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

by Nabeel Qureshi

Also, just as Muslim scholars have traditionally taught that the Quran is best understood as Allah’s knowledge or speech, so the term for “Word” in Greek is Logos, and it embodies two concepts: reason and speech. These two meanings are captured in the English derivatives logic and dialogue. When God created the universe, he used his divine reason and his speech. These are the ideas embodied in the notion that God the Father created the universe through the Logos, found in John 1:3: “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (NIV). So the universe was made through the Logos, the Word—divine reason and speech.

He did not just appear like a human; he became one. But by the word became, Christians do not envision a change to God’s nature. God never changed during any of the theophanies in the Torah, and he was not changing during his incarnation. Christians traditionally teach that God, rather than changing, was taking a human nature in addition to his divine nature. This doctrine is called the hypostatic union. When the Bible says that Jesus “grew in wisdom and in stature” or that Jesus died by crucifixion, Christians believe it is speaking with respect to his human nature, not his divine nature.

On the basis of their special status with Allah, 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). Accordingly, Muslim scholars tend not to agree with these common views, though they are not unanimous. Regardless, most Muslims do believe that Muhammad in particular was sinless, especially because Allah commands Muslims to follow him (33.21).

The hadith record what Muhammad said and did in thousands of situations, and what he told the Muslim people to do in turn.

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.

“How can you believe Jesus is God if he was born through the birth canal of a woman and that he had to use the bathroom? Aren’t these things below God?”

When we remember that Yahweh is different from Allah, and that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, the answers to many similar questions become readily apparent.

Sometimes, though, by asking, “How can God die?” Muslims are essentially asking, “Who was ruling the universe?” There are many possible responses to this question, but the one I prefer is the simple one: the Father. This is why, if Muslims wish to engage in these kinds of questions, it is essential that Christians adequately explain the Trinity to them. The Father is not the Son, and the Father did not die on the cross.

He said that if the Father sent the Son to die for the sins of the world, then this was “cosmic child abuse.” What kind of a Father is God if he punishes his son for the sins of others? By this point, we should be able to readily see the problem with this assessment: Christians do not believe that God is punishing a random victim. Jesus is God. The Judge is himself voluntarily paying on behalf of the criminal. Against Dr. Ally’s caricature, a more apropos illustration is shared by Brennan Manning in his book Ragamuffin Gospel.1 In 1935, Fiorello LaGuardia, the mayor of New York, presided over a court case in which an old woman had been caught stealing bread to feed her grandchildren. Although LaGuardia wanted to offer her mercy, the shopkeeper demanded justice. LaGuardia judged her guilty and imposed a fine of ten dollars, but in the same moment he took ten dollars from his own wallet and paid the fine on her behalf. Acknowledging the woman’s guilt, the judge himself paid the penalty and let her go free.

This is a beautiful illustration of mercy and justice, but if we tweak one minor detail it will accord better with the gospel: if LaGuardia had not just been the judge but also the shopkeeper from whom the woman stole. When we sin, we sin against God. He has to judge us guilty, but then he pays for what we have done. It all makes sense when we remember the Christian view of Jesus: He is God.

“Sahar, let’s imagine that you are on your way to a very important ceremony and are dressed in your finest clothes. You are about to arrive just on time, but then you see your daughter drowning in a pool of mud. What would you do? Let her drown and arrive looking dignified, or rescue her but arrive at the ceremony covered in mud?” Her response was very matter of fact, “Of course, I would jump in the mud and save her.” Nuancing the question more, I asked her, “Let’s say there were others with you. Would you send someone else to save her, or would you save her yourself?” Considering this, Sahar responded, “If she is my daughter, how could I send anyone else? They would not care for her like I do. I would go myself, definitely.” I paused for a short moment before continuing, “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?” She considered this for a moment, and the conversation moved on. As the dinner ended, my friend returned me to my immersion Arabic program, where the idea of drowning was perhaps a bit too real for me.

