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Evaluating a Christianity Today review of Ridchardson's Secrets of the Koran

In the June 2006 issue of Christianity Today, Warren Larson, director of the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University, reviewed seven books by American evangelicals that evaluate Islam. Three of the seven he finds sorely deficient and is especially critical of books by John MacArthur and Don Richardson, the veteran missionary and author Peace Child and Eternity in Their Hearts.

I've read many books that are critical of Islam, but very few of them were written by evangelicals. Having read Don Richardson's Secrets of the Koran: Revealing Insights into Islam's Holy Book (Regal, 2003), however, I was struck by Larson's harsh judgment of it. He denounces Richardson's "art of vilification," the "lack of integrity" in his alleged "fact-based commentary, his "unfair assumptions" and generally negative view of Mohammad. So I've gone back to Richardson's book to see if Christianity Today treats him fairly.

The book's foreword, by Reza F. Safa, "A servant of Jesus Christ and an ex-Shiite radical Muslim," establishes its tone: "If Islam is a peaceful religion, then why did Mohammed engage in 47 battles? Why, in every campaign the Muslim armies have fought throughout history, have they slaughtered men, women and children who did not bow their knees to the lordship of Islam. The reign of terror of men such as Saddam, Khomeini, Ghadafi, Idi Amin and many other Muslim dictators are modern examples. If Islam is peaceful, why are there so many verses in the Koran about killing the infidels and those who resist Islam: If Islam is peaceful, why isn't there even one Muslim country that will allow freedom of religion and speech? Not one! If Islam is peaceful, who is imparting this awful violence to hundreds of Islamic groups throughout the world who kill innocent people in the name of Allah?" (p. 10).

Richardson himself clearly sets forth his methodology. He carefully read, in various translations, The Koran (or Qurron, as Larson insists it be spelled), looking for the "redemptive analogy" that enabled him as a missionary to lead non-Christians to Christ. "What I discovered," he says, "shocked me" (p. 18). For he found that Islam "stands alone as the only belief system that, due to its very design, frustrates anyone who seeks to use the redemptive-analogy approach" (p. 18). Islam promotes a radically different God, an explicit denial of the Christian doctrine, and an alliance between religion and politics that confounds any effort to find correlations between Islam and Christianity.

Richardson also found, while reading the Koran, little in Mohammed to admire. His commitment to violence and plunder, his polygamous sexual indulgences, his misrepresentation of the Jewish scriptures, make him a rather singular figure in religious history. His book the Koran, has been negatively reviewed by a long litany of scholars. Edward Gibbon, for example, referred to it as an "incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept," filled with "fraud and perfidy, of cruelty and injustice," written by a man who "indulged the appetites of a man and abused the claims of a prophet" (p. 65). Trying to be fair, Richardson devotes chapters to both Muslim and non-Muslim defenders of the Koran, but he finds them unpersuasive.

Richardson emerged from his study of Islam with a fresh awareness of its power since 9/11, convinced that "radical Islam is the real Islam of the Koran. Moderate Islam is pseudo-Islam. As surely as those we call moderates refuse to speak critically of the Koran, we may know they are living in a dream world. They are equivalent to a hypothetical 1930s German saying, 'I believe Hitler is a good leader and I believe every word of his Mein Kampf is true, but I am not a Nazi!'" (p. 179). More ominously, Richardson says: "Moderate Muslims do not control tens of thousands of madrasas [Islamic schools]. And these Muslim madrasas are the Islamic equivalent of Hitler's Nazi youth movement, but on a vastly larger scale!" (p. 179).

Without further citing sections from Richardson's book, I find it obviously polemical, committed to the proposition that Islam is hardly a religion of peace. Indeed it is a grave threat to the 21^st century world. He wants to tell the truth about Islam, both to help non-Muslims resist it and to reach out to Muslims who might hear his message. If, in fact, Islam is a false religion, Mohammed was a false prophet, and the world has been long harmed by both, Richardson's strong language is defensible.

What's lacking in his book, however, is the knowledge of history and Arabic evident in books by Bat Ye'or and Bernard Lewis that make more careful distinctions and less sweeping generalizations. He cites both authorities in his bibliography and has read them, but he's certainly not devoted a lifetime of study to the subject. But to simply dismiss Richardson's book, as does Larson in his Christianity Today review, seriously fails to do justice to either his intent, his diligent study, or the evidence he sets forth.