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  • Evangelicals, the End Times, and Islam
  • Thomas S. Kidd (bio)

American evangelicals are well known for their opinions about the Jewish people and the last days. Evangelicals have been called Israel's "best friends" because of the belief that Jesus will rescue Israel and its newly converted Christian Jews at his second coming. What may not be as widely realized is how ideas about the end of days also shape many evangelicals' views of Islam. Forecasts of the apocalyptic destruction of Islam are common in certain evangelical and fundamentalist circles, as some speculate that God will miraculously defeat the Middle Eastern Muslim nations just as they rise up to attack Israel in the last days. Since September 11, 2001, some conservative writers have even begun to suggest that the Antichrist will be a Muslim.

The angry attention focused on Muslims after 2001 may have made these kinds of interpretations of biblical prophecy more common, but theological connections between Islam and the apocalypse have deep historical roots in American history. 9/11 certainly did not inaugurate American evangelicals' reflections on Islam, or their speculations about the role of Muslims in the end times. Evangelicalism's greatest theologian, the 18th-century pastor Jonathan Edwards, wrote that Roman Catholicism and Islam would both meet an abrupt end in the last days. "Those mighty kingdoms of Antichrist and Mohammed that have made such a figure for so many ages together and have trampled the world under foot, when God comes to appear will vanish away like a shadow."1 A historical survey of eschatological ideas regarding Islam reveals that, while the details have changed over time, conservative American Christians have always given Muslims a critical role in the drama of the last days.

Some readers might be surprised to know how much colonial Americans discussed Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Seventeenth-century Americans still lived mentally in a European world and were keenly aware of the military and religious challenge presented by Islam. The Ottoman Empire continued to pursue expansion into Eastern and Central Europe until the Turks lost decisively at Vienna in 1683. North African corsairs, the so-called Barbary pirates, tormented European ships and often made white Christian sailors into slaves.

Although perhaps thousands of African Muslims labored on plantations in the colonial South, most of the notions that white American Christians had regarding Islam came from widely circulated literature on Muslims, and from their own encounter with the Barbary pirates. American sailors occasionally fell prey to the Barbary pirates, generating a lively market for Barbary captivity narratives in the American port towns. Cotton Mather, one of the leading pastors in Boston, penned a tract in 1703 for a day of thanksgiving occasioned by the release of several hundred English captives from North Africa. Some of these captives were from New England and attended the thanksgiving services in Boston. Mather detailed the horrors of North African captivity, but praised the rescued prisoners for resisting the pirates' attempts to convert them to Islam. He recommended that they live out their days in thankfulness for their deliverance from the "Filthy Disciples of Mahomet."2


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From John Warner Barber, Historical Religious Events (Hartford, 1828).

The controversy surrounding Barbary piracy helped generate a broader interest in literature on Islam. Americans printed and imported hosts of books on Islam, most with a decidedly anti-Muslim slant. Among the most popular of these books was Humphrey Prideaux's biography of Muhammad, The True Nature of Imposture Displayed in the Life of Mahomet (originally published in London in 1697). The title explained Prideaux's approach: the Prophet was a fraud, especially as compared to Jesus. Prideaux reflected common opinion in Anglo-America, where the epithet "impostor" was frequently applied to Muhammad. Prideaux's biography was held in a number of American libraries by the mid-18th century, and came out in American editions after the American Revolution.

Many pastors in colonial America concurred with Jonathan Edwards in seeing Islam as a demonic force that would be extinguished in the last days. Most believed that a specific passage, Revelation 9:2-3, prophetically pointed to the historic rise of Islam. These verses, which...

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