The message of God’s selfless love had overpowered her, and she could no longer remain Muslim. A few days after our dinner, she had accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

The series of events is so tragic that it is easy to overlook the absurdity of it all. In response to the activist’s claim that Islam causes oppression and violence, Afghan imams demanded he be silenced and precipitated the slaughter of innocents. The media, reveling in their denouncement of the activist’s life-risking behavior, put the limelight on him, thereby themselves catalyzing the murderous reaction from the East. The rioters of Mazar-e-Sharif, unable to discern between Westerners, took the lives of innocent Europeans. They stereotypically proclaimed death to Obama, the American president who has been most vocal in his support of Islam, having said, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Of course, even having to comment on the relation of Gurkhas to this debacle leaves us shaking our heads. But let us now take note of the principal matter: Throughout the series of events, no one doubted that burning the Quran would lead to riot and murder. This was such a firm fact that no one even suggested otherwise. Not the activist, not the media, not the government, and not even Muslim leaders. Everyone knew that the offense of burning the Quran would lead to violence. We ought to contrast this to a similar event, close in both time and proximity. In 2009, at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, the US government announced that it burned dozens of Bibles. A military official pr...

I am not arguing that Afghan Muslims are uneducated and temperamental, easily provoked to mindless rage; nor am I suggesting that Christians are either too indifferent or too docile to be passionate about their Holy Scripture. These are both caricatures that miss valuable insight. I believe the answer lies, at least partly, in the fact that the Quran has a different place in the hearts and minds of Muslims than the Bible does in the hearts and minds of Christians. Both scriptures are considered holy to their people, certainly, but their uses are different, their histories are different, and indeed, their very natures are understood differently.

That is not to say that Christians do not highly revere the Bible, because they certainly do. But the traditional Muslim reverence for the Quran is almost inestimable. To understand this, we have to remember a point from the previous two chapters: The Quran is, to Muslims, the eternal Word of Allah himself. It is the closest thing to God incarnate. To Christians, the eternal Word of Yahweh is Jesus. The Quran holds in Islam the place that Jesus holds in the Christian faith. So let’s put it together: To comprehend the insult of burning a Quran, a Christian would have to imagine someone burning Jesus.1

While Muhammad was still alive, he would give recitations that cancelled previous ones. In other words, he would tell his followers that certain portions of the Quran he had relayed before were no longer to be recited as part of the Quran. This was met with resistance, as people asked him how the Word of God could be cancelled. 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.”

Muslim scholars have classically taught that there are multiple types of abrogation, including abrogation of text-not-law and abrogation of law-not-text. In other words, they teach that Allah intended certain verses to be recited but not practiced, and other verses to be practiced but not recited. For these reasons, Muslims scholars turn to the records of Muhammad’s life, the hadith, for clarification. In addition, as we have already seen, most Islamic practices actually come from hadith and not from the Quran.

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

Muslims generally defer to scholars and imams for the explanation of verses and texts. That is why the vast majority of Muslims do not directly use the Quran themselves for anything but liturgy: memorization and recitation for prayers.

On the one hand, a reader can deem every inconsistency a contradiction; on the other, a reader can attempt to harmonize the differences and try to make exceptions for the apparent inconsistencies. If a reader is friendly toward a text, he or she will give it the benefit of the doubt and harmonize it, whereas if a reader is antagonistic, he or she will discredit the text as contradictory. This is almost always what happens when Muslims and Christians lodge accusations of contradictions against one another.

On that note, Christians often do accuse the Quran of having contradictions. One website, for example, charges the Quran with containing over 120 contradictions.1 Some examples: 6.163 says Muhammad was the first believer, 7.143 says Moses was the first, and 26.40 says that Pharaoh’s magicians were; 88.6 teaches that the only food in hell will be thorns, whereas 69.36 says it will be pus, and 37.66 says it will be devil-like fruit; 7.54, 10.3, 11.7, and 25.29 teach that Allah created the world in six days, whereas 41.9–12 gives a total of eight days; 2.29 says Allah created the earth before the heavens, and 79.30 says he created the heavens before the earth; 96.2 says Allah created man from blood, 25.54 says from water, 15.26 says from clay, and 30.20 says from dust; 109.1–6 says non-Muslims worship different gods, whereas 2.139 says Jews and Christians worship the same God as Muslims; 4.48 says Allah does not forgive idolatry, and 4.153 shows him forgiving idolatry; 4.78 says all blessings and afflictions are from Allah, whereas 4.79, the very next verse, says blessings are from Allah and afflictions are brought on by those who suffer them. These are but a few of hundreds of alleged Quran contradictions. Even though Quran contradictions are far more devastating to the case for Islam than Bible contradictions are to the case for Christianity, I find these arguments about contradictions to be unproductive and bordering on fatuous. I prefer the constructive dialogue of giving...

