Islam appears to be winning battle for souls, but trends point to demise

By Michael Ashcraft –

About 100,000 are added to Islam every year in America, according to Pew Research from 2017, and there are reports of mosques full of converts in Britain (reportedly 5,000-10,000 a year convert in the UK).

These growth rates suggest that Islam is beating Christianity in the battle for souls. But they are a current snapshot that fails to take into account significant forecasts. There are trends that suggest that 1) as easily as they convert to Islam, they can leave it, and that 2) the collapse of Islam is imminent from research currently being conducted in archaeology and textual criticism.

“I think we really need to see Islam stopped in our lifetime – not Muslims but Islam,” says Dr. Jay Smith, who foresees the internal collapse.

Why are there so many converts to Islam? What is the appeal?

A large percentage of the converts are women, which is surprising given that Islam is not famous for women’s rights and feminism.

But ex-Muslim Harris Sultan says women are becoming disillusioned with modernism and unstable men. They open themselves to something completely different with the hopes that it works better, but they don’t usually research Islam much before tying the knot.

“A lot of women says, ‘My life is so bad in the West. I had my heart broken by that guy, by that guy, by that guy. I going to try a more conservative religion,’” says Harris, who lives in Australia. “If he doesn’t let me go out, if he puts me in these bean bags, at least he’s not going to be ——– around.’

“Little does she know that he can have three more wives, and if they were living in any other era, he could have had multiple sex slaves as well,” adds Harris on his YouTube channel.

Frustration with modernism and the elusiveness of success may also be driving men into Islam.

“It’s perfect for a specific audience,” says Sam Harris on a Chris Williamson YouTube video. “It’s an explicitly macho religion. With Islam there’s an expectation and an imperative that they’re going to conquer the world. If you take this far and become a jihadist, you’re a kind of spiritual James Bond. You get to be Jocko and get to go to Paradise.”

Recently, kick boxer Andrew Tate, a hero for the incel movement, converted very publicly to Islam. An influencer with 11.6 billion views of his TikTok videos, Tate may have prompted untold admirers to follow suit.

“Andrew Tate is symptomatic of so many young converts that we have in Britain,” says Dr. Jay Smith, who has made his career debating the leading authorities of Islam. The converts say, “Islam is the only religion that makes any sense to me because it’s black and white. I feel much more comfortable in that type of environment.”

Conclusion? Atheism has not filled the void of growing churchlessness with science and rationalism, as it wanted. People feel disappointed in the modern world and are flocking to something new and exotic, which claims to hold ultimate truth.

How many converts research before committing to Islam?

Probably the majority of people who take the plunge don’t bother to check the temperature of the water first. If they did, they might find that Mohammad approved of slave trafficking and slave hold, he married a 6-year-old girl, he urged men marry four wives and rape women as part of the spoils of war. Among many other things.

Bob of Speaker’s Corner, a Christian debater who uploads his skirmishes from Hyde Park in London on YouTube, recently engaged a new convert to Islam, who said he didn’t support slavery. When told that Mohammad did, he appeared to know nothing about it.

The young man was flanked by Muslim friends who tried to defend him, even accusing Chris of lying.

Will he remain Muslim?

Then there’s a YouTuber who calls himself Sheikh Ifoff (Homonym: Shake it off). “Sheikh Itoff is a convert to Islam who did no research prior to his conversion,” his channel says. “Follow his adventures as he starts reading through Islam’s most trusted sources and finds out what it really teaches.”

His 42 videos so far are devastating to Islam. The describe in the most palpable disgust the unsavory truths of Mohammad the Warlord. They even present the prophet in cartoon fashion, a grievous offense against Islam. It is evident that Sheikh Itoff is warning others to not fall prey.

Nuriyah Kahn, a London-born British Pakistani, met and fell in love with a handsome guy from United Arab Emirates. She married and moved there, thus falling under legal jurisdiction of the UAE. The marriage turned abusive. When she tried to divorce, she very nearly was forced by UAE law and police to return to her husband’s house.

Nuriyah narrowly escaped UAE. She’s now an atheist called “Holy Humanist” on YouTube and exposes the misogyny of her former religion.

Katrina, who calls herself “Christian Princess,” was a European working Abu Dhabi, UAE, in a saloon. She met a man but didn’t marry. Her channel name says it all: “Before You Say I do to a Muslim.”

“Islam is something different,” Katrina says.

An American convert, Ishmael preached, promoted and studied Islam for 16 years. He even learned Arabic. Ultimately he left Islam because of Mohammad’s endorsement of rape, a fact he demonstrates from the Koran and the hadiths. His channel: “Seeking Allah, Finding Jehovah.”

“Our police, militaries and secret intelligence agencies are not enough to stop the spread of radical Islam,” Ishmael says. “We also need a strong education and research to confront Islam at its ideological roots.”

Pew Research showed that 24% of Muslims in the West (frequently the younger generation) abandon Islam. If the Muslims who face the death sentence for apostasy in Islam are not afraid to leave the religion of their fathers, how much quicker will Western-born converts when get shocked by cold hard facts?

Impending demise of Islam from Archaeology and Textual Criticism

There are egregious practices and beliefs that emerge with just superficial research. But in the background, coming from Academia, a tsunami of doubt is forming. It hasn’t trickled down to the public yet, and the best minds of Islam are working feverishly to squelch it.

It’s coming from archaeology and textual criticism.

For centuries, archaeologists have puzzled over a smattering of qiblas (the markers in mosques for which way to pray) that don’t point to Mecca, the supposed birthplace and the center of Islam. While it struck them odd, they chalked it up to lack of cardinal finesse from the ancients.

