Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

My mind was being shaped to think critically, but that shape did not ...

was far too Pakistani to fit in well with my American friends.

I just couldn’t fit in perfectly anywhere.

No one understood that, not even I. I was no longer of traditional Pakistani culture, and I was no longer of American culture. I had a third culture, and no one met me there.

Don’t become Americanized. Listen to your elders!”

an Eastern sense of tough love,

Muslim immigrants from the East are starkly different from their Muslim children born in the West.

People from Eastern Islamic cultures generally assess truth through lines of authority, not individual reasoning.15

individuals do engage in critical reasoning in the East, but on average, it is relatively less valued and l...

Leaders have done the critical reasoning, and le...

Receiving input from multiple sources and then critically examining the data to distill a truth is an exercise for...

Shades of grey are far less common among authority-based cultures.

the average Muslim immigrant expects people in the West to be promiscuous Christians and enemies of Islam.

When they come to America, their cultural differences and preconceptions often cause them to remain isolated from Westerners.

Only the exceptional blend of love, humility, hospitality, and persistence can overcome these barriers, and not enough people make the effort.

To be Americanized was to be disobedient to your elders, to dress less conservatively, and to spend more time with your friends than your family. Cursing, drinking, and dating were simply unfathomable.

One of the greatest travesties of all is that Muslim immigrants often associate Western immoralities with Christianity, and correlation becomes causation in the minds of the uncritical.

They did not categorize religion with belief but with cultural identity. The tragedy here is that no one has given them a reason to think otherwise. If they were to intimately know even one Christian who lived differently, their misconceptions might be corrected, and they might see Christianity in a virtuous light.

All of this is different for their children, for second-generation Muslims in the West. The second generation is as varied and disparate as their peers.

Some may be, as I was, raised to think critically and yet still love Islam.

Whether a young Muslim stays connected with his culture or becomes nominal often has to do with pressures in the culture clash.

If the parents are nominal, there is little chance the child will care more than nominally for Islam.

Who the child’s friends are and what they believe is also highly influential,

Baji

has blended Islam with Western pluralism. She believes that Allah can lead people to Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, or any other religion, and they can still atta...

As for my cousin,

One of my male cousins

Another of my male cousins

All of these second-generation American Muslims are my relatives. They all trace their lineage back to the same town in Pakistan, they were raised in the same jamaat, and they are roughly the same age. Yet they all see the world and process it extremely differently.

none of them see the world as their parents do, not even close.

Yet they all call themselves Muslim and identify themselves with their parents’ faith.

What, then, does it mean to be Muslim in the West? It can mean anything. If you really want to know what someone is like and what they believe, you have t...

the best we can do before getting to know someone is to determine whether he is an immigrant or a second-generation Muslim. This one ...

MY PARTICULAR BLEND of East meets West was shaped by Islamic apologetics.

did not have to wrestle long with some of the postmodern relativism that captures my generation.

To me, it was self-evident that truth exists. What’s the alternative? If truth doesn’t exist, then it would be true that truth doesn’t exist, and once again we arrive at tr...

Muslims and Ch...

have roughly analogous beliefs in monotheism, spiritual and physical realms, angels and demons, good and evil, a final judgment, heaven and hell, the inspiration of scriptures, and many more peripheral beliefs.

These commonalities are a double-edged sword. They build a common platform for dialogue such that the two can often understand each other and see the world from a similar perspective.

But the commonalities perhaps also serve to sharpen disagreements on the most sensitive difference between the two faiths: their views of Jesus and Muhammad.

Christians believe Jesus is Go...

Christians believe that those who teach contrarily to the gospel of salvation through Jesus are false teachers.18

This difference in beliefs is why dialogue between Muslims and Christians has mostly focused on Jesus and Muhammad.

Regarding Muhammad, Westerners rarely knew anything.

it was not hard to make a case for Muhammad to the average Christian, simply because of their ignorance. I shared with them all the things I learned in my early childhood about Muhammad,

Regarding Jesus, there are two issues on which Muslims particularly disagree with Christians: that Jesus died on the cross and that Jesus claimed to be God.

The Quran specifically denies both of these beliefs.19

And yet the quran Says the Muslims are supposed to honor The old and new testament. However it is written in the quran that's what it equates to. Quran also teaches that the bible has been corrupted. The quran also teaches that the word of god cannot be corrupted.

When he was in the garden of Gethsemane, he prayed that God would take the bitter cup away from him.

I think God loved Jesus. There is no way that God would let Jesus’ prayers go unheard.

Pilate