This NY TIMES article about Evangelicals contemplating the conversion of Muslims is interesting. As an atheist from a Muslim background I think that a collision between these two fundamentalisms is all for the good if it damages both. Additionally my personal experience with many Evangelicals is that they are intellectually not sophisticated and their understanding of which ever “Enemy” they have in their sight at the moment is usually shallow (speaking as an atheist, I’ve been involved in with discussions with theists who barely understand where I’m coming from, but tend to parrot back talking points learned in church when the pastor was preaching to the choir) [1]. Though the article makes clear there is some nuance among Evangelicals in their attitudes toward Islam, the “foot-soldiers” are generally much more blunt and rough-hewn in their conception of the opposition than the theologians, and this lack of genuine clarity (the preconception with stereotypes) will make attempts to convert Muslims pretty futile in my opinion. On a final note, this sort of hubristic attitude toward unbelievers is exactly what I saw in mosques in the United States as a child, though Muslims are very sensitive about Christian missions targeting them, even in the United States, unlike the Hindus and Jews that have been similarly focused upon, they as a proslyetizing faith are being a bit disingenious when they argue for pluralism of belief.
Randall Parker comments on this article over @ Para Pundit.
Update: Reason puts the situation in perspective.
[1] I heard on NPR a few years back a writer who had studied the Christians of the Near East recount how southern Evangelicals who visit the Holy Land sometimes are surprised about the presence of indigenous Arab believers. One of his contacts, a Christian of Armenian extraction who worked as a waiter, always bristled when American Evangelicals with heavy southern accents asked him when he had “converted to Christianity” when they saw the cross he wore. For those not in the know, Armenians like to assert that they were the nation that first accepted Christianity as the state religion, not Rome.
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