By God’s grace, and with pressure from American, Canadian, British, Italian, and other leaders, the case against Rahman was dropped. He was set free and left the country.
But persecution of believers in Afghanistan has hardly diminished. Just days after Rahman’s release, two more Afghan believers were arrested, and according to Compass Direct news service and Open Doors, a Christian ministry to the “closed” countries of the Middle East, one young Afghan convert to Christianity “was beaten severely outside his home by a group of six men, who finally knocked him unconscious with a hard blow to his temple. He woke up in the hospital two hours later” but was discharged before morning. Compass and Open Doors also reported that “several other Afghan Christians have been subjected to police raids on their homes and places of work in the past month, as well as to telephone threats.”598
Revival in Central Asia
During the summer of 1986, I had the privilege of traveling to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, to share Christ with Muslims. At the time, there were only a few Uzbek believers in a country of 27 million people. Today, there are some thirty thousand Uzbek followers of Christ, and hunger for the gospel is at an all-time high. “Hundreds and hundreds of churches were planted after the Soviet Union broke down,” one Uzbek Christian leader told me. “And now these churches are growing.”599
On that same trip, I also had the opportunity to travel to Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in southern Kazakhstan, near the Chinese border, on a ministry trip to share the gospel with Muslims. At the time there were no known Kazakh believers in Christ in the entire country of 15 million people. By 1990, there were only three known believers. But today evangelical leaders in the country report that there are more than sixteen thousand Kazakh Christians, and more than one hundred thousand Christians of all ethnicities.
The stories I hear from Kazakhstan today are extraordinary. One young Kazakh Muslim man, for example, was severely persecuted after he converted to Christianity and began preaching the gospel in village after village. The leaders of his own village cursed him and said terrible things about him. But several years later, two Muslim tribal leaders came to his home with a lamb. They said they had come to apologize because their crops were failing, their livestock were dying, and they knew God was punishing them.
“Will you forgive us?” they asked.
The evangelist said yes.
Then the leaders sacrificed the lamb as a sign of their repentance. This opened a new door for the young man to bear witness for Christ in that village, explaining verses from the Bible like John 1:29, which describes Jesus Christ as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” because of His death on the cross. The tribal leaders did not immediately come to Christ. But having asked the evangelist for forgiveness and being willing to listen respectfully to the Word of God, they found that their crops suddenly began to grow and their livestock began to flourish again.
And then something really unexpected happened. The evangelist’s father would not speak to his son or visit his home for ten years because of his son’s conversion to Christianity. But after watching how calmly and patiently his son had endured the village’s persecution, and how God had withdrawn his favor from the village and now was giving it back again, the father sat up all night with his son asking him questions about his faith, about the Bible, and about the power of his son’s God to hear prayers and answer them.
In the morning, the Holy Spirit moved in the father’s heart and the son had the privilege of praying with him to receive Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and Lord.600
Revival in Pakistan
Senior Pakistani Christian leaders whom I have great trust in tell me there is a “conversion explosion” going on in their country, comparable in many ways to what is going on in Iran, Sudan, and Egypt. Despite the fact that Pakistan is a base camp for the Radicals, God is moving powerfully, and there are now an estimated 2.5 million to 3 million born-again believers worshiping Jesus Christ amongst the jihadists. Whole towns and villages along the Afghan-Pakistani border are seeing dreams and visions of Jesus and are converting to Christianity.
One young Pakistani Muslim who converted to Christianity became a bold minister of the gospel to Taliban refugees. Over the course of two to three years, the thirty-one-year-old evangelist personally led eight hundred Taliban extremists to faith in Christ before he was captured and murdered and his car set ablaze by a bloodthirsty mob.
The spiritual climate is so ripe for harvest that even Indian evangelists are seeing record numbers of Pakistanis come to Christ. My friend Dr. T. E. Koshy, a senior elder in one of India’s largest evangelical church-planting movements, began traveling to Pakistan in 1993 to preach the gospel and strengthen the local believers. In 2006, he addressed a conference in the city of Lahore on the topic “Jesus Christ, the Healer.”
He told the gathered crowd of more than ten thousand people, “Sin is the worst sickness of all. And only Christ can heal us of this sickness.” He pointed to passages like Matthew 4:23-24, which tells us that “Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching . . . and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them.” He pointed to passages like Matthew 14:14, which tells us that when Jesus “went ashore, He saw a large crowd, and felt compassion for them and healed their sick.”
Koshy also pointed to passages like Matthew 9:1-8, which tells the story of Jesus healing a paralyzed man. “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven,” Jesus told the man. The religious leaders were angry when they heard this, saying privately to each other, “This fellow blasphemes.” Jesus, however, knew exactly what they were thinking. So He said to them, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’?” Then, in a stunning display of His authority, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” And the paralyzed man jumped to his feet, completely healed physically and completely healed spiritually. The text tells us that “when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.”
