From the very beginning...

From the very beginning, I realized that those churches were doing their best__and worst__to convert non-Christians to Christianity; after all, is not this what missionary work is all about?! And who could be better candidates than single foreign students studying for their graduate degrees? Once they go home, these students will disseminate their new faith with zeal and enthusiasm to others. At least this is what those churches were hoping.

This is why many of their preachers and priests were distributing anti-Islamic literature, thinking that by attacking others' beliefs, they would protect their own and win new converts. They had forgotten about the laws of action and reaction. Some of those churches were showing movies derogatory to Islam and to the Prophet of Islam.

Since my life's motto has always been the Prophet's tradition saying, "One who remains silent rather than says the truth is a tongue-tied Satan," I refuse to be that Satan.

I almost broke into a fist fight once with an Atlanta pastor who was then my host and who was assaulting Islam and the Prophet of Islam; he had to shut his mouth after listening to my counter-arguments and to a volley of charges of my own against today's version of Christianity which included tracing the deviation in the Christian Church back to its very first years.

I explained to him how much respect Muslims have for Christ and his saintly mother and juxtaposed it with the disrespect of people like him towards our Abrahamic faith. I reminded him of the bloody and shameful history of the barbaric Crusades which were sponsored by the Church, of the Muslim lands they burnt and looted and of the Muslim blood they shed, of the Muslims who were brought to Europe as slaves.

He soon realized that he was facing a formidable foe who was fully knowledgeable of the history of the Christian church and who, for many years, had studied such bloody history academically and written numerous term papers about it, and who knew fully well the extent of mischief inflicted in the past and is still being inflicted upon the Islamic world by the colonizers and imperialists who profess to follow Christ, the prince of peace, the man who never hurt anyone or anything.