Your View — Muslims are turning to Christianity

Jim Tessien, Mankato

May 19, 2008 12:58 am

— If you remember, one of the big stories at Easter was the pope baptizing a well known Egyptian who gave up Islam to be a Roman Catholic. This is just one story of many as it turns out. You will not see this on TV or read it in the papers of the mainstream outlets, but many thousands of Muslims are turning to Christianity. They are making this decision amid widespread persecution and death threats. In recorded history, more Muslims have turned to Jesus Christ in just the last 30 years.
According to New York Times best-selling author Joel Rosenberg, there were only 17 Christians in Afghanistan before Al-Qaeda attacked America. Today that number is way over 10,000 and the number is growing. If you look back to 1979, there were only a few Christians in Iraq. Today there are well over 70,000, including former Islamic Jhadist terrorists. In Egypt there have been over a million converted to Jesus in the last decade. In the year 2005, 750,000 copies of the Bible on tape in Arabic were sold, plus a half million copies of the Arabic New Testament. In Iran, so much in the news today, there were only 500 Christians back in 1979. Currently Iranian pastors report well over one million Shia converts. In the Sudan, there were over one million converts to Jesus since 2001. Sheiikh Ahmad Al Qataani, a leading Saudi cleric, appeared live on Aljazeera TV to confirm that indeed Muslims were turning to Jesus Christ in alarming numbers. He reported that every hour there are 667 converts and 16,000 a day, and six million a year. He said a tragedy has happened.
Life is certainly not easy for any of these new Christians. They face ostracism from family, getting fired from jobs, torture and death. But they have come to believe that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. Let all Christians rejoice in these new believers, and pray for their faith and safety.