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Secrets of the Koran 'A Review of Excerpts' of the Don Richardson Book Reviewed by
Don Richardson has been studying the Muslim world for more than 30 years. He is an accomplished linguist who translated the New Testament in the Stone Age tribe of Irian Jaya’s (the Sawi’s) native tongue—resulting in more than half of the tribe accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Since 1977, Don has served as Ambassador-at-Large for World Team, a mission organization. He holds an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Biola University in La Mirada, CA, and he is an ordained pastor and speaks at more than 40 church conferences each year.
In his book, Secrets of the Koran, Regal Publishers, 2003, Don Richardson compares every quote from the Koran with eight (8) English translations, lest one translator’s error would cause a misinterpretation. In his book he answers directly whether or not (1) the Koran is a book of war or of peace, and (2) Islamic strategy is for world domination. The following highlighted titles are not found in his book, but the page numbers and quotes are.
Islam’s Koran and Virgins and Heaven
Pg. 38
Was Mohammed merely an Arabian Jesse James? Or was he something far more sinister? As quotes in the next chapter show, Mohammed distributed women and girls he captured on raids to be sex slaves for his male followers. He kept some for himself, of course. Otherwise reticent pagan men were thus enticed to become Muslims.
Of course some of Mohammed’s male followers would complain that if they were killed while marauding, they would not get to enjoy the promised extra sex. Unabashed, Mohammed was ready with a shameless retort that is still taken seriously by hundreds of millions of credulous Muslim men, even in today’s world.
In the Koran, he repeatedly redefines Judeo-Christianity’s heaven as an enormous God-owned bordello in the sky. In that heavenly brothel, loyal Muslim men—especially those paying the door price of martyrdom—would find a host of virgins, called houris, who would forever satisfy all their sexual cravings (see Koran 38:51; 44:54; 55:55-74; 56:22, 34-36). In fact, sex with beautiful houris in heaven was guaranteed to be far more enjoyable than any sex Muslim men might miss by being killed while serving God or by trying to have promiscuous sex here on Earth.
If a follower complained sardonically that early martyrs would get to deflower all the virginal houris, leaving later Muslim martyrs with used goods, Mohammed had an answer for that as well. Rodwell’s translation describes the houris as “a rare creation . . . we have made them ever virgins” (Koran 56:34-36). Ahmed Ali translates “God’s” description of the houris in the same passage: “Maidens incomparable. We have formed them in a distinctive fashion, and made them virginal.”
Muslim scholars tend to find a deeper meaning behind these words. One interpretation: heavenly houris are a rare, incomparable and distinctive kind of virgin precisely because, once deflowered, they become physically virginal again for the next sex act.
Islam’s Koran and Female Genital Mutilation
Pg. 42
Islam’s widespread practice of amputating the clitoris and sometimes part or even all of the vulva from the genitalia of Muslim women, affirmed in a hadith by Mohammed himself, most likely also traces back to the founder’s deliberate abuse of sex to lure pagan males into his cult. The more the male sex drive is purposefully aroused, the more the female sex urge may have to be proportionately suppressed, lest orgiastic hell begin to spread.
Consider then what frequently happens when even a modestly clothed young Western woman walks alone in broad daylight down a street in, for example, a non-Westernized area of a city in Pakistan. Muslim men around her can see her face, hair and neck—maybe even her ankles. Some of them perceive that much exposure as intent on her part to arouse them. The fact that she is not accompanied by a male relative confirms their suspicions. Knowing that she, a Western woman, has not been subjected to that cruel amputation which Islam forces upon millions of Muslim women, some males may even imagine that she must feel sexual desire for them.
They tend also to perceive themselves as not responsible to exercise decent social restraint. Rather she is responsible not to tempt them! Whatever lewd thing Muslim men around her say, do or feel as a result is regarded as her fault alone. . . .
