January 9, 2002
One message has been sent all around the Muslim world for many months already:
Please beware of the following websites: 1. www.answering-islam.org 2. www.aboutislam.com 3. www.thequran.com 4. www.allahsassurance.com These sites have been developed by the Israeli Jews who internationally propagate wrong information about the Quran, the Hadith and the Islam. Please spread this information to as many people as u can.
And thousands of Muslims have been obeying and continue to obey this request without stopping to think whether it is true or not, so that this message has nearly the same distribution like many viruses. Since the claim itself is so silly, we did not intend to reply, but have now received so many private inquiries asking to answer this accusation, that we see ourselves forced to give a public reply.
It is true that these pages have information about Islam that many Muslims do not want other Muslims to find out about. They raise questions and give answers which do not conform to Muslim propaganda. Many Muslims fear that others or even they themselves will begin to doubt Islam if they would start to seriously think about the facts, questions and conclusions presented in these pages.
It is false that these pages are developed by Jews, living in Israel or elsewhere. These pages are clearly Christian, calling all people to put their faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior. No Jew* would spend much effort to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah or call to faith in Jesus as the Son of God. That is a singularly Christian message, rejected by Jews.
It is a Muslim paranoia to accuse Jews to be behind anything that they do not like. Even though I know the authors of the other sites, I will only speak about our own web site Answering Islam. We are a team of dedicated volunteers all around the world, who believe that God's word and command to bring the gospel to the ends of the Earth includes the Muslim world. We seek to share, discuss and when necessary debate with Muslims about the message of Jesus and the Bible and their message of Islam as found in the Quran and Hadith. We do our best to understand Islam from its authentic sources and to the best of our knowledge and with a clean conscience document all our conclusions from the historical sources.
We believe that the information we make available to our readership is accurate and fair, though we have no goal to be "politically correct" and know that many Muslims do not like our conclusions. We believe the Bible to be the word of God and Islam to be "another message" that is not compatible with God's Word as revealed in the Bible.
But our highest priority is truth. And on every point we raise, we are willing to discuss it, and to be corrected where we have made mistakes. Please see also our Policy Statement on this issue.
Sincerely,
Your Answering Islam team
Footnote:
The Muslim accusation is that these sites are politically
motivated, but it should be obvious to any diligent reader
of Answering Islam that the site is about the
theological disagreements of Christians with the
claims of Islam, even though these disagreements sometimes
have political implications (because of the fundamentally
political nature of Islam). Mainly after Sept. 11, 2001, and due
to the many questions we received on these issues, we have begun
to add some material that focusses on political dimensions of
the Islamic system.
* For clarification on the term "Jew"
as used in the article:
There are a growing number of Jews who have accepted Jesus as
their Messiah and God Incarnate (they are called Jewish Christians
or Messianic Jews. They are
regarded as apostates by the Jews and are excluded from their
religious community. Even though Israel is supposedly a secular
state, it rejects applications for citizenship coming from
ethnic Jews who believe in Jesus and want to emigrate to Israel.
Since the term "Jew" can refer to the faith or the ethnicity,
there obviously are people of Jewish descent (Jews) who are
Christian believers. However, the intent of the accusation made
by these Muslims did not have this small minority of Jews in view
(less than 1%), but the ethno-political entity of Jews, particularly
the Israelis. Although Answering Islam also links to some
Messianic Jewish web sites, and by now even contains a couple of
articles from Messianic believers, it is was neither founded nor
developed nor ever run by any Jew, not even a Messianic Jew.
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