When Edward Gibbon introduced the prophet Muhammad in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he observed that
the rise of Islam was “one of the most memorable revolutions, which have impressed a new and lasting character on the nations of the globe.” Gibbon saw that Islam did not just inaugurate a religious revolution. Its unparalleled expansion changed the course of history by altering the map of the world.
No event was as consequential to Christianity in the 600-700's as the rise of Islam. Islam rose with great swiftness and disruption. In the span of less than a hundred years after its founding, Arab commanders made their way from the edge of Egypt along the North Africa until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. From the Arabian Peninsula they also advanced northeast through Persia and across the Asian steppes to India.
Within the space of a century, the movement inaugurated by the prophet Muhammad had planted a permanent political and religious rival to Christianity in historic Christian lands. Its advance both to the West and to the East meant that a large part of the globe was claimed for Islam, fulfilling the words of the
Qur’an: “We appointed you successors on the earth after them.”
By the year 750, a hundred years after the conquest of Jerusalem, at least 50 percent of the world’s Christians found themselves under Muslim hegemony. In some regions, most notably North Africa, Christianity went into precipitous decline. At the time of the Arab
conquest there were more than three hundred bishops in the area, but by the tenth century Pope Benedict VII could not find three bishops to consecrate a new bishop. Today there is no indigenous Christianity in the region, no communities of Christians whose history can be traced to antiquity. Though originally conquered by the sword, most of the subject peoples eventually embraced the religion of their conquerors.
By the eleventh century, however, Christianity had begun a long demographic decline in its eastern homeland, and, carried by the militancy of the Turks, Islam resumed its relentless drive westward. The end of the eleventh century also marked the beginning of the First Crusade.
Consider some statistics. In the eleventh century, the population of Asia Minor was almost wholly Christian. By the sixteenth century, Muslims constituted 92 percent of the population. During those centuries, the Church lost most of its property, its ecclesiastical structures were dismantled, and its bishops prohibited from caring for their dioceses. At the beginning of the period, there were f
our hundred bishops; by the end, 97 percent had been
eliminated.
Most of the territories that were Christian in the year 700 are now Muslim. Nothing similar has happened to Islam. Christianity seems like a rain shower that soaks the earth and then moves on, whereas Islam appears more like a great lake that constantly overflows its banks to inundate new territory. When Islam arrives, it comes to stay—unless displaced by force, as it was in Spain.
Nothing from its earliest years has changed. Islam is still a religion bent on conquest.
One principle in preaching and receiving the word is found in the Lord's parable of the sower. While the sower sowed, some seeds fell beside the way, some on the rocky place, some into the thorns, and some into the good earth. This shows us four different ways for man to receive the word. The Lord Jesus tells us that among these different conditions, one is the rocky place. There is a little earth on the surface, but underneath there are rocks. When the seed falls into this kind of ground, it springs up quickly, but as soon as the sun comes out, it withers because of the lack of root. What is a root? It is growth that occurs beneath the soil. What are the leaves? They are growth that occur above the soil. In other words, roots are the hidden life, whereas leaves are the manifest life.
The trouble with many Christians is that, while there is much apparent life, there is very little secret life. In other words, there is the lack of a hidden life. You have been a Christian for a number of years, have you not? Then let me ask: How much of your life is hidden from view? How much is unknown to others? You stress outward works, Yes, good works are important; but apart from that manifest expression of your life, how much of your life remains hidden: If all your spiritual life is exposed, you do not have any root. Are all your virtues before God manifested before man, or is there something more that is unknown to man? If all your experiences are manifested, then all your growth is upward; there is no downward growth. If this is the case, you are a person who has only leaves without root, and you are on shallow ground.
Then came Moses like a towering light in chaotic darkness. Alone in the midst of all of the cultures of the world he taught monogamous covenental marriage. Sexual energy was to be channeled through marriage, alone. Out of this direction came two consequences: 1) Women achieved equality with men in marriage. They became partners. No longer was a man to have a house maid who primary purpose was to fulfill his sexual gratifications. A woman is to be an equal marriage partner. 2) The ideal social unit became centered in the family. Life then becomes more directed by real and objective love. Not love as we wish it would be for "me" but love as it really needs to be--for the "benefit of the other." 
Further men and women, though equal, are not identical. Their very differences are important to the very nature of what love is to be. (The great English journalist G.K. Chesterton once marveled during his first long stay in America, that Americans can seek divorce “on the grounds of incompatibility.” “I would have thought,” he commented dryly, “that incompatibility is the reason for marriage.”)
