Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

We wrestle with the honor-shame principle that tells us, “It’s okay as long as you don’t get caught.” If there is no dishonor, it is not wrong.

As strange as it might sound to Westerners, it was more dishonorable for him to be called out by a minimum-wage employee than to be caught stealing soda.

By the time the story was through, the family was roaring with laughter. For having told such a good story, he was able to transform the shame of being caught lying into the honor of being a good storyteller.

But for me, and for others like me, the schism between East and West shapes the very course of our lives. Because of it, I had no friends in my early childhood, and because of it, I was launched into adulthood alone once more.

As the days progressed, it became clear that the hijackers were indeed Muslim and that this attack on our nation had been carried out in the name of Islam. But what Islam was this? It was clearly not the Islam I knew. True, I used to hear of Muslims in distant lands committing atrocities in the name of Allah, but those accounts were too remote to create any cognitive dissonance. This hit much closer to home. This hit us in our hearts.

I had to learn the truth about my faith once and for all. I had to figure out how to reconcile my Islam, a religion of peace, with the Islam on television, a religion of terror.

If by Islam we mean the beliefs of Muslims, then Islam can be a religion of peace or a religion of terror, depending on how it is taught.

So if we define Islam by the beliefs of its adherents, it may or may not be a religion of peace. But if we define Islam more traditionally, as the system of beliefs and practices taught by Muhammad, then the answer is less ambiguous.

Unfortunately, I have found that many Christians think of evangelism the same way, foisting Christian beliefs on strangers in chance encounters. The problem with this approach is that the gospel requires a radical life change, and not many people are about to listen to strangers telling them to change the way they live. What do they know about others’ lives?

True, I knew Christians revered the Bible, but I figured they all knew in their hearts that it had been changed over time and that there was no point in reading it.

“The fact that there are manuscripts of the Bible all over the world means we can compare them and see where changes have been introduced.

“The words do matter, but they matter because they constitute a message. The message is paramount. That’s why the Bible can be translated. If the inspiration were tied to words themselves as opposed to their message, then we could never translate the Bible, and if we could never translate it, how could it be a book for all people?”

After reading them, those Christians often copied the books before sending them on. How exactly can this kind of proliferation of texts, without any central control, be uniformly and undetectably altered? How can someone corrupt the words?

There is just no conceivable model for the New Testament to have been changed in any significant sense, no model that’s consistent with the facts of history, anyway.”

That boldness was the ethos of the early Christian movement, and without it, there would be no Christianity.”

“Scholars are virtually unanimous: the death of Jesus on the cross is among the surest facts of history.”

At the mosque, no one was allowed to stand in front of you while you worshiped so that you could focus on worshiping God.

I was like them, someone who was pursuing God and truth with all his heart and mind.

And now I had found the path of my pursuit: assess the historical case for Jesus’ death, his deity, and his resurrection. If these three arguments were strongly evidenced, then there would be a strong case for Christianity. If not, then the case would be poor. Other factors, like my opinion of church services, were irrelevant.

In fact, not only were the disciples willing to die for this belief, but so were a couple people who had been opposed to Jesus’ message during his life, namely, Paul and James.

he accepted that non-Muslim scholars universally conclude Jesus died by crucifixion, but he paradoxically denied that the crucifixion played any significant role in their assessment;

As enraptured as we all were by Shabir’s oratory and rhetorical prowess, focusing on his arguments led to two conclusions: his skepticism of the data was unwarranted, and he applied nowhere near the same level of skepticism to his own position. This inconsistency had to be the result of his bias, one that I could see even as a Muslim who wanted to agree with him.

You say that the Holy Spirit visited Mary, making her pregnant. It would only be logical for the Christian Jesus to be a demigod, since he was born of a human and a god. But let’s face it, the Bible describes a fully human Jesus. That explains his hunger, his thirst, his bleeding, his ignorance, and his death.”

Conversely, I could not just focus on individual verses to make a point about a gospel, as we often did with the Quran. I needed to read the whole gospel, understand the author’s intent and themes, and let the book speak for itself.

It was obvious that “the Word” was Jesus, not just because John’s gospel was ostensibly about Jesus but also because the Quran calls Jesus the “Word of God.”62 Besides, verse 14 left little doubt: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.” It had to be Jesus.

If Jesus truly did claim to be God, then the Quran is wrong and Islam is a false religion.

