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| Dr. Aila Tasse |
A few years ago, I spent ten days in Indonesia with Ray Bakke and a group of fellow graduate students from Bakke Graduate University. During our stay, Ray pointed out that Islam did not come to Indonesia through Muslim clerics. It came through business and trade.
Of all nations on earth, Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims. About 86% of Indonesia (nearly 200,000,000 people) claim to follow Islam.
Michael Baer, in Business As Mission, wrote: “I once asked an Indonesian Christian why the country had become so predominantly Muslim…She said that when the Western Christians came...they built missionary compounds and missionary churches and expected the Indonesian people to come to them. The Muslims, on the other hand, came as traders, farmers, merchants, and businesspeople and simply lived among the natives.”
Dr. Darrell Furgason, an expert in Islamic studies, says: “In places like Africa and Indonesia, the church has been intellectually crippled, with one hand tied behind its back. Western missionaries generally brought the Gospel in the way they learned it, as a purely soul-saving faith, with no real bearing on anything else—religion was a mostly personal matter, nothing to do with things like politics, science, law, economics….African people were given the Gospel, but not how to build a righteous nation, how to apply Christianity to everything….Muslims see their faith as all-encompassing…”
One of my fellow graduate students on the study trip to Indonesia was an African by the name of Aila Tasse. We became friends. Aila told me that Islam is spreading in Africa through business. He further said something sobering, when he told me, "the Muslims are winning."
When I returned from Indonesia, I called Aila by phone and asked permission to record our conversation. Some months later, when I was in Kenya, speaking at a conference of Christian educators, I played Aila's comments for the Africans to whom I was speaking. They were from Uganda, Nigeria and Sudan. I asked them if they concurred with Aila's report. Without hesitation, they all replied: "Yes! Absolutely! He is 100% correct!"
I urge you to take 2 1/2 minutes to listen to Aila's report for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJppIj-Fnmc