Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

Multiple recitations of the same verse, missing verses, missing surahs, disputes over the canon, controlled destruction of all variants — how could we defend the Quran as perfectly preserved?

24: “Forbidden for you are women already married, except such as your right hands possess. Allah has enjoined this on you.” 23:6: “(Successful indeed are those believers who guard their private parts) except from their wives or those whom their right hands possess.” 70:30: “(Worshipers guard their private parts) except from their wives and from those whom their right hands possess; such indeed, are not to blame.” I took the verses to Ammi and asked what the phrase meant. She said it referred to the female servants that Muslim men had married, but that didn’t fit. In the verses, wives were clearly separate from those whom the right hands possessed. When I pushed back on her interpretation, she deferred to scholars in the jamaat. I left Ammi, agreeing to ask them when the next opportunity would arise. In the meantime, I knew I had to research this on my own. The scholars had not been comprehensive before, and I had no reason to think they would be now. Of course, David had given me his interpretation, but I knew it was wrong. It had to be wrong. He was arguing that “those whom the right hands possessed” were slave women, captured by Muslim conquerors. According to him, 23:6 and 70:30 meant Muslim men could have intercourse with slave women that had been captured as spoils of war. Not stopping there, he argued that 4:24 annulled the marriages of captive women so Muslims could have intercourse with them even if their husbands were still alive. The mere suggestion was outrageou...

This was my last-ditch effort to maintain my Islamic faith: denying my ability to arrive at objective truth.

It is this kind of familial dishonor that drives many in the Middle East to commit honor killings. Although there is no command in the Quran or hadith to carry out “honor killings,” there are commands in the Quran to kill mischief makers,113 as well as plenty of commands in the hadith to kill apostates.114

Shirk: The unforgivable sin in Islam; it is roughly equivalent to idolatry, placing something or someone in the position due to Allah

Of course, that is exactly what the Quran teaches. In Islam, there is only one unforgivable sin, shirk, the belief that someone other than Allah is God. Shirk is specifically discussed in the context of Jesus in 5:72. He who believes Jesus is God, “Allah has forbidden Heaven for him, and his abode will be the Hellfire.”

There is a reason Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:34 – 35).

But the interim was agonizing. I traveled from mosque to mosque, asking imams and scholars to help me with my struggles. None came close to vindicating either Muhammad or the Quran, all of them selectively denying traditions that were problematic and cherry-picking traditions that fit their views. They did not help.

All morning, my thoughts were consumed with this dream. What did it mean? What were the symbols, and how did they fit together? I immediately tried fitting the pieces together: The snake on the stone pillar had to symbolize evil. What else could it be? The garden was the world. That I started seeing the world from the snake’s perspective means I must have some hidden evil inside me from the beginning of my world. This strikes me as a Christian concept: original sin. Or perhaps it means that Islam, which was in me from the very beginning, is evil? I’m not sure, but both seem to point to Christianity. As I looked into the world, what seemed to be a natural part of the landscape was actually another reptile, reminiscent of the snake but so massive that people were walking on it thinking it was a hill. Then a boy came along and challenged it, calling it out for what it actually was. In tandem, these symbols only fit one explanation: the boy was David, calling out the iguana, Islam, as a falsehood. The iguana, Islam, was naturally deceptive and tricked people into thinking it was a natural part of the world. The boy’s cricket had to be Christianity, which challenged the iguana. That the cricket could speak and the iguana could not means that Christianity is able to speak for itself, or in other words, it has a strong case. That the iguana could not speak means it is unable to provide proof for itself. This is confirmed when the cricket challenged the iguana but the iguana tried...

That is where I stood, just outside the narrow door of salvation, wondering why I had not been let in. Thankfully, the owner had not yet come to close the door. There was now no question left. I knew what I had to do. I had to accept the invitation.

There was nothing there for me. It depicted a god of conditional concern, one who would not love me if I did not perform to my utmost in pleasing him, one who seemed to take joy in sending his enemies into the hellfire. It did not speak to the broken nature of man, let alone directly to the broken man in need of God’s love. It was a book of laws, written for the seventh century. Looking for a living word, I put the Quran down and picked up the Bible. I had never read the Bible for personal guidance before. I did not even know where to start. I figured the New Testament would be a good place, so I opened to the beginning of Matthew. Within minutes, I found these words: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The words were like a current sent through my dead heart, electrifying it once more. This was what I was looking for. It was as if God had written these words in the Bible two thousand years prior specifically with me in mind.