During a major upheaval in Indonesia in the late 1990s, sex-crazed Muslim men gang-raped dozens of Chinese women in shops, homes and even in the streets, shouting in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!)* *http://www.colorq.org/humanrights/Indonesia/Jakarta.htm (accessed August 25, 2002)
Islam’s Koran and War Verses
Pgs. 28, 29
Readers will have heard apologists for the Koran acknowledge that, yes, there are war verses in the Koran, but only a few. Every Muslim apologist hastens to add that the Koran’s sparse number of war verses relate to just a few unavoidable military crises in Islam’s early history. They assure us that no war verse was ever intended to serve as a model inciting Muslims in general to hostility against resistant non-Muslims in all ages.
What is the truth of the matter?
In fact, there are at least 109 identifiable war verses in the Koran. One out of every 55 verses in the Koran is a war verse. War verses are scattered throughout Mohammed’s chapters like blood splatter at a crime scene. I will demonstrate from Mohammed’s own words that he leaves readers in no doubt—he obviously intended his war verses to arouse Muslims to compel the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam, even by violence if necessary. Failing their conversion, Mohammed ordained that non-Muslims be killed, enslaved or—provided Islam is in full political control—heavily taxed for the advancement of Islam in perpetuity!
And yet I hesitate. Why? If I simply cite war verse after war verse after war verse from among 109 samples, many readers, seeing just the words on paper, may think it was just that—vengeful-sounding words that got written on paper but remain innocent because they did not lead to actual deeds of violence. Even Hitler’s Mein Kampf—minus World War II—could be justified by some as Adolph’s way of venting frustration. Thus I am obligated to quote Mohammed’s war verses in the context of the actual violence they either described or inspired. Violent words that trigger violent deeds cannot be dismissed as innocent ramblings.
The tragic events I describe in the next few pages are all confirmed from Muslim sources. Readers may find it odd that perpetrators of such loathsome crimes would confess them so audaciously. In fact, the violence that Mohammed inspired in his followers was so pervasive that both he and they seem to have lost all sense of how villainous the recounting of their deeds would appear to non-Muslim readers in ages to come. As the following chapter shows, they virtually brag about murdering innocents.
Islam’s Koran and Madrasas
Pgs. 69-71
The world needs to be warned. At least 40 million Muslim youth in the Muslim world’s religious schools, called madrasas, are avidly memorizing the entire Koran plus a generally extremist body of related traditions—the hadiths. In the hands of extremists—whether run by Saudi Wahabbists, Osama bin Laden’s follows or Indonesian mullahs—these schools become breeding grounds for potential terrorists. Early in the training, Muslim teachers especially focus pliable young minds on dozens of the Koran’s extremely militant war verses, plus other texts that assure paradise for Muslim martyrs. Hatred for Jews and Christians (largely synonymous with Israel and America) and general disdain for all non-Muslims (defined by Muslim instructors as the House of War) are deeply instilled. The Bible is described as corrupted. Separation of Islam from political control is despised.
When male students, isolated from family and friends in madrasas, reach puberty and their hormones are active, there are no girls to date. Instead, Muslim clerics easily shift to focusing the male students’ attention on Koranic verses that promise sex in heaven with dark-eyed houris (see chapter 3). Students can only fantasize about martyrdom followed by the sexual release Mohammed promised. This is an unspeakably cruel brainwashing technique, and the Koran is its perfect guidebook. . . .
Goldberg writes that 1 million Muslim students fill 10,000 madrasas in Pakistan alone. He concludes: “These are poor and impressionable boys kept entirely ignorant of the world and, for that matter, largely ignorant of all but one interpretation of Islam. They are perfect jihad machines.” . . . .
To grasp Buchori’s figures, consider this: If we add all the universities, colleges, high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools in the United States, we find the total is about 24,000 institutions. Yet Buchori counts 37,362 Muslim madrasas in Indonesia alone!
Islam’s Koran and Hell
Pgs. 92, 93
A reasonable reader expects Mohammed to ease eventually from such avid exploitation of his hell theme. Instead, he keeps warming to it. Of the 286 verses (277 in Rodwell) in chapter 2, 1 out of every 9.5 threatens both non-Muslims and disobedient Muslims with utter damnation.
Even in subsequent chapters, Mohammed addresses scarcely any topic without constantly interrupting himself to warn his readers about hell. Chapter 3, with 200 verses, warns of hellfire in 1 out of 7.4 verses! The 176 verses in chapter 4 follow the same course — 1 out of every 7.2 verses harps on hell. Chapter 5, with 120 verses, average 1 flame-throwing threat in every 8 verses.