Then Dr. Dan Gibson examined the question more thoroughly. By visiting hundreds of mosques and unearthing their original designs, he found that qibla from the first 100 years of mosque-building point to Petra.

During the next 100 or so years during which there was a power struggle between the Umayyads (based in Damascus near Petra) and the Abbasids in the Hejaz (based in Central Arabia where Mecca is), qiblas point all over the place: some to Petra, some to Mecca, some halfway in between, and some in parallel.

The conjecture? Muslims around the world didn’t know who would win the power struggle and had their choice. From 876 AC on, they all point to Mecca.

His research has been strenuously criticized. Just check Wikipedia and the number of websites that pop up if you do a Google search.

A Canadian scholar, Shabir Ally, the most reasonable and best behaved Muslim apologist, offers a lame observation. First he calls Gibson a “fringe” researcher and urges people to stick with the bulk of academics.

This response is wrong-headed on two accounts. First, it is the fallacy called “band-wagon.” Second it ignores how research works: a researcher challenges established notions with bonafide science, his notions aren’t immediately accepted, but if his findings are genuine his theory eventually becomes accepted.

Shabir Ally, at best, is buying time for Muslims. If Gibson is correct, one of the foundations of Islam crumbles. If Mecca wasn’t the original center of Islam, the faithful have been lied to and Saudi Arabia loses its status as protector and promoter of Islam.

Now about textual criticism, the science that devastated Christianity in Western Europe but eventually affirmed the vast majority of the Bible. “The Bible has passed every test we’re asking of the Koran,” Dr. Jay Smith says.

The first strike against Koranic authority came with the revelation that there are at least 37 different versions. Hatun Tash, a convert to Christianity, has dedicated her life to this question and traveled across Northern Africa and the Middle East to locate and purchase ancient copies.

She and Dr. Jay Smith held them up at Speaker’s Corner to expose the myth that the Koran has been perfectly preserved by Allah without a change, previously a significant point of contention for retaining Muslims and proselytizing.

The event caused quite a stir. To quiet the underground grumblings, Mohammed Hijab live-streamed an interview with Islam’s preeminent expert Yassar Qadhi in Houston. The live-stream backfired spectacularly. Instead of defining the best Koran, Qadhi acknowledged “holes in the narrative.” It was the first time a Muslim scholar conceded publicly. Mohammed Hijab removed the video from his YouTube.

Why remove the video? Was it because it was too damaging? Can Islam not tolerate facts emerging from academics?

But now something even more devastating is coming. Daniel Brubaker is publishing never-done-before research showing erasures and edits done on ancient manuscripts of the Koran in museums around the world. He has published a book of 20 such edits, and more are forthcoming.

This is more than scholarly minutia. It is the credibility of the Koran. For years, Muslims bragged about the superiority of the Koran based on unaltered transmission and purity worldwide. Facts are catching up with them.

Islamic scholars are scrambling to shut down the news. A Google search produces dozens of entries that crowd out Dr. Brubaker’s work (Google’s search listings are manipulatable; people with money can unduly influence them).

Dr. Brubaker’s academic integrity is being challenged. They say he doesn’t know Arabic, an accusation he classifies as “absurd. I could not have gotten to where I am and defended by doctorate successfully without knowing Arabic,” he says.

Yassar Qadhi wrote Brubaker an email that Brubaker shared on his YouTube channel three years ago: “You seem to be agenda-driven. I find it very repugnant that you seem to be spoon-feeding well-known Islamophobes and Christian apologists who lack both genuine knowledge and integrity. Anyone who conflates personal theological agendas with genuine scholarship eventually fails.”

Brubaker responded to the attack that the only germane question was if his research was important and true. He’s a researcher first and foremost, he says. The fact that Islamic polemicists like Dr. Jay Smith and Dr. David Wood have picked up on his studies doesn’t make him partisan.

“I realize that the substance of what I’m doing is potentially disruptive of people’s worldview and the things they believe and hold dear. I’m sympathetic to that,” Brubaker said in response. “Usually an ad hominen attack come when someone thinks there’s no substantive way of winning the argument.”

The findings of Brubaker and Gibson will take time to trickle out to the public. What will happen when Muslims find out that both Mecca and the Koran are seriously in doubt?

So what about raw statistical evidence then?

Mark Twain famously said, “There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars and statisticians.”

The reader must be careful of cherry-picked statistics on hype videos.

The same Pew Research group citing conversion to Islam also said of Europe, the supposed hotbed of Muslim conversion: “Religious switching is estimated to be a small factor in Muslim population change, with roughly 160,000 more people switching away from Islam than converting into the faith during this period.”

In other words, no avalanche of Islam is coming from conversion. Birth rates is a different matter, as Muslims tend to have more children than Christians and than “nones.”

Statistics tell you numbers based on current scenarios. Trends, if identified correctly, suggest foreseeable changes to those current scenarios.

The Christian debaters who weekly go to Speaker’s Corner to debate Islam report something strange: they currently can’t find anyone willing to debate them from Islam. Why? The debates are filmed, and if you lose, it’s a hit for your side. The Muslim debaters don’t know how to answer the skilled and knowledgeable Christians.

Are they indirectly admitting defeat?

“We’re not against Muslims. We just want to invite them home (to Christianity),” says Dr. Jay Smith. “Their faith in God is beautiful. They just have the wrong God, they’ve got the wrong history, they’ve got the wrong prophet, they’ve got the wrong book.”

To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.

Related articles: 

• 37 Korans prove the Koran has NOT been perfectly preserved
• Mrs. Apostate converts to Christ
• Queers for Palestine?
• Muslims practice polygamy even in the West
• Jay Smith
• Hatun Tash
• David Wood

About this writer: Michael Ashcraft pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.