As if the living word of the Bible were in conversation with me, Jesus began responding to my heart, verse by verse. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

Jesus answered in the next verse: “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” It was not that Jesus was turning me against my parents. It was that, if my family stood against God, I had to choose one or the other. God is obviously best, even if that caused me to turn against my family. But how? How could I bear the pain?

“Nabeel, my child,” I felt Him say, “whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”

Burdened by these words, I lay awake deep into that night. But far from resisting rest, sleep was ashamed to fall upon me. I had denied God long enough. On August 24, 2005, at three o’clock in the morning, I placed my forehead on the foot of my bed and prayed. “I submit. I submit that Jesus Christ is Lord of heaven and earth. He came to this world to die for my sins, proving His lordship by rising from the dead. I am a sinner, and I need Him for redemption. Christ, I accept You into my life.”

Did he know that God made him exactly how He wanted, knowing each hair on his head and each second of his life? God knew full well that the hands He gave to this man would be used to sin against Him, that the feet He gave to this man would be used to walk away from Him. Yet, instead of withholding these gifts, He gave him the most precious gift of all: His own Son.

But we also have a steady diet of polemics. From a young age, I was told that although Christians may mean well and may even sincerely follow their faith, their faith is fatally flawed. Their sacred texts were once the unadulterated word of God, but they fell into hopeless corruption. And Christians had invented logically ridiculous doctrines, like the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. The Quran was revealed to Muhammad in seventh-century Arabia to undo the harm caused by the biblical corruption and blasphemous teachings of Christianity. Muhammad’s mission was to restore true religion. And it was my goal as a good Muslim to continue that mission.

A healthy diet of apologetics and polemics, spiced with cultural pride, it is believed, can help prevent that disaster. And young Muslims are convinced by their families that being a Muslim means to affirm Muhammad’s prophethood and the Quran’s divine origin while at the same time resisting the very idea of becoming anything else, especially a Christian.

I knew that fully embracing the person and work of Jesus Christ would cost me the very identity that had been forged for me at the dinner tables of the Muslim community. Until I was able to see that Christ is worth the cost, I was not willing to pay it. But eventually, I understood what the famed Jim Eliot, who lost his life in service of the gospel, meant when he wrote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”118 Eliot rephrased Paul’s words that “for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Phil. 3:8 ESV). Yet the price that Jesus paid for us dwarfs whatever price we might pay to follow Him. C. S. Lewis wrote that God’s love for us “is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of [our] sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”119 Following such a God is worth sacrificing our identities so that we can be given a new one that looks more and more like Jesus. Since giving my life to Jesus, the table set before me is quite different. Before, I gobbled up superficial answers that left my stomach gnawing and my throat parched. But in Christ, my hunger is fed by the Bread of Life and my thirst is slaked by the Living Water who satisfies eternally.

In the East, and for Islam in particular, what is accepted as true is generally what the authorities tell you — and you are expected to embrace what they teach. That is why I call this approach the Authoritarian Faith Path.

This squares with my friend Nabeel Qureshi’s assessment in this part 2 of his book: “People from Eastern Islamic cultures generally assess truth through lines of authority, not individual reasoning. Of course, individuals do engage in critical reasoning in the East, but on average it is relatively less valued and far less prevalent than in the West. Leaders have done the critical reasoning, and leaders know best.”

As Nabeel indicates, this contrasts sharply with the more typical approach in the West, which I refer to as the Evidential Faith Path. This approach decides what should be accepted as true based not on the word of authorities but rather on logic and experience, including experiences recorded in trustworthy historical records like the ones I cited in my interactions with the imam.

Easterners who embrace an authoritarian mindset need to be reminded that religious authorities are not all created equal; some are worth following, and some are not. If the credentials of the leaders are not scrutinized and their messages not weighed, how can one know which should be followed? The Bible encourages us to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21 ESV) and warns, “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1 ESV).

The question is, Will Easterners have the courage and tenacity to apply the needed tests? This can be challenging because, as Nabeel reminds us, “When authority is derived from position rather than reason, the act of questioning leadership is dangerous because it has the potential to upset the system. Dissension is reprimanded and obedience is rewarded.”

