No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

The term Allah will refer specifically to the Muslim conception of God, the term Yahweh will be used when I intend to refer specifically to all three persons of the Trinity, and the term God will be used when the occasion calls for a generic use or intentional ambiguity. The terms Father, Son, and Spirit will be used to refer to the specific persons of the Trinity.

In the case of Muslims, their defining act was assenting that Muhammad is a prophet and exclusively following his teachings as revelations from Allah. In this book, we will consider all who do the same to be Muslims.

Sharia is literally translated “the way.” According to the Christian message, the gospel, the way to eternal life is Jesus. He said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Allah gave mankind the final, perfected religion (Quran 5.3). Islam is therefore the culmination of Judaism, Christianity, and all other world religions, which started off in line with Islamic teaching.

Once people learn what to believe, aqeeda, and how to live, sharia, they will earn the pleasure of Allah.

Since mankind inherited the broken image from Adam, all humans are broken and prone to sin. They are not judged for his sin, but because of his sin, we, his progeny, have all been born broken. Because of his sin, we all ultimately sin.

Herein lies the genius and infinitude of the love of God: He does not draw the line. He offers mercy to everyone who has ever sinned while also demanding justice for every sin ever committed. He does this by offering to bear the consequence of our sins himself. The consequence of our sins is death, and God is willing to die on behalf of all his children.

Without hesitation, the sister answered, “Because we love her.” And as the words left her lips, the realization was apparent on her face: obedience under the shadow of threat is hardly obedience at all, but compulsion. Christian obedience, devoid of threat and rooted in love, is what God truly wants.

Umar, the second caliph of Islam, was slain by avenging Persians; Uthman, the third caliph of Islam, was besieged and then slaughtered by Muslim rebels; Muhammad’s cousin Ali, the fourth caliph, was also assassinated by dissidents, but not before he had marched against the army of Aisha, Muhammad’s young bride. That was the first Islamic civil war, often called the First Fitna, and on that day ten thousand Muslims killed one another on the field of battle. With the spilling of their blood were sown the first seeds of Shia and Sunni discord. The sword was ever unsheathed in these earliest years of Islam.

the Umayyad Caliphate governed the Islamic empire for a short ninety years until, through revolt and open war, the Abbasid Muslims took control and established a dynasty that lasted for 750 years.

In AD 827, al-Mamun officially declared that Muhammad’s cousin Ali, the paragon of the Shia and their first imam, was the best of all Muhammad’s Companions. Even more striking than the move toward Shia sympathies was his alignment with Shia rationalism: He declared the Quran to be a created book.

A third, equally divisive view is that of many Sufis, called wahdat al-wujud. Literally translated “unity of being,” this doctrine teaches that the entire universe is God. It is so offensive to some Muslims that they denounce Sufis as kafir, infidels, under charges of pantheism.

the word tawhid is not found in the Quran, and the doctrine also took hundreds of years to iron out.

How can the Quran, something that is in some sense separate from Allah, be an eternal expression of Allah without jeopardizing his absolute unity? Bila kayf.

Genesis 1:1 reads: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (NIV). If we look more closely at the word we translate “God,” Elohim, we see it is plural. If we were to translate it literally, we would translate it “Gods.” But the reason we do not translate it that way is because the verb in the sentence is singular. The word Elohim is plural, but the verse treats it as a singular noun.

Biblical Hebrew does not use the plural of majesty, and it is probable that such a literary device had not been invented yet. To say that the Bible is using a plural of majesty is to apply later manners of speaking and writing to the Bible, which is poor methodology. God is not referring to himself here with a “royal we.” God is pointing out that, in some sense, he is plural.

After emphasizing that God created mankind in his image, the Bible then says he created them male and female. That’s not to say God has genders, but it is to say that there is plurality in his image.

Amos 4:11 confirms this interpretation: “ ‘I overthrew some among you as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah . . .’ declares Yahweh.” Here, Yahweh refers to God in the third person. This makes little sense within a monotheistic framework unless we read the Old Testament through the lens of the Trinity.

an example of a passage in the Old Testament that features the deity of all three persons of the Trinity can be found in Isaiah 48:12–16.

5.116, where Allah says to Jesus: “Did you say to the people, ‘Take me and my mother as two gods in addition to Allah’?”

The Quran never rejects the possibility of one God subsisting in three persons.

as the Quran specifically denies that Allah is a father (112.3), and in 5.18 it rebukes the idea of God’s spiritual fatherhood: “The Jews and the Christians say, ‘We are the children of Allah and His beloved.’ Say (in response), ‘Then why does He punish you for your sins?’ Rather, you are human beings from among those He has created.”

We must also note that this verse actually does use the primary and best word for “love” in Arabic, habb, but it uses it to explicitly deny that people are God’s beloved.

But if Allah is the greatest, and in his nature he is removed and does not desire a relationship, then Islam exalts the qualities of being removed and nonrelational.

He might have the potential to be gracious all by himself, but he cannot actually be gracious until there is something else to be gracious toward.

