Margins of Islam: Ministry in Diverse Muslim Contexts

Islam is a kaleidoscope of expressions shaped by different cultures. Local spiritisms flavor people’s connections with the supernatural. Political histories and ideologies carve out other emphases. And all of these patterns are in flux, since change never stops. Lifelong learning is required from those who want to understand Islam. This book presents diverse Muslim lifestyles and worldviews in a readable, accessible, interesting form. Beyond description, authors explore particular bridges for communicating the gospel in various unique contexts. For updating and expanding one’s knowledge, for interacting with creative minds, and for general enrichment, this book is a treasure.

—Miriam Adeney, PhD

associate professor of world Christian studies, Seattle Pacific University,

author of Kingdom Without Borders: The Untold Story of Global Christianity

Here are fourteen missiological case studies, written by practitioners who have lived for many years in a wide variety of Islamic contexts all over the world, and have wrestled with what it means to live out and communicate the Christian message. They take us far beyond simple theories about contextualization, and using all the skills of anthropology and sociology, help us to understand an extraordinary variety of different expressions of Islam. This book raises huge questions about how we should understand Islam, how we should teach Christians about Islam, and how we should communicate with Muslims. While it doesn’t provide neat answers, it’s a model of what’s involved in reflecting seriously on long-term Christian engagement with Muslims.

—Colin Chapman

visiting lecturer, Arab Baptist Theological Seminary

Margins of Islam sweeps away the reductionistic, yet pervasive, assumption that Islam is the same everywhere. As someone who has ministered to Turkic and Asian Muslims outside of the Arab world, this book is particularly helpful for me. Along with insightful explanations of different Islams from around the world, this volume provides a conceptual framework that will help readers understand and engage Muslims in any context.

—Jayson Georges

author of The 3D Gospel and HonorShame.com

Humans and human societies are complex, yet simple categories too often frame our missiology and mission approaches, missing the changing, hybrid, at times puzzling realities of life. Margins of Islam breaks this pattern, exploring diversity of expression across multiple settings in which Muslims live out their faith. Its missiological proposals offer a significant—and needed—contribution, intended for those who love and serve among Muslims, but with insights to be applied in numerous other settings.

—David Greenlee, PhD

author and missiologist

director of missiological research and evaluation for Operation Mobilization

Water is H2O. But for the scuba diver, or surfer or marine biologist, it is much more. Is Islam confined to its creed and dogma? Those who swim in its waters experience it as much more. The authors invite us to dive among the coral reefs of Islam, observe its rich colors and bio-diversity, and feel the force of its currents and breakers. Rather than reducing Islam to a system of beliefs, they urge us towards incarnation—the risky venture of getting to know Muslims. Hybridity and liminality are the new buzz-words, but since its inception, Islam has intermingled with worldviews and cultures around the globe. This volume patiently unveils that reality, inviting Jesus-followers to encounter Muslims where they live, as they live. Thanks to Farah and Daniels for confronting us with the diversity of global Islam and implications for Christians who engage with it.

—Mike Kuhn, PhD

assistant professor, Arab Baptist Theological Seminary author of Fresh Vision for the Muslim World

Sixteen different scholar-practitioners illustrate how Muslims use and shape Islam to build distinctive worldviews and ways of life, and how a presentation of the gospel works best when it is grounded in the fabric of their social and emotional life. The critical contribution of this volume is the seminal idea of adaptive missiology—a missiology that begins with the assumption that each people group is so distinctive that no one religious system (i.e. Islam) can adequately define the nature of a local worldview and way of life. Therefore, a presentation of the gospel in each context requires personal relationship and learning essential to discern the local values, habits of life, and idolatries that characterize this particular expression of Islam, before a unique and sufficient message of the Cross of Christ is proclaimed. This is an exceptional contribution to conversations on the global mission of the church to Muslims, and a must read for anyone engaged in such ministry.

—Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, PhD

senior professor of anthropology, provost emeritus, Fuller Theological Seminary

I so enjoyed Margins of Islam. With numerous missiological insights in each article, this book is a bounty of practical wisdom. It challenges reductionist views—both of the gospel and of ministry to Muslims. Praise God for this crucial contribution to the global conversation on ministry in the Muslim context.

