Women who risk Secret agents for Jesus in the Muslim world

Married American pastors Tom (Killing Christians) and JoAnn Doyle offer a middling collection of stories about Muslims who have converted to Christianity. During nearly two decades of missionary work abroad, the authors met those profiled. Jordanian Nori Kahn, plagued by nightmares brought by "jinns," was turned away by both Catholic and Orthodox priests before being welcomed by a Baptist church, having her demons cast out, and coming to understand that her relationship with her father was sexually abusive. Farah Abbas, also in Jordan, was forced into a marriage with a vile man to secure funds for her mother's cancer treatments, but an encounter with happy Syrian refugees who had converted to Christianity showed her a new way forward. The other stories follow similar trajectories of women caught in abusive marriages or war zones who find peace by leaving Islam for Christianity. Unfortunately, the Doyles locate the main source of these women's tragedies in Islamic practice and scripture, making the stories rather simplistic despite the real human emotion undergirding them. These one-note accounts of religious conversion will have very limited appeal. (Jan.)