May 28, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 25,1424

NEW YORK, May 27: Many fundamentalist Christian evangelical scholars and leaders in the United States perceive Islam to be the public enemy number one and aim to launch a movement to convert Muslims to Christianity.

According to a report in The New York Times on Tuesday, the Iraq war and the terrorist attacks “have led many Americans to see Islam as a global threat”.

“Evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice-president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations told the newspaper. “The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire.”

Fundamentalist Christian organizations which lend support to President George W. Bush are pushing the churches and seminaries across the country, to launch movements for conversions of Muslims.

They have undertaken crash course studies of the Holy Quran and Sharia and have written books and essays available in Christian book stores comparing Islam with Christianity.

The paper said that the Arab International Ministry, the Indianapolis group that led the crash course on Islam in the US, claims to have trained 4,500 American Christians with the objective of preaching to Muslims in the last six years, many of those since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

However, the newspaper said that the National Association of Evangelicals has called on Christian leaders this month to temper their anti-Islam oratory, saying it had been unhelpful in fostering interfaith relations, and dangerous to Christians spreading the gospel to Muslims. While some evangelical leaders welcomed the criticism, others bristled and said that it was not the Christians but the Muslims who must stop the hate-speech.

Akbar Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic studies department at American University, said he grew up attending Catholic and Protestant missionary schools in Pakistan, but never heard a negative word about Islam from the missionaries. Now, he said, the new hostility to Islam and, in particular, the insults to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) have outraged the Muslim world.

“The whole range of Muslims, from orthodox to liberal secularists, are all lined up against these attacks coming from the American evangelists,” Ahmed, author of the new book Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World (Polity Press) said in an interview with the Times.

“Unwittingly, these evangelists have unleashed a consolidation of sentiments for Islam. Even the most moderate Muslims have been upset by this.”

The push for conversions may backfire for the evangelists, he told the paper, “since Muslims who may have been open to the missionaries’ presence feel their honor has been insulted.”