars - shaped my perspective, leading me to question the traditional narrative of Islam and the major claims advanced by Muslims.

   "Abu Bakr ibn Abi Dawud al-Sijistani (d. 928), a prominent Sunni scholar, was renowned for his expertise in Islamic traditions. His The Book of Codices, <www.tinyurl.com/yw6yjptv> parts of which have been translated into English, examines competing Quranic texts, challenging the Muslim claim that the Quran is preserved without any alteration. His book shows that originally Muslims acknowledged multiple Quranic versions, with Muhammad's companions disputing the authenticity of various copies, each differing significantly. ...

   "Erling Ladewig Petersen's 1964 study, Ali and Mu'awiya in Early Arabic Tradition, <www.tinyurl.com/ytbw7t9r> demonstrates that supposed authentic historical narratives of Islam's origins are largely ideological forgeries crafted to advance sociopolitical and - sectarian agendas favored by Muslim authors. These accounts, documented at least two centuries after the events, are religiopolitical rather than factual. ...

   "Petersen illustrates how Sunni and Shiite writers portrayed the same historical events differently, shaped by their religious and political commitments. Due to their late composition and numerous contradictions driven by sectarian and political biases, these texts provide no reliable means to discern what truly happened in early Islam, leaving us with a fragmented remnant of an obliterated past. ...

   "The internal and external limitations of Arabic Muslim sources make it hard to reconstruct a coherent account of Islam's origin. Consequently, many modern scholars advocate consulting non-Muslim sources from the seventh to 10th centuries to better understand its beginnings. Robert Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997) <www.tinyurl.com/2hfkht64> is a pioneering work in this field that compiles and analyzes accounts from Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and other non-Muslim writers, all often neglected in discussions surrounding Islam's emergence. ...

   "Many non-Muslims portrayed Muhammad as a deceiving preacher, false prophet, and Arabian warlord leading nomadic invasions into Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian territories. Hoyland's work remains a seminal contribution to Islamic studies, providing a balanced, source-driven perspective on Islam's origins and its reception among neighboring cultures, enriched by a cross-cultural lens." <www.tinyurl.com/y7es7a28>

 ---

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

"The Elvis Problem: Defining religion under the First Amendment" by Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit Substack, Jul 23 '25) -- summarizes the American Federal Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith. After discussing "the cult of Elvis," Reynolds (a law professor and "sometime writer at NY Post, WSJ, USA Today, Popular Mechanics)" summarizes the current difficulties that make defining religion so difficult for our highest court. Included is one of Reynolds' "favorite free exercise cases," <www.tinyurl.com/ytuwtbwb> which gets most of his attention early in this piece.

   However, it seems to us that the most significant discussion focuses on the earliest history of America. Reynolds explains one of the questions that constitutional law professor Josh Blackman, <www.tinyurl.com/4hka6hrk> "identifies as vital if the Supreme Court's opinion in Employment Division v. Smith is overturned. Smith held that a neutral law of general application is valid under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment even if it burdens someone's religious practice." Elsewhere Blackman has discussed the case's distinction between religious belief and action, its implications for religious exemptions, and debates about overruling it.

   Here, Reynolds emphasizes that "Backman asks if we would consider how the Framers viewed freedom of religion. That's tricky. Some Framers seem to have thought of religious freedom as applying mostly among different Christian denominations, though there were occasional more-general statements, such as that contained in George Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Rhode Island, which was pretty universal: 'The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.'

   "There were also occasional statements from Jefferson, Franklin, etc. to the effect that religious toleration extended even to 'Mahometans,' and the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli provided that 'As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.'

   "That said, the chief background for the First Amendment's religion clauses was experience. And that experience was of religious war - between Catholics and Protestants, between Protestants of the Puritan variety and the Church of England, etc. - and one of the chief purposes of both the free exercise and the establishment clause was probably to tamp that sort of thing down. By providing that government couldn't be used to advance or repress particular religions, it gave everyone less cause to resort to arms to take control of it, or to prevent their enemies from taking control of it." <www.tinyurl.com/5cjcbmr4>

 ---

WORLD CHRISTIAN ANALYSIS

"Base Rate Neglect and Spiritual Formation" (Justin Long's Weekly Analysis, No. 444 - Jul 25 '25) -- How to detect the important outliers while scanning current events.

   In a recent editorial, ChinaSource founder Brent Fulton <www.tinyurl.com/y5xtfkkd> "noted the prominence of stories about the church under attack around the world.... 

   "What Brent describes is a cognitive hazard: base-rate neglect. Flashy evidence blinds us to dull truths, and prior probabilities quietly shape outcomes more than vivid details do.

   "People routinely overweight the importance of new, vivid, or emotionally charged events and underweight the 'base rate' - the background drumbeat of the days of our lives, which forms the basic likelihood of a given action. This mis-weighting distorts our judgment. ...

   "Most of life takes the shape of the 'base rate.'

   "Unfortunately, the exceptional draws our attention - the 'ordinary' is not vivid. ...

   "In the larger picture, Gospel access is also shaped by consistency, more by the planes that take off and safely land daily than by the one plane that goes down. Church growth is shaped by daily activities more than one-off crusades. As we covered last week, Christians are being born all over the world, and believers are being discipled. The result: the church is growing more through quiet seepage than through massive and very public moments. ...

   "Some days do have outliers. ... These events aren't so common that they happen every day, but they aren't so rare that they occur only once in a lifetime. They can alter the course of a person's life, but rarely change the course of a community. But I generally ignore outliers - they might change life for a few people, but probably won't change what they do so much as where they do it. ...

   "We shouldn't confuse an 'outlier' with a Black Swan. Swans are different - they are previously unpredictable events, things that rarely happen, but that shape whole communities, nations, and the world. Facebook, 9/11, Covid-19, the Hamas attack on Israel, the war in Sudan - these might not have been entirely unpredictable, but they were rare, unpredicted by most people, and world-changing. ...

   "The best we can do is to build as much resilience as possible against the possibilities of Black Swans. ...

   "We must 'keep an eye out' for Black Swans, and prepare for outliers, but we should never neglect the base rate. Outliers and Swans shape the part of the map we can get to, but daily action is what propels us to explore the map. Most of our attention should be on the base rate of daily habits - 'boring' by some accounts, perhaps, yet the primary stuff that expands the Kingdom worldwide." <www.tinyurl.com/yenjkrmm>

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