The vast of the Muslim community lives and works in the area around one main street in Luton. This particular area (Bury Park) is facing many needs and challenges. It has been identified as one of the neediest communities in England.
There are about 1.4 million people in Guinea-Bissau. Only 5 percent of the people claim to be Christian, while 50 percent are adherents of various indigenous beliefs and 45 percent are Sunni Muslim. Fighting between Senegalese-backed government troops and a military junta destroyed much of the country's infrastructure and caused widespread damage to the economy in 1998. Missionaries in the last year have had Imams asking them for Bible teachers to come to their village! Pastors in Bissau have been taking Christian leadership seminars and are now seeing open doors to preach and teach. Hundreds of people showed up for the first showing of the Jesus film in Fula.
There are over 100 mosques in Italy, 65 of which are in the North. Italian Muslims are increasingly gaining official recognition, which helps them open mosques and Islamic schools. Many Arabs from North Africa and the Middle East believe that Islam is the absolute truth and consider it their duty to promote their religion in Italy.
It is a commonly held misconception in the region that followers of Jesus bribe downtrodden Muslims and Hindus to accept Christ in return for material benefit or social advantage. Nominal followers of Jesus number around 5%.
The Muslim Chittagonian people group cannot necessarily understand standard Bengali. Growth of the church among the Chittagonians has been slow. They are the largest people group in the world without the Bible in their own language. The past decade has seen a growth in conservative Islamic politics as well.
A Christian who recently visited the country described the general situation of Mauritanian believers. “You can have freedom of speech, if you are a Muslim. You can have freedom of religion, if you are a Muslim. It is in fact OK to be a Christian, but it is offensive to speak of Jesus as anything other than one of the prophets.”
This idealistic young man is a member of the Magindanao people group, almost one million strong, living on the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The name "Magindanao" means "people of the flood plain."
The Betawi people (population 500,000) are considered the original inhabitants of Jakarta. They came from the mixture of peoples who arrived in Batavia (Jakarta’s historical name) from the 15th century onwards from elsewhere in Indonesia and from other countries, including Portugal.
Some immigrant families have become believers in Jesus Christ while in other countries, but there are few reports of similar developments in Turkey, their country of origin. It is thought that there is just a hand-full of Zaza believers in Turkey.
There are over five million Bedouin in the Near East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq), comprising a number of tribes, each with their own loyalties, characteristics and dialects. The Gospel has hardly reached the Bedouin in this region.
