When prominent Islamic leaders speak and write, often their goals are noble. Their criticisms of life in the West are accurate—similar, in some ways, to more conservative voices within Western society.
One Muslim leader called Islam “a pathway toward a new world, warranting a prosperous life, moral soundness, and salvation for mankind.”
“[T]he major sufferings and grievances of man,” he said, “have permanently been the same: poverty, ignorance, discrimination, war, insecurity, and finally man’s incarceration in the prison of materialism and captivity by his evil tendencies. … Wars flare in nooks and corners of the world, while others not affected by war are constantly in fear of the eruption of war. … The Western materialistic civilization is directing everyone toward materialism, while money, gluttony, and carnal desires are made the greatest aspirations. Finally, sincerity, truthfulness, altruism, and self-sacrifice have been replaced in many parts of the world by deception, conspiracy, avarice, jealousy, and other indecent features. Science, technology, equipment, speed and facility have dramatically changed the world as compared with the past, but the chronic and age-old pains and chagrin of humanity still remain unchanged.” Not an entirely unfair critique of the West.
Another leading Muslim said this: “These people who want freedom, who want our youth to be free, write effusively about the freedom of our youth. What freedom do they want? … They want the gambling casinos to remain freely open, the bars to be freely open, they want the fleshpots to remain freely open, they want heroin addicts to be free, opium addicts to be free. … We want to take our young people from these [movie theaters] that were designed and made to drag them to corruption, and to take them by the hand to places where they will be of some use to the nation. … The safeguarding of the realm cannot be effected with the freedom that you proclaim. This freedom fragments and ruins the realm.”
Regular Trumpet readers may recognize this as a theme we have addressed occasionally, based on the truth in Romans 6:16: “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?”
These men can look at the world and see problems—and recognize that we need serious solutions! They have a mind to set things right and to spread their way throughout the Earth.
The trouble is, they do not have the solutions. In fact, their “solutions”—the means by which they would bring about “a new world,” “prosperous life, moral soundness, and salvation for mankind”—only create more problems—far worse problems!
The first statement above was from Ali al-Husseini al-Khamenei, the supreme religious leader of Iran, from a speech he gave to the Organization of Islamic Countries in 1997. He regularly speaks of America as being the leader of the world’s evil forces and calls it “the Great Satan.” He wants Iran to lead the world’s Islamic movement—and his country is the greatest sponsor of terrorism on Earth today.
The second statement was from his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man who led the Iranian Revolution, from a speech he gave at a theological school in 1979. In that same speech, when Khomeini was talking about the harm to young people, he proposed this “solution”: “We want to release our youths from the opium pipe and place machine guns in their hands. We want to release our youths from the opium pipe and dispatch them to the battlefield.” Elsewhere this man wrote, “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors! There are hundreds of other [koranic] psalms and hadiths [sayings of the prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
You can easily see how that kind of thinking is not going to bring this world peace. Jesus Christ uttered the simple truth that “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52).