I had to read Daniel 7 for myself. I grabbed Abba’s Bible off the shelf, looked up “Daniel” in the table of contents, and flipped to Daniel 7. There indeed, just as Blomberg had said, was a prophetic vision of one like a Son of Man who was worshiped for all eternity by men of every language.

In Mark 14:62, Jesus claimed to be the divine Son of Man and the sovereign heir of the Father’s throne. He was boldly claiming to be God.68

I could not get myself to admit that the earliest gospel, and in fact every gospel thereafter, was built around the framework of Jesus’ deity, but neither could I deny it. On the one hand, the cost was too high, and on the other, the evidence was too strong.

We should read the gospels through the contextual lens of the early Christian beliefs, which we can see through Paul’s letters.”

“Power?! If all he wanted was power, he could have stayed just where he was. He was the top student of the top rabbi of his time; power was coming his way. He went the total opposite direction, choosing a life of meekness and poverty. The early Christians had Paul and his sacrifices to thank for their survival!”

I can recall many jumaa khutbas, classes at youth camps, religious education books, and Quran study sessions dedicated to rebutting the Trinity. They all taught the same thing: the Trinity is thinly veiled polytheism.

Technically, a molecule with resonance is every one of its structures at every point in time, yet no single one of its structures at any point in time.”

That’s when it clicked: if there are things in this world that can be three in one, even incomprehensibly so, then why cannot God?

Even though every Muslim would quickly admit that Muhammad is human, in theory fallible like any other man, they often revere him as flawless. To that end, Islamic theology has accorded him the title al-Insan al-Kamil, “the man who has attained perfection.”

The greatest concern in the post – 9/11 West among the average Muslim was to distance himself from a violent image of Islam, and this was particularly true for me as an Ahmadi Muslim.

Referring then to John 16:12 – 13, I argued that Jesus had pointed forward to a promised counselor or comforter who would come after his own time and lead people to the truth. This man had to be Muhammad, since no major religious figure emerged after Jesus except for Muhammad.

I followed through by arguing that Islam was the final message and that Muhammad came not as one who abolished Judaism and Christianity but one who reinforced and redirected them toward the one, true God. Muhammad’s message — the “eye for an eye” justice of Moses combined with the “turn the other cheek” mercy of Jesus — was the heart of Islam, the final message for all mankind. In the course of this last point, I made it clear that Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians.

I can rely on the gospels because the four of them were written very soon after Jesus’ life, in the community of eyewitnesses. How do we know that the books of hadith are trustworthy?

“Nabeel, two hundred fifty years is a really long time to wait before writing stories down. Legends grow wildly in that span of time. Villains become much more villainous, heroes become much more heroic, ugly truths are forgotten, and many stories are created entirely out of whole cloth.”

Unlike Christians learning about Jesus from the Bible, the Quran has very little to say about Muhammad.

If a Western Muslim wants to paint a peaceful portrait of Muhammad, all they have to do is quote peaceful hadith and verses of the Quran, to the exclusion of the violent ones. If an Islamic extremist wants to mobilize his followers to acts of terrorism, he will quote the violent references, to the exclusion of the peaceful ones.80

What each of these references omitted was the first line of the verse, which makes it explicit that the prohibition of murder was directed specifically to the Jews; it was not a teaching sent to Muslims.

It is the next verse that directly relates to Islam and Muslims: “the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land.” Unfortunately, that verse is also ignored in the process of selective quotation.

Muhammad was saying that he would fight people until they became Muslim or until he killed them and took their property. That was impossible! It ran counter to everything I knew about Muhammad, and it contradicted the Quran’s clear statement that “there is no compulsion in religion.”

It’s good that you are starting, but these scholars are farther down the road. They’ve asked the questions you’re asking and have found the answers. It’s wise to learn from their efforts instead of reinventing the wheel.” He gently but firmly placed the book before me.

Lings was certainly using the earliest sources to write his biography, but at the end of the day, it was still a filtered biography. It ignored the problematic traditions instead of explaining them.

For example, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Trench, Muhammad captured and beheaded over five hundred men and teenage boys from the Jewish tribe of Qurayza. After the Muslims killed the men, they sold the women and children into slavery and distributed their goods among themselves.82 Since this account was found in both hadith and sirah, the Muslims online could not argue that it was fabricated.

The merciful, kind Muhammad that I knew as my prophet would never order men and boys to be beheaded. He was a prophet of mercy and peace. Nor would he sell women and children into slavery. He was a defender of the rights of women and children.

He was pursuing the following question: “Would an objective investigator conclude that, based on Muhammad’s life and character, he is a prophet of God?”