—Werner Mischke, DD

author of The Global Gospel

In the venerable tradition of Clifford Geertz who taught us decades ago that Muslims in Java and Muslims in Morocco believed the same things about God and humanity yet practiced their faith in radically different ways, editors Gene Daniels and Warrick Farah have gathered together sixteen mission workers to Muslim peoples who extrapolate Geertz’s fundamental insight to mission practice. The result is a book of invaluable wisdom about doing Christian mission in Islamic contexts.

—Terry C. Muck, PhD

scholar of religion, comparative missiologist, and theological educator

co-author of Christianity Encountering World Religions

Contrary to persistent stereotypes, Islam is not monolithic and unchanging. Here—at last!—is a book that takes seriously the bewildering diversity among Muslims worldwide and explores responsibly the missiological implications of these diverse contexts. This is a terrific book which deserves a wide readership.

—Harold Netland, PhD

professor of philosophy of religion and intercultural studies, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

As long as Muslims are outside of saving faith in Jesus Christ, there is need for a flow of writings on how to reach them. In recent years there have been a plethora of books written on the topic. Why another? some skeptically may ask. Because this collaborative volume brings to us both balance and up-to-date cutting edge missiological observations on the world of Islam in a fresh way. This book will quickly become a standard textbook for understanding the varied dynamics of this non-monolithic religion.

—Marvin J. Newell, DMiss

senior vice president of Missio Nexus

years of service among Muslim-majority peoples in Indonesia

Our world is comprised of a Muslim mosaic, not a monolithic Islam. The religion may have its pillars, but radically different expressions. Daniels and Farah have done a great service in the Kingdom by reminding us of this fact! Margins of Islam takes readers on a global journey revealing the multiple expressions of the Islamic faith. This book gives us solid evidence of what we have known, but seldom allowed to influence our mission practices. We no longer have any excuse to train others to reach all Muslims in the same way. This book challenges us to know our contexts and allow such insight to shape contextualized strategies and methodologies.

— J. D. Payne, PhD

pastor, missiologist, podcast host, blogger, and author of Apostolic Church Planting

Margins of Islam is an extraordinary collection of articles that points to the inappropriateness of a simplistic analysis of the rich diversity in global Islam, while providing windows into how serious Christians might engage Muslims with dignity, honor, and grace. The seasoned experience of the contributors from a wide variety of contexts provides a depth of reflection that makes this collection a rich resource for missional engagement in the contemporary world.

—Perry Shaw, EdD

professor of education, Arab Baptist Theological Seminary three decades of ministry in the Middle East, author of Transforming Theological Education

As children we often prefer neatly divided plates to keep the apple sauce out of the peas. As we grow up, we give up our desire for clear boundaries between the food groups and learn to enjoy a good biriyani mixed full of grains, vegetables, spices, and yes, fruits and nuts. Likewise, the global diversity of Muslims stubbornly resists our attempts to label and categorize. Margins of Islam helps us learn to witness for Christ within a fluid Muslim world while discontinuing our over-reliance on externally defined juxtapositions.

—Keith E. Swartley

editor of Encountering the World of Islam

In a marvelous tour de force, Margins of Islam exposes the widely held, but false assumption that the house of Islam is a monolithic religious entity which either resists or responds to missiological strategies. Collectively, these authors offer up case studies and rich and textured on the field experience which reflects the true variegated diversity of Islam. This book is contextual missiology at its finest.

—Timothy C. Tennent, PhD

president, Asbury Theological Seminary, professor of World Christianity

This text is a masterful collection of representative examples of various types of Muslims around the world and aspects of the gospel that resonate with their concerns be they Sufi, secular, ethnic, Western, youth, or other types of Muslims. Every witness to them should profit from it.

—J. Dudley Woodberry, PhD

dean emeritus and senior professor of Islamic Studies

School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary

Margins of Islam: Ministry in Diverse Muslim Contexts

© 2018 by Gene Daniel and Warrick Farah

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Published by William Carey Publishing

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Digital Ebook Release 2018

ISBN’s: 978-0-87808-066-3 (paperback)

978-0-87808-067-0 (mobi)

978-0-87808-068-7 (epub)

Melissa Hicks, managing editor

Andrew Sloan, copyeditor

Mike Riester, cover and interior design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Daniels, Gene, 1963- editor.

Title: Margins of Islam: missiology in diverse Muslim contexts /

Gene Daniels and Warrick Farah, editors; foreword by David Garrison.

Description: Littleton: William Carey Publishing, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018040957| ISBN 9780878080663 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780878080687 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Missions to Muslims. | Islam.

