Source: Houston Chronicle
On May 30, 2003 the Houston Chronicle reported that "on a recent Saturday in a church fellowship hall [in Grove City, Ohio]... evangelical Christians from several states gathered for an all-day seminar in how to woo Muslims away from Islam. The speaker urged a kindly approach: Always show Muslims love, charity and hospitality, he said, and carry copies of the New Testament to give as gifts... At the grass roots of evangelical Christianity, many are now absorbing the antipathy for Islam that emerged last year with the incendiary comments of pace-setting ministers... Akbar S. Ahmed, chair of the Islamic studies department at American University in Washington, D.C., said he grew up attending Catholic and Protestant missionary schools in Pakistan, but never heard a negative word about Islam from the missionaries. Now, he said, the new hostility to Islam and in particular the insults to the prophet Muhammad had outraged the Muslim world. 'The whole range of Muslims from Orthodox to liberal secularists are all lined up against these attacks coming from the American evangelists,' said Ahmed, the author of a new book Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World (Polity Press, 2003)."