When Koshy was finished preaching, more than a thousand Pakistanis—all of them weeping over their sins—made decisions to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior and their Healer. For the next four nights, Koshy preached the power of Christ to heal and forgive, and when the conference was over, more than three thousand Pakistanis had become followers of Jesus Christ.601
I asked Koshy why so many Pakistanis—Muslims and nominal Christians—are giving their lives to the Lord in this post–9/11 world.
“Today, with so many Christians in Pakistan, many are seeing the believers demonstrate Christ’s love in real and practical ways,” he said. “When the massive earthquake struck several years ago, it was the Christians who responded with relief supplies, love, and compassion. One Muslim told me, ‘No one else but the Christians came to give us hope.’ Pakistanis now are able to see the difference between hard-core radical Islam and hard-core Christianity, and they are choosing Jesus. You can see the hand of God moving so powerfully. The restlessness of the masses is created by the Enemy, and Pakistanis are coming to realize that they can only find rest and healing and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Air War
How the Revivalists use TV and radio to reach Muslims with the gospel
You have probably never heard of Father Zakaria Botros.
But you need to know his story. He is far and away the most watched and most effective Arab evangelist operating in the Muslim world, and he is by far the most controversial. I think of him as the Rush Limbaugh of the Revivalists—he is funny, feisty, brilliant, opinionated, and provocative. But rather than preaching the gospel of conservatism, he is preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. And his ene
mies do not simply want to silence him. They want to assassinate him.
An Arabic newspaper has named Botros “Islam’s Public Enemy #1.”602 The week I interviewed Botros by phone from a secure, undisclosed location, he told me that he had just learned that an al Qaeda Web site had posted his photograph and named him one of the “most wanted” infidels in the world.603 The Radicals have even put a bounty on his head. The Christian Broadcasting Network reported the figure was as high as $60 million.604 Botros does not know for certain. But just to put that in context, the U.S. bounty on Osama bin Laden’s head is $25 million.
Why are the Radicals so enraged by a Coptic priest from Egypt who is in his seventies? Because Botros is waging an air war against them, and he is winning.
Must-See TV
Using state-of-the art satellite technology to bypass the efforts of Islamic governments to keep the gospel out of their countries, Botros is directly challenging the claims of Muhammad to be a prophet and the claims of the Qur’an to be God’s word. He systematically deconstructs Muhammad’s life, story by story, pointing out character flaws and sinful behavior. He carefully deconstructs the Qur’an, verse by verse, citing contradictions and inconsistencies. And not only does he explain without apology what he believes is wrong with Islam; he goes on to teach from the Bible why Jesus loves Muslims and why He is so ready to forgive them and adopt them into His family, no matter who they are or what they have done.
If Botros were doing this in a corner, or on some cable-access channel where no one saw him or cared, that would be one thing. But his ninety-minute program—a combination of preaching, teaching, and answering questions from (often irate) callers all over the world—has become “must-see TV” throughout the Muslim world. It is replayed four times a week in Arabic, his native language, on a satellite television network called Al Hayat (“Life TV”). It can be seen in every country in North Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia. It can also been seen throughout North America, Europe, and even as far away as Australia and New Zealand. And not only can it be seen in so many places, it is seen—by an estimated 50 million Muslims a day.
At the same time, Botros is getting millions of hits on his multiple Web sites in multiple languages. There, Muslims can read his sermons and study through an archive of answers to frequently asked questions. They can also enter a live chat room called “Pal Chat,” where they are not only permitted but encouraged to ask their toughest questions to trained online counselors, many of whom are Muslim converts to Christianity who understand exactly where the questioners are coming from and the struggles they face.
As a result, “Father Zakaria”—who has been on the air only since 2003—has practically become a household name in the Muslim world. Millions hate him, to be sure, but they are watching. They are listening. They are processing what he is saying, and they are talking about him with their friends and family.
When Botros challenges Radical clerics to answer his many refutations of Islam and defend the Qur’an, millions wait to see how the fundamentalists will respond. But they rarely do. They prefer to attack Botros rather than answer him.
Yet the more the Radicals attack him, the more well-known he becomes. The more well-known he becomes, the more Muslims feel compelled to tune in. And as more Muslims tune in, more are coming to the conclusion that he is right and are in turn choosing to become followers of Jesus Christ.
Botros estimates at least a thousand Muslims a month pray to receive Christ with his telephone counselors. Some of them pray to receive Christ live on the air with Botros. And this surely is the tip of the iceberg, as it represents only those who are able to get through on the jammed phone lines. There simply are not enough trained counselors to handle all the calls.
Many leading Arab evangelists I interviewed for Inside the Revolution said they believe God is using Botros to help bring in the greatest harvest of Muslim converts to Christianity in the history of Christendom. Botros refuses to take any credit, saying he is just one voice in a movement of millions. But he is certainly excited by the trend lines. He does see more Muslims turning to Christ than ever before, and he told me he has cited Epicenter at least three times as evidence of the enormous numbers of conversions taking place.
