Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Ramadan

What is "Ramadan"? According to Norman Geisler and Abdul Saleeb's book, Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross, "Followers of Muhammad commemorate his receiving of the Qur'an by fasting in the ninth lunar month of Ramadan. They are expected to refrain from eating food during the daylight hours for this entire month. However, they are allowed to eat from sunset to sunrise during this time." For more info, see the Wikipedia article on Ramadan.

Ramadan begins this Thursday (Sept. 13).

Something you can do during this time is to use these 30 days of Ramadan to make Muslims a special focus of your prayer life. To assist with this, a website called 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World has some helpful resources.

In particular, you can download for free (or pay to order) their "50 page, illustrated prayer guide booklet [that] contains insight, prayer points and background articles."

Here's the link to a PDF of the booklet: 2007 30-Days Prayer Booklet.

They also have a version for kids, which is 36 pages, fully illustrated, and contains puzzles and solutions: 2007 Kids Edition.

A friend recently alerted me to this, but closed his email with this warning:
You should be warned that praying through this book could forever change your life. It was in 1997 when a friend first gave me the 30 days of prayer for Muslims during Ramadan. At the beginning of the month I didn’t care about Muslims anymore than I cared about other lost people. Thirty days later my heart was on fire to see Jesus glorified among Muslim peoples. I hope yours will be too!