Classification: LCC BV2625 .M2974 2018 | DDC 266.00917/67—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040957

Contents

Contributors

Foreword

David Garrison

Introduction

Gene Daniels

PART 1: CONCEPTUALIZING ISLAM

1Who Represents Islam?

Evelyne A. Reisacher

2How Muslims Shape and Use Islam: Towards a Missiological Understanding

Warrick Farah

PART 2: ENGAGING MUSLIMS

3The Donkey and the Straw: Reaching South Asian Sufis with the Gospel

Kevin Higgins

4Secular Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Ted Esler

5Egalité, Fraternité, and Cous-cous: Ministry to Muslims in the Context of a Resurgent Islam and French Laïcité

Rick Kronk

6Biblical Approaches to the Nurcu Gülen Movement in Turkey

Yakup Korkmaz

7Magical Mystical Muslims: Sufi-oriented Islam and African Traditional Religion

Robin Dale Hadaway

8Ordinary Muslims in Pakistan and the Gospel

Warren Larson

9Ministry to Hui Muslims in China: An Approach to Dual-layered Cultural Settings

Enoch Jinsik Kim

10 Context as Flypaper: The Island of Java in Indonesia

Michael A. Kilgore

11 Liberating Liminality: Mission in the North African Berber Context

Patrick Brittenden

12 Russified Muslims of the Former Soviet Union

Gene Daniels

13 The Queen’s Muslims? Muslim Identities in the UK

Phil Rawlings

14 In the Shadow of a Buddhist Temple: Muslims in Thailand

Alan Johnson

15 Uyghurs of the Tarim Basin: Muslims in Northwestern China

CG Gordon

16 Muslim Youth in a Glocal World

Arthur Brown

PART 3: REFRAMING MISSIOLOGY

17 Adaptive Missiological Engagement with Islamic Contexts

Warrick Farah

18 Conclusion: Learning from the Margins

Gene Daniels

Contributors

Patrick Brittenden, DPhil

Brittenden has lived in North Africa for over twenty years. His primary interests are teaching, evangelism, and indigenous church planting. His passion for the church, mission, and education come together in a doctorate he is completing at Oxford University on the contemporary Muslim-background church of Algeria. Patrick was formerly an executive leader of PALM (a training ministry of Pioneers International) and is currently a consultant supporting the development of local MBB training approaches and encouraging the growth of North African churches.

Arthur Brown, DMin

Brown has been ministering in the Middle East since 1991 and a resident in Lebanon since 2005. Until 2017 he taught in the areas of Youth Ministry and Applied Theology and was Associate Director [Youth] at ABTS’ Institute of Middle East Studies. Arthur is involved in a number of regional and global networks, developing contextually appropriate youth work, and helped establish the khebz w meleh interfaith youth project in Lebanon. Arthur is now BMS World Mission’s Regional Leader for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and has recently relocated to the UK. He has contributed chapters to a number of books.

Gene Daniels, DLit et Phil

Daniels is a missiologist whose specialty is qualitative research with Muslim-background believers (MBBs). He is also a college instructor and mission trainer who conducts classes and training events both in the US and in the Muslim world. Previously Gene and his family were church planters among Muslims in Central Asia for twelve years. He is the author of three books and numerous articles, all on Christian mission. Gene and his wife, Linda, who have four grown children, currently live in Little Rock, Arkansas. Gene Daniels is a pseudonym.

Ted Esler, PhD

Esler is the president of Missio Nexus, an association of agencies and churches representing over forty thousand Great Commission workers worldwide. A Minnesota native, Ted worked in the computer industry before becoming a church planter in Sarajevo, Bosnia, during the 1990s—about which he wrote the book Overwhelming Minority. In 2000 Ted became the Canadian director of Pioneers, and three years later he moved to Orlando to join Pioneers USA’s leadership team. He was appointed the president of Missio Nexus in 2015, and he also serves on the board of other ministry organizations. Ted is married to Annette, and they have five children.

Warrick Farah, DMiss

Farah is a missiologist serving with One Collective (https://onecollective.org) in the Middle East, where he coaches team leaders working in community transformation and discipleship. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Missiology at an evangelical seminary that trains Arab world leaders for ministry in the region. Focusing on MBBs, Warrick’s research on conversion, theological paradigms of witness, and insiderness has been published in journals such as EMQ, IJFM, and Global Missiology. You can follow him on his blog at muslimministry.blogspot.com. Warrick Farah is a pseudonym.