What’s more, he vows to keep preaching the gospel so long as the Lord Jesus gives him breath. John 3:16—“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son [Jesus], that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”—is the verse that drives Botros. He believes passionately that God loves the whole world, including each and every Muslim. He believes that “whoever” believes in the lordship of Jesus Christ—Jew, Muslim, or otherwise—will, in fact, receive eternal life. He does not believe all Muslims are Radicals, but he does believe all Muslims are spiritually lost, and he desperately wants to help them find their way to forgiveness and reconciliation with the God who made them and loves them.
“I believe this is the hand of God,” Botros told me when we spoke by phone in September 2008. “He is directing me. He shows me what to say. He shows me what to write on the Web sites. He is showing me more and more how to use technology to reach people with his message of redemption.”
Twice Imprisoned
Zakaria Botros was born in Egypt in 1934 to a Christian family that raised him to love Christ with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength and to study the Bible for himself. “Since I was a child I loved Jesus and loved to worship Him,” he said.
Sadness struck at a young age, however, when his older brother, Fuad, was murdered by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. “But it did not cause me to be against Muslims,” Botros said. “I know he was a believer. I will see him again in heaven.”
What did affect Botros was a high school teacher who was “a very fanatic Muslim.” The teacher was “always asking me difficult questions about the Bible” and mocking Christianity. “I started to study Islam to answer him. I read the Qur’an and other books. And then I became a Sunday school teacher in my church, and I began teaching the youth about what was wrong about Islam and what was right about the Bible.”
In 1959, at the age of twenty-five, Botros was ordained as a priest in the Egyptian Coptic church, one of the oldest Christian Orthodox denominations in the Middle East, started in Alexandria, Egypt, by the apostle Mark. “After I became a priest, I began to print lectures and essays explaining how to refute Islam and lead people to Jesus,” Botros said. By the time he was arrested and imprisoned for his faith in 1981, he had baptized five hundred MBBs.
But it was not enough. Botros wanted to have more impact. When he was released from prison after a year, he went back to preaching the gospel and refuting Islam. By 1989, the Egyptian authorities had had enough. They not only arrested him; they sentenced him to life in prison.
After much prayer—his own and the prayers of many of his disciples and friends—Botros was surprised when the authorities made an offer he could not refuse: they would set him free, but only if he left Egypt and went into exile, never to return. He agreed and moved to Melbourne, Australia, where he practiced his faith freely until moving in 1992 to England, where he lived eleven years.
It was there, amid a British society that was rapidly becoming home to Muslim immigrants from all over the world, that Botros began praying about ways to reach more Muslims. He could not bear the thought of speaking to only a few at a time. But he also knew that for security purposes he needed to have a way to get “in the face” of a Muslim without literally being in his face.
In early 2001, the Lord answered his prayers. Someone suggested he set up an Internet chat room where he could have online conversations with Muslims without subjecting himself to physical danger. In April of that year, “Pal Talk” was born.
Soon a producer for Al Hayat heard the growing buzz about Botros and invited him to be a guest on the network. The interview went well. Botros was asked back again and again. In time, Al Hayat executives asked him to host his own weekly program, teaching the Bible a
nd challenging the Qur’an. After much prayer, Botros agreed.
“Truth Debate” debuted on September 1, 2003. At first, the show was taped. “We used to record twenty episodes in a week and they would air them later,” Botros recalls. But in February 2008, the decision was made to go live for ninety minutes every Friday night during prime time (9 p.m.) in the Middle East. While a tape of the show was replayed multiple times throughout the week, it was the live broadcast airing on the Muslim Sabbath when families are home sitting around their televisions that changed everything. The audience grew rapidly, and so did the controversy.
“It is much more effective now,” Botros said with palpable excitement in his voice. “Now I’m in direct contact with people. They ask me questions in front of the whole Muslim world. They debate me. They challenge me. And then they accept Christ on air. Just this morning, a man named Ahmed prayed with me to become a follower of Jesus. He said, ‘I need You, God. I accept You now.’ . . . What a joy! That is why I do this.”
Directly Challenging Islam
Botros pulls no punches on the air or off. He tells Muslims what he believes is wrong with their religion, no matter how painful it may be to hear.
During a 2005 show, for example, he blasted Muslims for abusing children by telling them lies. “Children are brainwashed that Islam is the truth, that Mohammad is the last prophet, that the Christians are infidels, and that the Jews are infidels,” he said. “They repeat it constantly.”
In that same show, he blasted Islamic leaders for historically spreading their religion by violence rather than by persuasion. “Islam, as portrayed in The Encyclopedia of Islam, in the Qur’an and the Hadith, was spread by means of the sword,” Botros said on the show. “‘The sword played a major role in spreading Islam in the past, and it is the sword that preserves Islam today. Islam relies upon jihad in spreading the religion.’ This is very clear in the encyclopedia. This appears in section 11, page 3,245. It says: ‘Spreading Islam by means of the sword is a duty incumbent upon all Muslims.’ Thus, Islam is spread by means of the sword.”605
Inside the Revolution Page 45