The average Greco-Roman author has fewer than twenty copies of his writings still in existence. Usually, there are far fewer. The New Testament boasts more than fifty-eight hundred copies in Greek alone. But the New Testament was translated into various languages early on — languages such as Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, Gothic, Armenian, and Arabic. Altogether, there are more than twenty thousand manuscripts of the New Testament. To be sure, some of these are small scraps of papyrus, and most are not complete New Testaments. Nevertheless, the average-size manuscript is more than four hundred fifty pages long.

If all the manuscripts were destroyed in the blink of an eye, we would still not be left without a witness. That’s because church fathers, from the late first century to the thirteenth century, quoted from the New Testament in homilies, commentaries, and theological treatises. And they did not have the gift of brevity. More than a million quotations of the New Testament by the church fathers have been collected so far. Virtually the entire New Testament could be reproduced many times over just from the quotations of these fathers.

The Nature of Variants More than 70 percent of all textual variants are mere spelling differences that affect nothing. And several more involve inner-Greek syntax that can’t even be translated into English (or most other languages).

In the appendix to Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, there is a dialogue between the editors of the book and the author: “Why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?” Ehrman’s response is illuminating: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” Even this skeptic, a bona fide New Testament scholar, had to concede that no cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith is jeopardized by textual variants. Many atheists and Muslims who have followed in Ehrman’s path have exaggerated his claims way out of proportion to what he actually stated. The textual history of the New Testament is robust and fascinating. When the dust has settled, we can be assured that what we have today, in all essentials, and even in the overwhelming majority of particulars, is what they wrote then.

His paying the debt for our sins is just one part of how He saves us. Jesus did not pay the penalty for our misdeeds so we can continue disobeying God with abandon; rather, in dying on the cross, Jesus not only canceled our spiritual debt but also cured our spiritual disease. When we put our trust in Christ, He forgives our sins and also begins the work of changing us from the inside to become holy and loving like Him, and like God our Father. Jesus does this through the Holy Spirit, whom He sent. Salvation by grace does not mean we stay impure sinners forever. Rather, it means that God forgives all our sins and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves by paying the penalty for our sins and working to eliminate sin from our lives. He does this in two stages: while we are mortal, the Holy Spirit changes our hearts so that we begin to live in a way that is more pleasing to God, even though we still commit sin; and then in the resurrection at the end of history, we will be made morally and spiritually perfect beings.

Thus, all three persons of the Trinity are involved in our salvation. The Father calls us into a relationship with Him through the Son, whom He sent; the Son creates that relationship by dying to break down the barrier of rebellion that has separated us from the Father; and the Holy Spirit works within us to trust in the Son and to worship the Father according to the truth of the gospel. When we are brought into the Christian faith, this is why we are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). It means that we are acknowledging the three persons as the one God who has mercifully rescued us from our sin and given us the gift of eternal life.

ACCORDING TO THE QURAN, Muhammad is the ideal model of conduct for Muslims (33:21), and true believers are not allowed to question his decisions (33:36). So it is not surprising that when Nabeel and I began discussing the character and teachings of Muhammad, things occasionally got heated.

Islam’s earliest source is the Quran. Yet the Quran is not biographical in nature. Rather, it is claimed to be Allah’s eternal word, revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. As such, the Quran gives us very little direct information about Muhammad and mentions him by name only four times. To interpret passages of the Quran in the light of Muhammad’s life, we must turn to non-Quranic texts.

When Muhammad was forty years old, he had a mystical experience in this cave, and he emerged reciting five verses of what would eventually become the Quran (96:1 – 5).

“Whoever changes his religion, kill him” (Sunan AnNasa’i 5.37.4069).

Although Muhammad promoted peace and tolerance when Muslims were in the minority, his revelations suddenly changed when his followers outnumbered his enemies. Consider three verses from the last major chapter of the Quran to be revealed: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (9:29 Ali). “O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them …” (9:73 Shakir). “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness …” (9:123 Shakir).

No less troubling is Muhammad’s example regarding women. While the Quran allows Muslims to marry a maximum of four wives (4:3), Muhammad had at least nine wives at one time (after he received a special revelation that gave him the right to ignore the four-wife limit).