Does Mohammed ever leave the subject of hell alone long enough to render even 100 average-length verses without a single hell-threat? He does not.
Rodwell’s English translation of the Koran counts 6,151 verses in its 114 chapters. Throughout, Mohammed hurls 783 threats of hellfire, wrath, eternal judgment and perdition against the by then well-singed mind of any reader who keeps reading to the end of the Koran.
That is 1 threat of hell in every 7.9 verses! (Longer verses with two or three warnings each are counted once.)
Granted, the Bible also warns against hell, but not with a frequency that shows writers obsessing on the subject. According to New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible “hell” is mentioned 31 times in the Old Testament—once for every 774 verses. Among the New Testament 7,992 verse, “hell” and the nouns “perdition” and “fire” (when “fire” means “hell,” not “zeal” or “revival”) occur 74 times. That is once for every 120 verses.
Some of Mohammed’s hell-threats target only those who disobey God. Read further and the basis for damnation widens. Anyone who rejects his claim to be a prophet or questions the divine inspiration of the Koran is also doomed to eternal flame. Anyone who refuses to go to battle for Islam or retreats from a battle for Islam draws down the same threat (see Koran 8:16 and 9:49).
Islam’s Koran and Old Testament Morals
Pgs. 133, 134
Both Talmudic Judaism and New Testament Christianity—honoring David and Solomon for their Psalms and Proverbs—nonetheless have always expected adherents in subsequent ages to live far above the personal morals of a David or a Solomon. As mentioned earlier, none of the major or minor biblical prophets—from Isaiah and Jeremiah to Malachi—are known to have used the sword, and certainly nowhere in their writings do they urge its use. A very major shift in perspective had occurred (see 1 Chronicles 22:8-9). Instead of men wielding the sword in God’s name, devout men leave the sword in God’s own hands, to be used in His way and in His time, Mohammed, however, regressed to standards even baser than David’s and Solomon’s worst deeds. As we have seen, he did so with a vengeance!
David, as recorded in Psalm 51, expressed remorse for the sins he committed against Bathsheba, her husband, Uriah, and God. Clearly David did not offer such behavior as an example. Mohammed, on the other hand, defined even his worst crimes, as weighed against biblical standards, as normative for Muslims.
One higher standard of both Talmudic Judaism and New Testament Christianity is the noble ideal of seeking to influence goodwill. In Christianity this progression to a set of standards on a higher plane is expressed remarkably in John 1:17: “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Though elements within Christendom often slipped back to pre-John 1:17 standards, thank God a flag of remarkable upward progression was planted and, thank God, that flag also is still there.
The Talmudic/New Testament reaching to a higher ideal was either completely over Mohammed’s head or was understood but scorned by him. Thus his protégés, imitating his regression to de facto book-of-Judges standards, began spreading Islam by aggression, mayhem, intrigue and military conquest.
And that is precisely the philosophy that radical Muslims wherever they gain sufficient backing or become a significant majority, feel justified implementing today.
In summary, the Koran, as many quotes in previous chapters reveal, does prescribe armed struggle, polygamy and slavery as normative for Muslims in perpetuity until Islam becomes “victorious over every other religion” (Koran 61:9). Judaism and Christianity, however, in almost every quarter of the world, have cleansed themselves from past regressions to debased, even savage standards. Yet Muslim and non-Muslim apologists for Islam constantly and ever so illogically exploit Christianity’s crusades and inquisitions—scrapped centuries ago—to justify radical Islam’s still current militancy.
Islam’s Koran and New Testament Morals
Pgs. 138, 139, 144, 145
Distinguishing Christianity from pseudo-Christianity, we recognize the latter—not Christianity—as sourcing inquisitions, crusades, the murder of Jews in sixteenth-century Germany and innocents in twentieth-century Bosnia. To accuse Christianity of advocating crimes of violence, one must first find New Testament verses that teach violence. There are none. Yet Christianity is constantly blamed for pseudo-Christianity’s violent crimes. . . .