Muslims in the West often say that Islam is a religion of peace, to which Christians ask how they handle verses like 9.111, which says: “Allah has bought your life and your property for this, that you may slay and be slain.” Muslims will often respond at this point that they are not sure how to handle it, but that does not change their minds about Islam being a religion of peace.

What might be more helpful for a Christian who wants to point out such verses in the Quran to a Muslim friend is to 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.

What most Muslims envision when they say the Bible has been corrupted, though, are wholesale omissions or insertions of New Testament teachings, intentional alterations by ruling powers. This sort of corruption of the biblical text simply never happened, nor could it have happened.

As an example, let us consider the book of the Bible called 1 Peter. When the disciple Peter wrote this letter, he sent it to its recipients. They made copies of it and sent the copies to other churches in other cities. Those churches made copies of it and sent them out to yet other churches. Now let’s imagine that the church to which Peter sent it made five copies, and each church they sent a copy to made five more copies. Even at this early stage in the life of the letter, there are thirty-one extant copies. If someone wanted to effectively alter the text, they would have to recall all thirty-one copies. But nobody had the ability to do that. Nobody had ruling power over all of Christendom until the fourth century, three hundred years after Jesus. By that time, there were thousands of copies of the biblical texts, and even someone with authority over them would not have the practical ability to collect them all. Even if someone had the capacity to recall all the texts and edit them, there would certainly have been some record of such a massive recall. It is virtually impossible to envision every Christian calmly handing over sacred texts to be altered without some trace of resistance or complaint. 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 rec...

Within about twenty years after Muhammad’s death, the leader of the Islamic Empire recalled all Quranic manuscripts, destroyed them by fire, and issued official, standardized copies. When this happened, devout companions of Muhammad strongly resisted the recall of their texts, and the records of their dissent remain with us today. So the Bible could not have been altered because there was no central control over it in early Christian history, and as such it was never recalled or edited. But there certainly was such control over the Quran in early Muslim history, and there was an exact time when it was recalled and edited. Islamic history makes no attempt to hide the official burning of all Qurans and the propagation of its officially standardized version. Apart from ignorance or bias, I am not sure how anyone can continue to accuse the Bible of corruption when the Quran would stand condemned under consistent scrutiny. Indeed, the history of the Quran was one of the factors that stopped me from accusing the Bible of corruption when I was a Muslim. On account of Uthman’s control over the Quran, there simply is no basis to accuse the Bible of large-scale corruption without condemning the Quran.

More to the point of trustworthiness, in order to accept the Quran, one has to first accept Muhammad, as he is the only one who received Quranic revelations from Gabriel. On the other hand, whole communities testified to the inspiration of the biblical Scriptures, and they did not come from the mouth of one person.

At the end of my rope, completely distraught and emptied of tears, I asked God, whether Allah or Jesus, to guide me through his Scripture. I needed his comfort, and I was turning to him.

I started by opening the Quran. This was my first time opening the Quran for personal guidance instead of simply reciting memorized portions of it or asking an imam for help. As I looked through its pages, I realized there was not a single verse in it designed to comfort me while I was hurting. 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.

Shortly after this bloody conquest, the crusader lords wrote a letter to the pope, chronicling their journey and culminating in a description of how the Muslims suffered at their hands. “If you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.”3 These are the records of history, and the nine hundred intervening years do nothing to blur the vivid images of the First Crusade in the collective memory of modern Muslims.

Still, I was convinced that no one should judge a religion by its followers.

When I started investigating, it immediately became clear that neither party in these wars had clean hands. In 1268, Sultan Baybars I, a Muslim notoriously known as the Lion of Egypt, taunted a Christian ruler whose city had just been conquered in the latter’s absence. Baybars vividly describes what Count Bohemond VI would have seen had he been present in Antioch: Death . . . came among the besieged from all sides and by all roads: we killed all whom you appointed to guard the city or defend its entrances. If you had seen your knights trampled under the feet of horses, your provinces given up to pillage, your riches distributed by full measures, the wives of your subjects placed on the market for sale; if you had seen the altars and crosses overturned, the leaves of the Gospel torn and cast to the winds, and the sepulchers of your ancestors profaned; if you had seen your enemies, the Muslims, trampling upon the tabernacle and burning alive monks, priests, and deacons in the sanctuary; in short, if you had seen your palaces given up to the flames, the dead devoured by the fire of this world, the Church of St. Paul and that of St. Peter completely and entirely destroyed, certainly you would have cried out, “By Heaven, I wish that I had become dust!”5