This isnt solved by the trinity either there is no need to be gracious to the persons of the trinity

The word for “one” used in the shema is echad, and this is often the word the Old Testament uses to refers to a composite unity.

the Zohar, the famous and highly revered foundational text of Jewish mystical thought. While considering the wording of the shema, it says: “These three are one . . . So it is with the mystery of the threefold Divine manifestations designated by ‘the Lord, our God, the Lord’—three modes which yet form one unity.”4 But the belief that Yahweh was multiple in

Alan Segal, a Jewish scholar, argues that some first-century Jews held a “binitarian” notion of God.5 Daniel Boyarin, himself an orthodox Jew and a scholar, argues that rabbis declared such notions to be heretical only in response to Christian theology, not before.6

There is nothing inherently wrong with a headscarf, and focusing on it would be a waste of time in comparison with learning the truth about Jesus.

Muslims popularly hold two beliefs about prophets: that all prophets are sinless, and that Allah would hear the cries of prophets in persecution and save them from death. However, the Quran seems to teach that prophets did sin (e.g., 28.15–16; 38.24–25; 47.19), and that they often were killed (e.g., 2.61; 3.183; 5.70).

So the primary basis for accepting Islam is that Muhammad is a prophet of God, and the guidance that he brings, sharia, is interpreted largely from the records of his life as an exemplary leader. For these reasons, Muhammad’s prophethood is foundational for Islam.

“If you, being a human, love your daughter so much that you are willing to lay aside your dignity to save her, how much more can we expect God, if he is our perfectly loving Father, to lay aside his majesty to save us?”

2009, at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, the US government announced that it burned dozens of Bibles. A military official provided the illuminating reason: The Bibles were trash, and the military burns its trash.

It is the very speech of Allah, inscribed on a heavenly tablet, from which it was read by Gabriel and dictated to Muhammad.

Unlike the Quran, the Bible is very diverse in its literary genres and perspectives.

The response is recorded in 2.106 of the Quran, which asserts that Allah can substitute verses in his divine scripture because “he has power over all things.”3

Very few Muslims believe in the sufficiency of the Quran, and these “Quran only” Muslims are often deemed heretical by mainstream Muslims.

Bible is not the “why” of Christian faith; it is the “what.” The “why” of the Christian faith is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So Muslim apologists direct much dialogue toward Christian Scripture, assuming it ought to have the same impact as a challenge to the Quran would, though that is not the case.

find a scholar in that Muslim’s line of authority, and see if that scholar’s interpretation says the same thing. If it does, present the verse along with the scholar’s judgment and continue the conversation from there.

For example, the words “Jesus loves Peter” can be written sixteen ways in Greek. The letters could be altered in sixteen different ways without affecting the meaning whatsoever. So this kind of accusation might be true, but it is insignificant from the Christian perspective.

So the only way the Bible could have been corrupted on such a grand scale is if someone early in Christian history had the authority and the power to recall all the texts, destroy them, and issue official copies, resulting in complaints and resistance. Yet no such person or record of events has ever existed. Interestingly, such a person and such a record do exist in the early history of the Quran.

In addition to its more pristine textual history, the diversity of the Bible is a strength. It reflects God’s love for diversity. One language is not superior, one people are not superior, one mode of writing is not superior. Rather, God intends for humans to learn from history books, from law, from poetry, from proverbs, from apocalyptic literature, and more. He can teach through a fisherman like Peter, through a theologian like Paul, through a statesman like Moses, through a queen like Esther, and through his own incarnation. There is beauty and power in diversity, and the Bible reflects that.

Although there were certainly verses that promised Allah would reward me for doing the right thing, there was nothing that said Allah loves me for who I am or that sought to comfort me despite my failures.

Clinton said, “In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”4

The Seljuq Turks were Sunni Muslims, and they had taken Nicaea from the Byzantine emperor, a Christian. It was he, the Byzantine emperor, who asked Pope Urban II for help defending his lands at the Council of Piacenza in 1095. In other words, Muslims were actively attacking and conquering Christians, and the First Crusade was a defensive effort.

According to one scholar, sixteen of the seventeen preeminent Muslim dynasties in history systematically used slave warriors.6 These slave boys were often captured from places like Egypt, where Christian territories had been conquered by Muslims. This means Muslim rulers were capturing Christian boys and turning them into slave warriors to fight against other Christians.7

Amr ibn al-As, one of Muhammad’s companions, brutally swept through Northern Egypt in AD 640, just eight years after Muhammad’s death. John of Nikiu, a bishop in the Nile delta, records one such conquest: “[W]hen with great toil and exertion they had cast down the walls of the city, they forthwith made themselves masters of it, and put to the sword thousands of its inhabitants and soldiers, and they gained an enormous booty, and took the women and children captive and divided them amongst themselves, and they made that city a desolation.”

“Amr and the Muslim army . . . made their entry into Nakius and took possession. Finding no soldiers, they proceeded to put to the sword all whom they found in the streets and in the churches, men, women, and infants. They showed mercy to none. After they had captured this city, they marched against other localities and sacked them and put all they found to the sword . . . Let us now cease, for it is impossible to recount the iniquities perpetrated by the Muslims after their capture of the island of Nakius.”9

By the time the Byzantine emperor asked for the pope’s help, two-thirds of the Christian world had been captured by Muslims.

Christians had to invent an Arabic word for the Crusades, as Muslims apparently did not give much thought to them until the turn of the twentieth century.14