When Jesus said “I have come to bring fire on the earth” (Luke 12:49), He was not proclaiming Himself an arsonist! Bringing spiritual fire to Earth for light, warmth and testing of spiritual qualities is not the same as setting this planet physically aflame. Jesus also said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). By this He meant an ideological sword, one that would divide people having opposite opinions about Him.
Two of Jesus’ disciples, brooding because a Samaritan village refused hospitality to Jesus and to them, glowered, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them?” (Luke 9:54). How did Jesus respond? He “turned and rebuked them [i.e., the two would-be fire-summoners] and they went to another village” (Luke 9:55-56).
One may guess—with Koranic passages on violence quoted earlier in mind—how Mohammed would have reacted.
Another time Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest” (John 18:36).
A disciple named Peter once tried to do just that—fight to defend Jesus. Peter struck a presumed enemy with his sword. Jesus immediately healed the wound Peter inflicted. He then rebuked Peter (and any who might follow his example), warning “All who draw the sword will also die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). The New Testament does agree that civil law enforcement agencies may wield the sword to protect social order in kingdoms of this world (see Romans 13:4). But not one verse in the New Testament authorizes Christians to employ physical weapons in the ministry of the Church. Christian “soldiers” fight on their knees.
How appealingly the New Testament differs from Mohammed’s onerous endorsement of violence, polygamy, slavery and the sexual exploitation of slaves. Paul the apostle, writing to his protégé Timothy in a day when polygamy was common, ruled that overseers of Christian congregations must be “above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled . . . not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money [or plunder!]” (1 Timothy 3:2-3).
Obviously Mohammed would not have qualified.
Paul’s 2,000-year-old rule that overseers of Christian congregations must set an example for monogamy initiated a social trend that led eventually to monogamy being upheld as the only legal form of marriage in all of today’s Western democracies.
Christianity has always remained content with Paul’s monogamy-for-overseers rule, which—by the power of a good example—gradually became a monogamy-for-all-Christians rule.
Critics of Christianity often claim that the New Testament—like the Koran—does not condemn slavery. But it does. In 1 Timothy 1:8-10, Paul listed lawbreakers whom God’s Old Testament law is meant to restrain. Paul’s list includes, among other wrongdoers, adulterers and slave traders.
Paul sought to counteract slavery by attacking its source—slave trading. If slave trading is abolished, slave taking, sans the incentive of financial gain, will also end. Meanwhile—until that long-term goal is accomplished—since adultery is proscribed, sex with existing slaves is also forbidden.
Paul then declared slave trading and everything else on that ignominious list as contrary not only to Old Testament law, but also to “the glorious gospel of the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11).
Islam’s Koran and Submission
Pg. 143
Lacking the image-of-God doctrine, Mohammed emphasized something else in its place—submission. The very name he gave to his new religion—Islam—means submission. Submission in Islam means submission to God, submission to Mohammed as the ultimate prophet of God, submission to the Koran as the ultimate revelation from God, submission of women to men and submission of everyone to the caliph, sultan, shah or whichever other kind of Muslim ruler is in power.
Hence the same Muslims whom Mohammed taught to fight fiercely against infidels of the house of war are taught to be docile submitters within the house of submission. The problem is that blind, unthinking submission, submission, submission—emphasized over eons of time—does not encourage clearheaded critical thinking, without which no democracy can succeed.
In a submission-focused context, what can voting mean? Dozens of Muslims nations elect parliaments, yes, but to date there is always a strong man who can demand submission from the entire body of elected officials at will. Those who refuse to submit risk assassination.
. . . A devout Muslim’s sense of his own intrinsic value, accordingly, does not rest upon recognition of God’s likeness within him. He measures it instead by the intensity of his uncritical submission to every requirement of the Koran. . . .
Islam’s Koran and World Domination
Pgs. 160-162
Mohammed could not have known the size of the world, but several passages in the Koran show that he envisioned Islam dominating all of it, however large it might be: “He it is who sent his messenger . . . that he may cause it [Islam] to prevail over all religions´(Koran 9:33, M.M. Ali; see also 48:28 and 61:9). M.M. Ali designates these three passages as “the prophecy of the ultimate triumph of Islam in the whole world.”