According to the records, Baybars torched Antioch and emptied the city of its inhabitants. Fourteen thousand Christians were killed, and a hundred thousand were taken into slavery. This is an atrocity on par with the First Crusade’s massacre in Jerusalem. I was not expecting this, as the narrative I had always heard was that the crusaders were the only ones perpetrating atrocities, not Muslims. It occurred to me that the only way to vindicate my inherited narrative was if this massacre was belated retribution for what the crusaders had done in 1099, so I started studying the context of the battles, including the First Crusade. It was then that I discovered that the narrative I had inherited was lamentably misinformed. Just a few years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, the Seljuq Turks had conquered Nicaea, the same city where, 750 years prior, Constantine had convened the church’s First Ecumenical Council. 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.

contained warriors called mamluks, slave children who were trained to ultimately become young professional fighters. These slave warriors were first used by Muslim caliphs in the ninth century, and for the next thousand years they were ubiquitous in Islamic lands. 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 The records indicate that Muslims had been conquering Egyptian Christians and taking their children since the early days of Islam. 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.”8 Reading through John’s chronicles, I found that this was one of Amr’s more merciful conquests. He records the capture of Nakius, a city left defenseless when its soldiers fled the ...

History records similar Muslim attacks on Christian lands from the mid-600s through the year 1095 and well beyond. By the time the Byzantine emperor asked for the pope’s help, two-thirds of the Christian world had been captured by Muslims.

The pope ordered no slaughter of Jews, and as some crusaders were massacring Jews in the Rhineland, other Christians were protesting and doing all they could to protect them. The Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz tried to shelter Jews at his personal residence until he was overcome by Count Emicho. The bishops of Speyer and Worms similarly tried to protect the Jews as best they could. The crusaders who were killing Jews were defying their Christian leaders and brothers, and their actions ought not be imputed to all of Christendom.

we ought not see the Crusades as simply “Christians versus Muslims” or vice versa. Christians and Muslims were far too divided for such a monolithic view. Christians were not united among themselves, which is why it ultimately took hundreds of years for the Western Christians to come to the aid of the Byzantine Christians. Muslims were even less united, which is the primary reason the crusaders were able to conquer Jerusalem in 1099. The Seljuq sultan had just died in 1092, and multiple family members were vying for power. The Fatimid dynasty, a Shia caliphate based in Egypt, took advantage of this internal division to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Seljuq Empire in 1098, just one year before the Crusade. The Fatimids themselves had just come out of a civil war, and they were still in turmoil from the deaths of their caliph and his grand vizier in 1094. Their inveterate enemies, the Abbasid Muslims, had just lost their caliph in 1094 as well, and these factors all combined to leave the terribly divided Muslim lands prone to attack.

The reality is that the Crusades were launched in defense of the Byzantine Empire after two-thirds of the Christian world had been conquered by centuries of Muslim attacks. Muslims understood this and held no grudge against crusaders until modern times, when postcolonial narratives came into vogue.

The actions of some Christians do not necessarily say anything about Christianity, and the actions of some Muslims do not necessarily say anything about Islam. As I concluded while still a Muslim, what matters are the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Muhammad. But it is a step too far to say that neither crusaders nor mujahideen have anything to do with their religions. As it turns out, both Jesus and Muhammad had a lot to say about violence, and the crusaders and the mujahideen were listening.

Anyone who prays the five daily prayers would have to admit this, because not only are the words for the prayers not given in the Quran, even the number of daily prayers is not mentioned. The Quran mentions only three daily prayers, and it does not delineate the words or postures for any of them. Although there are legitimate “Quran-only” Muslims, they have always been an extreme minority in Islam. Most Muslims who argue against the law of apostasy using a Quran-only approach are using reasoning that would radically alter their Islamic practice if applied consistently.

Quranic verses such as 2.256, which says, “There is no compulsion in religion.” In order to say this, though,

they are also disavowing Muhammad’s example. Muhammad did not interpret that verse in that manner, as his actions in hadith repeatedly show. That is why, classically, Muslim theologians have listed 2.256 among the abrogated verses we discussed in the previous chapter.4 Ibn Kathir, for example, says 2.256 was abrogated by 9.29, which tells Muslims to fight Jews and Christians.

