Robert Morey and Faith Defenders

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Lots of books have been written recently about Islam by mostly western writers who are acknowledged as experts on Islam. Others are busy conducting radio and television interviews, setting up panels, and even debates about Islam, without stopping to weigh their own knowledge, background, expertise, credentials and preparedness on the subject. Consequently, we have an avalanche of misconceptions, misrepresentations, and harmful teachings being propagated to Christians about Islam under the guise of training for enlightenment and outreach. Most of these 'experts' really became experts by consulting a book or two on Islam by other western writers without themselves having a decent knowledge of Islam, its history, beliefs, practices, and above all, its language, Arabic, the language of its own sacred scripture, the Quran! I recently had the chance to hear one such 'expert' on an interview on a local Christian station. I was stunned and shocked by both the content and attitude of what he had to say! I could hardly believe my ears! There he was employing all kinds of misrepresentation of Islam, Muhammad, and the Quran, when all the while he presented himself as one exposing the truth in order to win Muslims and educate Christians. He made false and ignorant accusations, and tried to justify them by misquoting texts from the Quran, quoting others without regard to their context, and bluntly misinterpreting and distorting others still! He did the same to the theology of Islam, its history, and its language of Arabic! Now, of course, those who heard him who knew nothing about islam, were no doubt held captive by all the 'knowledge' that he portrayed not knowing that very little if any of what he said could be trusted as being a fair representation of Islamic beliefs! He had also written a book about the subject and proceeded to point every caller to the riches of his book gloating over that fact that people like Brother Andrew, Richard Wurmbrand, and others were using it! So I got his book and found it to be full of the same errors, if not worse, that I heard him make on the radio. I will proceed to list some of his major misrepresentations first, then I will list some errors of another book by another author, trusting that they will act as model for all misrepresentations, misconceptions, and harmful teachings out there, so that you as Christians worker can know what to avoid. Since this work has to do with what they wrote and not with who they are, I will not mention the names of the authors, but I will mention the titles of the two books. The first is ''Islamic Invasion - Confronting The World's Fastest Growing Religion.''

Other books are not so helpful. Robert Morey's popular book The Islamic Invasion  cannot be your accurate guide about Muhammad. Morey often writes with great care (as in Death and the Afterlife ) but this particular work is faulty. Through Morey claims that he has read every book in the Library of Congress about Islam (more than 7,000 titles!), there is little in his book that gives evindence of that incredible claim. Morey overstates the evils in Muhammad's life, misunderstands him and levesl many of his judgements without proper moderation.

A Christian acquaintance proudly handed me a copy of a book entitled The Moon-god Allaah in the Archeology of the Middle East by Dr.Robert Morey.

I found the author using a number of deceptive tactics to prove his foregone conclusion that Allaah is not the God of the Bible but rather the Moon-god of pre-Islamic Arabia whose worship is now perpetuated within Islam. I will classify his deceptive methods under five broad headings for simplicity of discussion.

• Misquoting authorities.
• Concealing evidence.
• Filling pages with irrelevant information thus giving a false impression of establishing something.
• Using logical fallacies to establish conclusions, and
• Drawing conclusions for which no evidence was even suggested, much less established.

CALLER: Because ... see, the thing is, is that thee is a theologist (a well respected theologian) that you guys also like that said that he made an exclusive investigative special report that reveals the heretical nature of Boyd's theology -- and I don't know what that means -- I sent for that -- HANK: Well, anybody that would say that is probably not someone that we would recommend --

CALLER: Well, you'd be surprised, brothers -- you want me to mention his name on the air?

HANK: Well, I don't really care, it doesn't make any difference to us. But, I'm just saying that someone that does that has to be someone that is not able to rightly divide what is being written in this book _Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity_ . We've had it gone over not only internally by our research staff, but also many other outside theologians who are at the very top of their field -- orthodox, biblical Christians -- they don't find any problems with it. There is one man, someone that we would not recommend at all, who did something which you should never do even if you're dealing with a cultist, and that is, you should never take them out of context. This particular individual took Gregory Boyd out of context over twenty two times and had him say the exact opposite, in some case, of what he actually said. This is not the kind of scholarship that we would recommend in any way.

KEN: It's not scholarship -- this was a terrible situation of really taking things and putting them in a different context in which they did not belong. Robert Bowman is a real scholar when it comes to the area of Jehovah's Witnesses, when it comes to the area of Oneness Pentecostalism. He's gone over this book and given it not only a clean bill of health, but says that it is an excellent book. Bob and Gretchen Passantino have worked in the area of cults for over twenty years -- they give it a thumbs up. This book is a very fine tool and the person who has ridiculed it, in my opinion, clearly has shown himself not to be a scholar in these areas.

CALLER: Because, again, the gentleman that I -- I have the thing here and he's a well respected theologian and he's very, very, I mean, and uh --

HANK: Well, I don't know how you know he's a well respected theologian but --

CALLER: Okay, Okay, Mayby I shouldn't read it, but maybe I should read it on the air. I don't know who wrote this thing here, but the newsletter is _The Researcher_ and it says [unreadable] says ''In an exclusive investigative special report, Dr. Morey.'' Dr. Robert Morey, ''reveals the heretical nature of Boy'd theology. And I don't know if Dr. Robert Morey wrote this or someone else from his staff wrote this --

HANK: Well, we will hope and pray that he did not pen those words himself because it is one of the -- as Robert Bowman has articulated -- one of the worst pieces of scholarship that we have seen. In fact, I think, Ken, you made the statement that you have been in countercult ministry for many, many years, you've taught Comparative Religions on a college level, a university level -- and you've never seen anything that was as shoddy from a scholarship point of view. So it's probably the worse thing we've ever seen.

KEN: I was literally shocked when I saw how this individual misrepresented another Christian's work, it was literally shocking. And again, Greg Boyd -- you know Greg Boyd's come along way he used to be a member of the United Pentecostal Church, he is a person that attended Princeton Seminary and now he has become a fine Christian man, a man who has a great love for the gospel --

HANK: And even if he was a heretic that's one thing, but don't take him out of context -- that's dishonest and not very scholarly. That's all we'll say about it. We don't want to dignify it with any more airtime.