David Garrison, PhD

David has a PhD in historical theology from the University of Chicago. He is a veteran of more than thirty years as a missionary pioneer. His books include Church Planting Movements (2004) and A Wind in the House of Islam (2014). Garrison currently serves as executive director of Global Gates, and as Church Planting Consultant in the Professional Services Group of Missio Nexus.

CG Gordan, MS

Gordon is a veteran cross-cultural communicator and student of missiology. He has worked and ministered in East, Central, and South Asia for the past three decades. CG and his team are presently training and mentoring Christian cross-cultural communicators from Asia. He earned a master of science degree in sociolinguistics from Georgetown University. CG Gordon is a pseudonym.

Robin Dale Hadaway, ThD

Hadaway has been the missions professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, for twelve years. Previously he and his wife, Kathy, served in church planting and administration with the International Mission Board, SBC, in Northern Africa, Tanzania, and Brazil for eighteen years. Robin worked with a Muslim unreached people group in Northern Africa and later served as the director of Eastern South America, supervising 350 missionaries. He also has been a senior pastor, a businessman, and an officer in the US Air Force. Robin and Kathy have three grown children.

Kevin Higgins, PhD

Higgins is the president of William Carey International University, and the coordinator of work among Muslims for Global Teams International. He has ministered to Muslims in the US, Africa, and South Asia since 1980. Kevin is now focused on mentoring leaders in several mature and emerging movements to Jesus in Muslim contexts, stretching from the Horn of Africa to East Asia.

Alan Johnson, PhD

Johnson has worked in Thailand for twenty-nine years with the Assemblies of God, USA, connecting with the national Thailand AG organization. He has done ethnographic studies in a Bangkok slum community, studying social influence processes. Alan is also the author of Apostolic Function in 21st Century Missions.

Michael A Kilgore, DMiss

Kilgore has over twenty years of broad experience in Southeast Asia. He has worked as a seminary lecturer, an advisor to church-planting teams, a trainer of national tentmaker missionaries, an English teacher, and a humanitarian aid organizer for marginalized refugees. This last role led to Michael being imprisoned and deported. Along the way, he and his wife have raised three children in Southeast Asia—all of whom yearn to return. Michael A Kilgore is a pseudonym.

Enoch Jinsik Kim, PhD

Kim is assistant professor of communication and mission studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is in charge of the Korean Language Doctor of Missiology program and teaches various other subjects. Prior to that he served among Chinese Muslims for sixteen years. Enoch is the author of one book and many articles on mission.

Yakup Korkmaz, MA

Korkmaz has been a church planter in Turkey since 2002. He trains both missionaries and nationals in the area of Muslim evangelism and apologetics. He has also been involved in the reconciliation movement between Armenians and Turkish Christians. Yakup has written several evangelistic and apologetic books in the Turkish language, as well as a cultural guidebook for missionaries who work in Turkey. He is married and has two adopted children. Yakup Korkmaz is a pseudonym.

Rick Kronk, PhD

Kronk and his wife spent their first sixteen years of marriage in Europe with Christar as church planters among North African Muslim immigrants. In addition to field-based ministry, Rick has been involved in training future workers among Muslims globally as director of Christar’s summer training called Manarah. He is the author of Dreams and Visions: Muslims’ Miraculous Journey to Jesus. Rick is currently Professor of Mission at Toccoa Falls College.

Warren Larson, PhD

Larson served with Christar for twenty-three years in Pakistan. While church planting was his main task, he also served as director of a reading room, administrator of a Bible correspondence school, and field director of Christar. Warren is former director of the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University. He teaches online courses to equip workers and edits the Zwemer website. His book on Islamism was recognized as one of the fifteen most significant books on missions in 1998. Due to his understanding of Islam, Warren has been quoted widely in both Christian and secular publications. He and his wife live in Vancouver.

Phil Rawlings, MA

Rawlings is codirector of the Manchester Centre for the Study of Christianity and Islam, based at the Nazarene Theological College, where he teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Christian engagement with Islam. He was a local church leader for nearly twenty years in a majority Muslim area of Manchester, where the church ministered to the local communities, sharing faith and building relationships. Phil is now the interfaith officer in three areas of inner-city Manchester, where his vision is to see new churches planted in majority Muslim areas of the city. He continues to live in Manchester with his wife and four children.