Does Islam allow sex slavery? We must do as my friend in Washington, DC, did, and as Muslims have always done, to answer questions like this: turn to the hadith. When we turn to the example of Muhammad’s life, we find multiple accounts of Muhammad not just allowing sex slavery but also encouraging Muslims who were hesitant to use their newly captured women for sexual intercourse.6 Whether they were hesitant because they were afraid the women would become pregnant or because their husbands were still alive, according to the hadith, Muhammad encouraged them. The hadith say that this is the very reason why 4.24 of the Quran was revealed, so that men would not be hesitant to have sex with female captives whose husbands were still alive.

Of course, many Muslims disagree with ISIS’s practice, but their reasons are enlightening. An open letter sent by 140 Muslim scholars to ISIS reads, “After a century of Muslim consensus on the prohibition of slavery, you have violated this; you have taken women as concubines.”7 They argue that Muhammad looked favorably on releasing slaves, which may very well be true, but they do not go so far as to say that Muhammad did not allow sex slavery. That is simply not what the records show, and ISIS knows it. Unfortunately for these 140 Muslim scholars and for the rest of the world, ISIS is interested not in the consensus of Muslim scholars one hundred years ago but in the example of Muhammad in the seventh century. ISIS takes not only females captive but also boys. The world was recently horrified by accounts of captured boys being made to remove their clothing and facing execution if they were found to have pubic hair. But once again, this practice was based on Muhammad’s treatment of the Qurayza Jews. Muhammad had commanded that, except in night raids, children could not be killed in war. So when a group of people were taken captive, such as the Qurayza Jews, the boys were separated from men by the growth of pubic hair, and the men were executed.8 ISIS was simply lifting this account from Muhammad’s life and applying it to their own circumstances. Of course, this allowance of Muhammad also explains why the Seljuq Turks and virtually all other Muslim dynasties had no qualms ab...

Recapping the chronology: Jesus’ clear words against violence led to over three hundred years of nonresistance among Christians, and then Augustine’s arguments led to six hundred years of war as a justifiable evil. It was not until Christians were a thousand years removed from Jesus that they believed holy war could purge sin, whereas Muhammad himself taught Muslims that fighting in jihad can forgive sin, and indeed is the best thing in the world.

To be fair, Augustine and Christians after him provided justification for war in part by asking questions about passages like these. But my response to Augustine would be the same as our response was to the Muslim debaters: “What is Jesus actually saying in this verse? We should read the context.” In context, it is incontrovertibly clear that Jesus is talking not about war but about division among families: “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’ ” (vv. 34–36 NIV). There is nothing here about war.

An even closer study of Jesus’ words reveals that the “sword” to which Jesus refers is not a rhomphaia, the kind of sword used only for war.1 The sword that Jesus brings is a machaira. Like a machete, a machaira is a long knife or a short sword designed as a multipurpose tool, such as cutting meat or cleaning fish. Also like a machete, a machaira can be used for fighting, but it is not its only or primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to divide, and here Jesus says his coming is as a machaira to divide families.

The next verse makes the reasoning clear: “The Jews said Ezra is the Son of God and the Christians said the Messiah is the Son of God . . . May Allah destroy them.” Their doom is merited on account of their beliefs. This was the verse that justified an offensive attack against the Romans in the ill-fated Battle of Tabuk, even though the Romans had never attacked Muslims.4

Before moving on from this point, it is worth mentioning chronology. These verses promoting violence against Jews, Christians, and polytheists are all found in chapter 9 of the Quran, and according to the Islamic records, this was the last major chapter of the Quran revealed to Muhammad.6 The Quran’s last words and marching orders, as it were, are the most violent teachings found in its pages. This is especially important given the traditional Islamic notion of abrogation, which teaches that earlier verses can be cancelled by later ones.

For example, a foundational Christian teaching is that Jesus died by crucifixion in the first century (Mark 15:37; Matt. 27:50; Luke 23:46; John 19:33; Acts 10:39; 1 Cor. 15:3). By contrast, the Quran teaches the exact opposite: Jesus was not killed, nor was he crucified (4.157). Neither religion treats these accounts of Jesus as a myth, so we cannot resolve these contrary positions in some metaphorical sense. He either died by crucifixion or he did not. Either Islam or Christianity has to be wrong.