Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

three purposes

1. To tear down walls

2. To equip the reader with facts and knowledge,

3. To portray the immense inner struggle of Muslims grappling with the gospel,

I lay in ruin, seeking Allah.

my mind scrutinized each word my lips whispered into the musty carpet.

These were not new words.

It was the sajda, the portion of the ritual prayers in which Muslims lower themselves before Allah, glorifying His loftiness.

The words had always flowed with ease, but this day was different. As my lips exercised their rote rituals, my mind questioned everything I thought I knew about God.

I hesitated, fighting the blasphemy I was about to propose. But what if the blasphemy was the truth? “Or are You Jesus?”

the Bible couldn’t be right, could it?”

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.”

“God, I know that You are great in reality, but some of what the Holy Quran teaches is far from great.

there’s no way You, being good and loving, would have given some of the commands found in the Quran.

“But maybe You are showing me that the Quran is not Your word after all? So much of what I’ve been taught about it has turned out to be false. I was taught that it has never been changed, but hadith and history show that it has.

So much that I thought I knew about the Quran simply is not true. Is it really Your book? O Allah, have mercy on me.

Why am I speaking to Muhammad in my prayer? He cannot hear me. He is dead!

why am I wishing peace upon him?

why does Your greatest prophet need anyone to pra...

Could You not have given him assurance and peace? If he cannot have peace and assurance as the Prophe...

Ammi taught me to love Muhammad

that he fought to elevate the status of women and the downtrodden.

“But now I know the truth about him, and there’s too much to sweep under the rug. I know about his first revelation, his raids on caravans, his child bride, his marriage to Zainab, the black magic cast upon him, his poisoning, his assassinations, his tortures, and . . .”

was still grappling with what I had come across while investigating the Quran.

The ritual prayers had ended, and now it was time for my heart’s prayer.

From memorized occasional prayers to elaborate daily rituals, devout Muslims are steeped in remembrance of Allah and performance of Islamic traditions.

It is a hadith, a tradition of the prophet Muhammad, that every Muslim child should hear the adhan at birth.

Nabeel's saying that Muslims Believe that you are Muslim because you were born into a Muslim family.

My family has always paid particular attention to following the hadith. We are Qureshi, after all, and the Qureshi are the tribe of Muhammad.

we are descendants of Hazrat Umar.” Umar was one of the four khalifas, the men that Sunnis consider the divinely guided successors of Muhammad.

my father left Pakistan in the 1970s,

Ammi, my mother,

was the daughter of a Muslim missionary.

It was part of the protocol.

I never really fit in

I was very lonely.

They rarely said “I love you” directly; that is too crass for traditional Pakistani ears. Love is implicit

too crass for Pakistani ears Or too crass for Muslim ears? I'm wondering if this Is what makes it so hard for Muslims to hear that Jesus loves them

That implicitness is one reason why a child’s obedience is paramount in Muslim culture.

when I was considering following Jesus, I knew I was contemplating the one choice that would be far and away the greatest disobedience. Not only would my parents feel betrayed, they would be utterly heartbroken.

Muslims believe that every single word of the Quran was dictated verbatim by Allah, through the Archangel Gabriel, to Muhammad. The Quran is therefore not only inspired at the level of meaning but at the deeper level of the words themselves. For this reason, Muslims do not consider the Quran translatable. If it is rendered in any language other than Arabic, it is not Quran but rather an interpretation of the Quran. A book can be a true Quran only if written in Arabic.

This is why it is such an important belief for Muslims that the Quran has always been exactly the same — word for word, dot for dot.

Imams and teachers regularly declare that the Quran was perfectly preserved, unchanged from the moment Muhammad heard it from Gab...

Muhammad had nothing to do with composing the Quran; he was simply the conduit of its revelation to mankind, and he dutifully preserved its exact form. Had he not, and had the words been even slightly altered, the Quran would be irretrievably lost. But such a tainting of the words was unfathomable. N...

the emphasis on the words themselves leads many Muslims to neglect the m...

Muslims who recite the Quran regularly are regarded as pious, whereas Muslims who only contemplate the meaning of t...

Piety is the greater honor, and most Muslims I knew growing up could recite many chapters of the Quran from memory, but rarely could they explain...

book called al-Qaeda, “the Guide.”

Surat al-Ikhlas, number 112,

What was the message that Muhammad considered so important? Essentially this: God is not a father, and He has no son.

In Pakistani culture, punctuality is not nearly as important as it is to Westerners.

Social considerations take priority. It’s often seen as uptight to be punctual, and to show up to someone’s home at the invited time is actually considered somewhat rude.

It's the same way in Latino cultures. One of my teachers told me about the time she worked in Latin America, and they always wanted to watch this 1 program on television, but they never knew when it was gonna be on because of their lackadasical way of scheduling things.