Central & West Asia Perspectives
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Learn how Islam is creatively expanding and engaging the next generation, presenting their faith as a peaceful, rational alternative to the western way of life in today’s complex world.
Bi-vocational workers are strategic for access to Muslim countries, and to model faith-and-work integration essential for the survival and growth of the Christian church in hostile environments.
Kazakhstan has been in the news lately. It is also the Central Asian Muslim country where one of our associates is serving. She moved there when the pandemic blocked her return to East Asia and has been teaching at a school not far from the center of recent unrest (the unrest started in the western part of the country, not where her school is located).
On Feb 15, the video titled “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nations of the Cross” went viral. 21 Coptic Christian migrant workers from Egypt were led like sheep along the Mediterranean coast of Libya by masked terrorists. They lined them up along the beach, forced them on their knees, and beheaded them. This was supposedly IS’ revenge for the alleged kidnap and torture by the Coptic Church of two Egyptian Christian women who had converted to Islam, a claim denied by those involved in the story.
Since the Arab Spring more than two years ago, the Muslim world continues to make headlines—civil war in Syria, violence and bloodshed in Egypt, continued unrest in Tunisia and Libya, unrelenting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan even as the U.S. and her allies struggle to pull out. Large populations of displaced refugees now threaten the stability of neighboring countries. As age-old sectarian and tribal hatreds rage across the region, one CNN journalist sadly concluded that there seems little that outsiders can do but wait for the volcano to finish erupting.