A Wind in the House of Islam (David Garrison)
The Dar al-Islam or House of Islam, is the vast collection of people and nations who share the Islamic faith. It reaches from West Africa to Indonesia and is populated by well over a billion adherents to Islam, many of whom have never heard the Gospel and never will hear the Gospel directly preached in their lifetime. As well as being vast and often unreached, the House of Islam has proven very resistant to the evangelistic efforts of Christians since its foundation by Mohammed some 1500 years ago. In this book, David Garrison, an American missionary and author who has studied Islam and spent many years living among Muslims, seeks to assess the movement of Muslims to Christ across history.
For the sake of clarity, he first defines a movement to Christ as at least 100 new church plants or 1000 newly baptised believers in a particular region. Using this criteria, he identified that up to the end of the 19th century, only two such movements appear to have occurred in the Islamic world, despite decades and centuries of missionary endeavour; yes, smaller scale conversions had occurred but there was little of evidence of great strides being made. The main thrust of Garrison’s book though, is that in the first 12 years of the 21st century, unprecedented movements to Christ were seen in the House of Islam, with almost 70 reported which meet the criteria for a large-scale movement as defined above. Garrison explores some of the stories behind these movements and has interviewed converts and missionaries to give an insight into why and how God seems to be bringing millions of Muslims to faith in Christ, even in the most dangerous and fundamentalist ‘rooms’ in the House of Islam.
Garrison’s book is very interesting and he provides compelling evidence that there really is something happening in the Islamic world. This book is really a survey of the available data about movements of people and so could come across as a little dry to some, though Garrison writes well and provides large numbers of human stories to breathe life into the facts and figures. In the doom and gloom surrounding Islam, especially in the Middle East at the moment, this book is a timely reminder that God can and does work in the darkest and most unlikely places. This book will also fuel your prayers for the House of Islam as there is still obviously so much more work to be done and even with these massive movements taking place, hundreds of millions of Muslims remain unreached by the Gospel, both abroad and increasingly much nearer to home.
