Unleashing the Beast

70 / U NLEASHING THE B EAST

Most Muslims today believe the Jews and Christians changed the words in the Bible to suit their own ideas and beliefs. Several Muslims have told me they believe the Bible cannot be trusted because it was changed. There are so many translations, they say, so how can it be the true Word of God? Another book called the Hadith (traditions) is said to contain the teachings of Mohammed as they were put together by his followers who knew him personally and spent time with him. Fourteen hundred years after Mohammed, Islam claims about 1.5 billion followers, and is the fastest growing religion in the world. Part of this is due to the fact that a Muslim man can have five wives at a time, and they often have very large families, some with 10 to 20 children. While Muslims claim to accept the Torah, Psalms, and the four Gospels, they claim the Bible has been tahrif , meaning "corrupted or altered." Muslims believe that since Jesus himself did not write the Bible, it is not accurate. Many stories in the Koran are very different from the stories in the Bible. For example, the Bible teaches that Abraham dwelt by the trees of Mamre and built an altar there to the Lord (Genesis 13:18). In the Koran, it teaches that Abraham said, "O our Lord! I have made some of my offspring to dwell in a valley without cultivation, by thy Sacred House (Ka'ba) in order, O our Lord that they may establish regular prayers" (Sura 14:37). When asking a Muslim about this contradiction between Mamre in Hebron and Ka'ba in Arabia, a Muslim said, "The Koran in infallible. The Jews and Christians changed the Bible to make it fit themselves." This is why