W. Robert Godfrey

Parts of Europe were under heretical Christian leadership, particularly Aryan leadership.

Parts of Europe were continuing to see the influx of a variety of barbarians from different parts of the East, and that barbarian pressure meant there was constant pressure on the church to find ways of coming to terms with these newcomers.

First half of the Middle Ages, one of the newcomers from the East that caused a lot of trouble were the Mudjars.

The Hungarians, since my wife's a Hungarian, I always have to mention the Hungarians whenever they come up in history.

But they were constantly pressuring in the first half of the Middle Ages from the East and finally settled down after the conversion of their King Istvan, King Stephen.

who was converted to Christianity, became a saint.

So there's this constant pressure of sustaining the faith and spreading the faith in the early Middle Ages, and one element of that pressure came particularly from the rise of Islam.

And I find people are interested in Islam today, and so we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about Islam.

Islam developed as a religion primarily in the 7th century, so in the 600s, and it was born of the visions claimed by a man named Muhammad, born in Mecca around 570.

He was born to a good family but not a wealthy family.

And he came to be convinced that the religions that surrounded him there in Arabia, today what we call Saudi Arabia, was pagan religion and was idolatrous.

He was not well educated.

Some claimed that he couldn't read or write.

And he claimed that the Koran was dictated to him by divine inspiration.

And he began to have visions as a result of a time of prayer and fasting, growing concern about the state of religion.

And what motivated him above all else was a fanatical, determined monotheism.

He wanted an absolute insistence that God is one, that there are not many gods, there is only one God, and that one God is God.

Allah is the Arabic for God.

There is no God but God.

That's the central confession of Islam.