Source: Mission Network News, June 19, 2023
A senior cleric made waves in Iran earlier this month by saying Islam was weak. Roughly two-thirds of Iran’s mosques have closed, he said—a “worrying admission” for a state built around the principles of Islam.
Tom Doyle of Uncharted Ministries says it’s part of a broader trend. “There’s just not that general excitement, that fervency to spread Islam that we saw when we started going to the Middle East 25 years ago,” he explains.
“We see tolerance for it. In places like the Gaza Strip, people are forced to make that the issue. For at least ten years, we’ve seen attendance [declining] in mosques, and many Muslims, especially young ones, becoming agnostic.”
Additionally, “we’ve been privileged to go into Iran a couple of times, and [in] the mosques that we visited, we didn’t see any young people; just a bunch of old people, and there weren’t that many of them. We saw the same thing in Syria, in Iraq,” Doyle says.
“I think we’re seeing the collapse of Islam.”
You could say the same about Christianity in America. Church attendance is down across denominations. However, Muslims in the Middle East are not only turning away from Islam. Many are turning to Jesus.
Editor’s note: We think it’s too soon to predict Islam’s collapse, but see another opinion piece about Christianity growing in unexpected places and describing why the author thinks it’s happening now (World).