Mohammed’s successors, the caliphs, quoted passages like these to inspire Muslim armies as they advanced out of Arabia, imposing Islam by the sword upon a peacefully unsuspecting Middle East and North Africa, as I described in the previous chapter.
Islamic armies, imbued with what Mohammed claimed was divine authorization, imposed Islam by force over vast areas, all the while extorting wealth from subjugated Jews and Christians to fund their ongoing conquests. As I noted, major defeats at Tours, France, in A.D. 732, and again at Vienna, Austria, in A.D. 1683, halted Islam’s attempt to take all of Europe by force. Gradually Islamic forces were forced to retreat from Europe, except for part of the Balkans. But Islam has again set its sights on a conquest of Europe and of European civilization, wherever the latter has spread to North and South America and other regions. Muslim strategists ask their followers, Why do we find in these modern times that Allah has entrusted most of the world’s oil wealth primarily to Muslim nations?
Their answer: Allah foresaw Islam’s need for funds to finance a final politico-religious victory over what Islam perceives as its ultimate enemy: Christianized Euro-American civilization. So, Islam follows Nazism, fascism and communism as the world’s latest hostile takeover aspirant.
Nazis, fascists and communists failed. Does Islam have a better chance at success? I believe it will flounder if we awaken to its threat in time; yet, if there is not adequate planned resistance, Islam does have a better chance of succeeding. Communism’s world takeover attempt was guaranteed to fail because its economic policy was naively contrary to human nature. Advocating the rubric What is mine is thine, and what is thine is mine, communism failed to see that human nature will not keep those two balanced propositions in equilibrium. Like a female black widow spider consuming her mate, the latter part of the formula makes a meal of the former, leading to the collapse of any system based upon that formula.
In contrast, political systems do well if they can persuade people to adhere to What’s mine is mine and What’s thine is thine maxims.
Only if a strong religious incentive is added does such an idealistic formula have any long-term chance. Even then success will be spotty. But communism (and Nazism, for that matter) excluded religion. And that mistake was the final nail eventually clamping a lid on communism’s coffin. Communism, on a historical scale, perished while still in its childhood.
Islam is not repeating communism’s mistake. Mating political cunning and incredible wealth with religious zeal, Islam does have a chance to succeed and will succeed unless major parts of the Western world unite to take appropriate countermeasures. But many Western leaders, unable to believe that a mere religion could possible be a serious political threat, keep proclaiming themselves as Islam-friendly, reasoning that all religions are good-aren’t they?
A Muslim strategist in Beverly Hills, California, declared several years ago, as quoted by a friend of mine: “Now that the struggle between Western democracies and international communism is winding down, it is time for the real and final struggle to begin, and we are going to win!”
When will people realize that just as there are good doctors and quacks, good cops and rogue cops, there can also be good religions and bad religions?
www.bibleone.net Editor’s Note: Other fascinating, if not startling, passages in Don Richardson’s book depicts Islam’s key strategies for world domination, e.g. (1) Exploit Massive Immigration—Legal and Illegal—of Muslims into Western Nations, (2) A Behind-the-Scenes Takeover [the worldwide takeover of parliamentary forms of government], (3) Widening Islamic Influence [the influencing of political leaders to achieve Islamic objectives], (4) A Multibillion Dollar International Mosque-Construction and Koran-Translation Program; (5) Infiltrate Christian Colleges and Churches Expressly to Seduce Christian Women. And what is most effective, (6) Islam’s Penetration of Western Culture—the inroads of Muslim controlled oil-dollars in the establishment of departments of Islamic studies in Western universities and colleges—an on-going program with great success.
www.bibleone.net Editor’s Conclusion: It is totally a misinterpretation that today’s terrorists are an outlaw or renegade group who has “high jacked” a “peaceful religion.” Islam, by order of the Koran, has at its heart the destruction (death) of all ideologies and peoples that do not conform to its teachings. It will never stop until it achieves this end. Furthermore, its brainwashing techniques throughout the world are far superior to any present efforts by the United States to defeat Islamic terrorism. Islam (not just the “terrorist”) is one of gravest, if not the most gravest, threat to Christians in these “last days” prior to the return of Jesus Christ to rapture His bride—the Church. As a Christian, don’t be fooled by it!
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