One of Muhammad’s wives (a girl named Aisha) was only nine years old when the marriage was consummated. Zainab, another wife, was originally married to his adopted son Zaid. However, because Muhammad became attracted to Zainab, Zaid divorced her so that Muhammad could marry her.

On at least one occasion, Muhammad physically struck his wife Aisha for lying. This was in accordance with the Quran’s command to physically discipline rebellious wives: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those...

Muhammad had a concubine named Mary, who was a Coptic Christian, and he allowed his followers to possess an unlimited number of sex slaves (see Quran 23:5 – 6; 70:22 – 30). Early Muslims were even permitted to engage in a form of prostitution (called mutah), according to which a Muslim could pay a woman for sex, ma...

Even more startling is that, according to our earliest Muslim sources, Muhammad once delivered a revelation from the devil (the infamous “Satanic Verses”). When Muhammad was initially reciting chapter 53 of the Quran (so the story goes), Satan tricked him into promoting polytheism. Later, Muhammad was supposedly informed by the angel Gabriel that all prophets occasionally fall for this ruse.

Multiple Muslim sources also report that Muhammad was the victim of black magic. According to these accounts, a Jewish magician stole Muhammad’s hairbrush and used one of the hairs to cast a spell on him. The spell lasted about a year, and it affected Muhammad’s memory and gave him delusional thoughts.

Rev. Dr. Keith Small is a Quranic manuscript consultant to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He is also a visiting lecturer and an associate research fellow at the London School of Theology and teaches internationally concerning the history of the texts of the Quran and the New Testament. He is the author of Textual Criticism and Quran Manuscripts.

Studies of corrections in these manuscripts have also demonstrated that no one has changed the text to make it support a political or theological agenda — a hollow accusation often made, for example, against Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in the early 300s.

Similar studies of the Quran are demonstrating that the Jesus it portrays is more a figure of the theological controversies of the sixth and seventh centuries than a figure of the first century.

At this point, I stumbled on research in the area of psychological assurance and related issues that has since changed my life. Falling under the general rubric of the “cognitive” or “cognitive-behavioral method,” the central idea is that what we tell ourselves, think, and do will determine how we feel, as well as our subsequent actions. Further, the most painful things in life are not generally what occurs to us but what we think and articulate to ourselves about those occurrences. Thus, it is not so much the events in our lives but rather how we download and respond to them that determines whether we are able to adjust and live peacefully, with minimal pain and stress.

One key passage that occupied much of my thinking was Philippians 4:6 – 9, where Paul exhorts believers to control their anxiety (v. 6), which often contributes heavily to emotional doubt. I knew that curbing my anxiety would provide a huge advantage in treating my emotional doubt. Paul issued a four-step remedy. He commanded prayer to God regarding our needs. Peter offers additional details to his anxious readers, telling them to cast their worries on God (1 Peter 5:7). Paul states that thanksgiving (Phil. 4:6) and praise (Phil. 4:8) should be given as well. Testimony shows that these practices, during anxiety or periods of being downcast, are often fantastically liberating actions that lessen our anxieties and fears. In perhaps the strongest “cognitive” passage in Scripture, Paul instructs his readers to exchange their anxiety for God-honoring truths. His readers should meditate steadily, deeply, and single-mindedly on God’s truths, employing these concepts (Phil. 4:8) instead of the ruminations that led to anxiety in the first place. Last, Paul adds a behavioral component — practicing the actions that he had just listed (Phil. 4:9). This does not mean that these four steps must be duplicated every time; other texts encourage the same steps, either by themselves or along with different practices. Many popular writings explain how to implement this process in more detail, but I have long preferred the bestseller Telling Yourself the Truth by William Backus and Marie Chapi...

In many Muslim cultures, dreams and visions play a strong role in people’s lives. Muslims rarely have access to the scriptures or interactions with Christian missionaries, yet God is as passionate about having a relationship with Muslims as He is about having a relationship with you and me (Exod. 34:14 NLT).

Dreams and visions do not convert people; the gospel does. These seekers begin a personal or spiritual journey to find the Truth. As was the case for Nabeel, the dreams lead them to the scriptures and to believers who can share Jesus with them. It is the gospel through the Holy Spirit that converts people.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9).

Shroud of Turin: A controversial relic, it is often believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus Himself, supernaturally bearing His image