Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

“But how can Allah be just if He ‘simply forgives’ arbitrarily? God is not arbitrary. He is absolutely just. How would He be just if He forgave arbitrarily? No, He cannot ‘just forgive us if He chooses.’ The penalty for my sins must be paid.”

positional authority yields a society that determines right and wrong based on honor and shame.

when authority is derived from reason, questions are welcome because critical examination sharpens the very basis of authority.

Rational authority creates a society that determines right and wrong based on innocence and guilt.

On the other hand, if a true friend shares the exact same message with heartfelt sincerity, speaking to specific circumstances and struggles, then the message is heard loud and clear.

If you’re going to be this skeptical about the Bible, I want you to be equally skeptical when we take a look at the Quran.”

The Bible and the Quran were nothing alike. Not in the slightest. Why was I trying to interpret them in the same way?

Muhammad dictated the contents of the Quran to his scribes over a period of twenty-three years. Only after his death was the Quran collected into a book.

Verses that had been dictated years or decades apart are frequently found side by side in the Quran, oft...

The result is that Muslims place relatively little weight on surrounding passages when trying to int...

For context, they turn instead to historica...

So fractured are narratives in the Quran that only one story has a clear beginning, middle, and end: the story of Joseph.

the gospels were coherent narratives, each serving as its own context. There was no need for any commentary in order to understand the gospels. Anyone can understand the Bible.

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.

Like an introduction in modern books, it gives us the lens through which to read the rest of the book. It was as if John were saying, “As you read this gospel, keep in mind that Jesus is coeternal with the Father, His partner in creating the world.”

“It was the last gospel, written seventy years after Jesus. It looks nothing like the other gospels, which appeared much earlier.”

Seventy years after Jesus is a decent amount of time. We can’t be sure that the disciples were still around that late. But there’s a bigger issue here: why does it look so different from the other gospels? Jesus doesn’t use a single parable in John, and he talks about himself a lot more frequently than in the Synoptics. Plus, there’s only one miracle that’s actually common to all four gospels.63 John seems to be telling us about his Jesus. A later Jesus. A different Jesus.”

If Jesus truly claimed to be God, we could expect his claim to be found in the earliest gospel, not just the last one. I needed to see Jesus’ claim to deity found in the gospel of Mark.

When the high priest asked if he was the Christ, the Son of God, Jesus testified to the Sanhedrin: “I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

Whatever he meant, one thing was clear. The priests of the Sanhedrin thought he made a statement about his identity that they considered blasphemous, warranting execution.

only one identity claim that deserved such a harsh penalty: claiming to be God. Claiming to be the Messiah was not enough.

In this context, ‘Son of man’ means far more than a simple human being.

This claim to be far more than a mere mortal is probably what elicited the verdict of blasphemy from the Jewish high court.”

Could it be that the term “Son of Man” actually meant something more?

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.

Jesus called himself the Son of Man more than eighty times in the four gospels; that he really used the term was undeniable. His position as the one “sitting at the right hand of the power” was deeply embedded in church doctrine, even at the earliest layer.69 If these were divine claims, Jesus’ deity was laced throughout the gospels and earliest church history.

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.

Muslims are often trained to despise Paul, to see him as the hijacker of early Christianity.

I had been repeatedly taught that Paul had corrupted Jesus’ message, misleading billions into worshiping the mortal Messiah.

Because of what the Quran and hadith teach, Muslims must revere Jesus and the disciples. They were people chosen by Allah to spread His true message, including the fact that Jesus was just a human. But somewhere very early in Christian history, people began to worship Jesus. That was anathema and blasphemy.

Paul started writing in the forties, a decade or so before Mark was written.

if the community is already proclaiming that Jesus is God Himself in human flesh, then we can expect a gospel written by that community to contain that belief. We should read the gospels through the contextual lens of the early Christian beliefs, which we can see through Paul’s letters.”

Paul took the religion taught by Jesus and turned it into a religion about Jesus.”

Paul saw a power vacuum. He saw that Jesus was gone and that the disciples were too disorganized to take the reins. He wanted power and authority, and so he fashioned himself a ‘disciple,’ even though he never so much as met Jesus, and took control of the burgeoning church, promoting his gospel over other gospels that were being taught. Over Jesus’ gospel.”

Tauheed is the doctrine of God’s oneness.

there are truths about our universe that do not fit easily into our minds.

according to Islam, we will all stand before God, each accountable for our sins. No one will be able to intercede for us. Our spiritual lives are our own responsibilities, and if our good deeds outweigh our sins, we will go to heaven. If our sins outweigh our good deeds, we will go to hell.

what is completely out of the question is God taking your sins and placing them on an innocent man, as if that man can be punished for your crimes while you get off scot-free. What kind of justice is that?”

Just like a dollar can’t pay for trillions of dollars of debt, Jesus’ death on the cross can’t pay for everyone’s sins. Even if one man could pay for another man’s sins, it doesn’t add up for just one man to pay for billions of sinners.

I knew I was a sinner and that I had rebelled against God’s commands at times and chosen my own path over His dictates. But since Muslims believe that salvation is a matter of doing more good deeds than bad, I never really felt anguish over my sins because I believed myself to be on the positive side of the scales. To me, sin was bad, but not that bad.

Christianity teaches that sin is so destructive it shatters souls and destroys worlds. It’s like a cancer that slowly consumes everything.

After having just confronted the depravity of my sins, His forgiveness and love was that much sweeter.

“There isn’t really a case for Buddhism. It’s a path you can choose to follow. I follow it because of the meditation, but I wouldn’t tell anyone else that they should follow it or that it’s true in some sense. Christianity is really unique like that. With Christianity, either Jesus died and rose from the grave or he didn’t. That’s something you can build a case for.”

This shows that even the earliest records of Muhammad’s life are altered versions of previous stories that were also altered.

he altered Muhammad’s story to make it more palatable and to remove the things he considered unbelievable.

What young Muslims learn about Muhammad is an airbrushed portrait — this blemish removed and that feature emphasized — that makes him fit a desired image.

I added up all the pieces in my mind: 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?

So, in truth, the scholars were not arguing that the Quran had remained unchanged. They were arguing that Allah intended all the many changes that came to it. That was a defensive position at best, not one that could bear the weight of the entire Islamic case.

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.

Not ‘blessed are the righteous’ but ‘blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’? I hunger and thirst for righteousness, I do, but I can never attain it. God will bless me anyway? Who is this God who loves me so much, even in my failures?”