Evelyne Reisacher, PhD

Reisacher is associate professor of Islamic studies and intercultural relations at Fuller Theological Seminary. Her current research interests include exploring gender issues in Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. Before coming to Fuller, Evelyne ministered with L’Ami in France for twenty years, facilitating the relationship between churches and North African immigrants and developing courses, teaching tools, and seminars for sharing the gospel cross-culturally. She trained Christian leaders and church members in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Evelyne has written one book and edited two books, in addition to contributing to several others. Her many articles and blogs focus on Muslim-Christian relations.

Foreword

David Garrison, PhD

author of A Wind in the House of Islam

If the body of Christ only knew what the body of Christ knows, it would know a lot! Christians around the world are engaging Muslims at a level and breadth that is unparalleled in human history. What are the lessons we are learning? And perhaps more importantly, are we sharing and applying those lessons with one another and with the broader body of Christ for the sake of Christ’s kingdom?

For too long Christians who seek to understand the Muslim world, and indeed their own Muslim neighbors, have limited themselves to the study of Islam’s core teachings found in the Qur’an and perhaps, if they are ambitious, the Hadith. Only after diving into the Muslim world, or the worldview of their own Muslim neighbors, do they come to realize that Islam and its 1.8 billion adherents are much more complex than they had imagined.

Indeed, Islamic texts only provide a shared historic touchstone to the sprawling faith that now commands the allegiance of nearly one quarter of the world’s inhabitants. In many cases the five pillars of Islam—the shahada, the alms, the hajj, the daily prayers, and the Ramadan fast—serve as little more than points of departure for the majority of the world’s Muslim population into complex worldviews exhibiting myriad expressions that have taken shape as Islam has expanded into every corner of our world.

If we are to engage Muslims in a meaningful way with the gospel of Jesus Christ, we must go beyond textbook analysis of creeds and ritual practices. We must understand and engage them as they understand themselves, with all of the complexity that journey entails.

Margins of Islam takes us into that complex world, enabling us to penetrate the fears, hopes, dreams, and aspirations of Muslims who need to know how the gospel of the kingdom can meet them where they are and bring them to the foot of the Cross. The authors of this book invite you to join them on this journey of discovery, as they faithfully bring Scripture to bear upon the worldviews of the world’s largest non-Christian population.

As such, this book is not exhaustive, nor does it pretend to be, but it should serve as a welcome intermediate course for any and every Christian seeking to engage what may very well be the body of Christ’s greatest challenge in the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

Introduction

Gene Daniels, DLit et Phil

The Muslim world today consists of 1.8 billion people,¹ the majority of whom live in a great swath of humanity stretching from West Africa through the Middle East and all the way to Southeast Asia. They are born into more than three thousand distinct cultures and speak about that many different languages. Furthermore, millions of Muslims also now live outside the traditional Islamic world, North Africans in France and South Asians in the UK being just a couple of examples. With this kind of staggering diversity, how does one meaningfully prepare for practical ministry to Muslims?

One tried and true way is through studying classic texts such as Samuel Zwemer’s Islam and the Cross, Phil Parshall’s The Cross and the Crescent, or perhaps Answering Islam by Geisler and Saleeb. Unfortunately, these excellent books share a common weakness with most other missiological books on Islam; they approach Muslims as if they were a monolithic bloc because they all follow the same religion. While this has a simple logic to it, it also carries certain implications. When our missiological lens is shaped primarily by religious affiliation it causes us to focus on doctrine, scriptures, and other orthodox elements of Islam. In other words, this causes us to focus on the things of which distinct boundaries and categories are made.

Consequently, learning about Islam tends to mean the study of things like the Qur’an, the five pillars, perhaps throwing in a few hadiths for good measure. Most assume this will show us what true Islam is, thus keeping the boundary lines clear between what is Islam and what is not. However, when we apply our neat religious categories across cultures we often end up with portraits of local people that they would not themselves recognize. Even with the best of intentions, missionaries sometimes create our own understanding of Islam that is quite different from on-the-ground realities, thus distorting mission into a pursuit of hypothetical ghosts of Islamic orthodoxy.

Most of us default to hard-and-fast boundaries because that is what we were taught beginning in elementary school. Since our earliest years we were trained to look at a map and think, Here is Texas and over there, across that line, is Mexico. We later carry that same mental construction into adulthood when we read that in 2017 the poverty line in the United States was $24,600 for a family of four. Boundaries like this are simple, clear, and easy to comprehend. They work great for introducing children to maps and perhaps even work for the very grown-up field of economists, but these hard boundaries are less and less useful the closer we get to human experience—the place where authentic Christian mission takes place.

As an example, let us revisit that boundary the US government calls the poverty line. In 2017, it fell at exactly $24,600 for a family of four. Thus, if your neighbor is earning $25,000 per year, their little family is doing just fine—right? But what about things like past-due medical bills or a gambling addiction—Don’t they play a role in the financial health of the family? In other words, it’s not quite as simple as a boundary line between poverty and non-poverty would lead us to believe. The binary nature of the government’s poverty line offers a clear demarcation for statistical purposes, but it not as helpful when we get close to actual people. And more importantly, the official poverty line might even obscure reality because it is rooted in the abstraction we call economics. Human experience is more dynamic and organic than such abstractions are able to portray.

This points to the reason for the book in your hands. In order to develop effective mission strategy and practice in the Muslim world we need a better way to think about the lived experience of Muslims than through a prism of categorical religious boundaries. A more natural way of thinking, the one we will use in this volume, is looking at you right now from the text on this page or screen. In one sense, the page in front of you is composed of a number of lines of text. However, in another very real sense that same page extends to the actual, physical cutoff of the paper or the screen. In between the end of the text and the physical limit of the paper is the slightly irregular space we call a margin.

Or another image that can help us understand the margins of human landscapes in Islam is the physical margins around a field of wheat or some other crop. Just like in human landscapes, the spaces at the edge of a field are an uneven mix of the intended crop along with weeds and wildflowers. Both of these illustrations are easy to picture, but they may leave you wondering how this idea of margins connects with the great diversity of the Muslim world and better mission practice? The answer lies in the following direction.

Most of us like to think in terms of hard boundaries because they establish clear lines and help us know things, such as who is Buddhist as opposed to who is an atheist, or who is Muslim rather than Hindu. But in assuming this high degree of categorical clarity we sacrifice a great deal of quality, accuracy, and depth of understanding about human experience. These seemingly precise religious boundaries do not work well for us in mission because biblically based ministry is not about engaging the religion of Islam; rather it is about engaging people who are Muslim. Thus a more missiological way of thinking about many parts of the Muslim world is akin to looking at the margins of a wheat field—a ragged, uneven place where many plants grow together and even compete with the intended crop. We believe this is much better than thinking in terms of religious blocs like the geopolitical boundaries between nation-states, where encyclopedic definitions tell us where one begins and another ends.

Of course, seeing people through the lens of Islam is not completely antithetical to seeing them through a lens as Muslims, but it is important to recognize that they have vitally different points of reference. The first focuses on doctrine and scripture, the elements which comprise the orthodox core of that faith. In contrast, the latter focuses on the behaviors and worldview of those who consider themselves part of a local community who call themselves Muslims. In theory these two spheres are the same—formal doctrines of the religion are supposed to be reflected in the actual beliefs of its practitioners. Yet as this book will show, there is often a very significant difference between formal doctrine and living practice in many contexts of the Muslim world today.

If we think missiologically, this departure from Islamic orthodoxy can take several shapes. Sometimes it is simply an advanced state of nominalism. For example, the Pew Forum (2012) studied the religious attitudes of Muslims in thirty-nine countries and found that a significant percentage of Muslims in some countries say they seldom or never attend prayers at the mosque.² However, that does not mean these same people are not fiercely proud and protective of their identity as Muslims. In many of the same countries where jumah (Friday) prayers were seldom practiced, a large majority of Muslims also said that religion is very important in their lives (ibid.). Considering the centrality of jumah prayers to orthodox Islamic faith, this contradiction points to a significant difference between orthodoxy and the local idea of what it means to be a Muslim.

Another form these margins of the Muslim world can take is seen in Michael Kilgore’s chapter on Muslims on the island of Java in Indonesia (chapter 10). He paints a picture of people who recognize they have blended imported Islamic practice into their traditional belief system, but still consider it to be a valid composite. Considering that Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, we cannot simply dismiss such people as not really Muslim.

This is a reminder that by referring to these Muslims as on the margins of Islam, we do not mean they are marginalized—certainly not in their context. For example, as strange as it might seem to us, many Muslims are functional atheists. They do not demonstrate