Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity

by Nabeel Qureshi

worked with Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Joseph took Jesus’ body and put it in the tomb, and Nicodemus brought one hundred pounds of aloe and other medicines, along with linen bandages, to heal Jesus. God used the medicines to heal Jesus while he was in the tomb for those three days.”

“the swoon theory,” is shared by Ahmadi Muslims and non-Ahmadi Muslims alike.

Muslim debaters,

Ahmad ...

Shabir...

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

The swoon theory is not the original Muslim explanation for Jesus’ apparent death, though, nor is it the majority view.

Most Muslims believe “the substitution theory.”

Who was killed in Jesus’ place?

Another majority view regards Jesus’ ascension.

The more I shared my views, the more I felt confirmed in my faith, and the conversations occurred with increasing frequency when I realized no one had anything substantial to rebuff my views.

BY THE TIME I WAS IN TENTH GRADE, my personal life was changing significantly.

The tug of Western culture was becoming difficult to resist.

still represented Islam proudly,

“Do you know about Jesus?”

Why had other Christians never asked me this question? They did think I needed Jesus to go to heaven, right? Were they content with letting me go to hell, or did they not really believe their faith?

Muslims believe that Jesus was sinless and born of the Virgin Mary. He cleansed the leprous, gave sight to the blind, and raised people from the dead. Jesus is the Messiah, the Word of God.”

“But Jesus was not God. He was just a man.”

don’t think the Bible we have today is the word of God. It’s been changed too many times throughout history. But for now, let’s just say I did think so. Where does Jesus say, ‘I am God’?”

Jesus never said he was God,” I argued. “He made the opposite quite clear to us. He felt the pangs of hunger, thirst, loneliness, and temptation. He cried, and he bled. He didn’t call himself ‘the Son of God,’ he called himself ‘the Son of Man.’ He was very obviously human.”

“Allah judges us based on our choices in this world.

When we stand before Allah, our deeds will be read aloud. No one will be able to intercede for us; not our family, not Jesus, not even Muhammad . Allah will weigh our good deeds and our bad, and if our good deeds are greater than our bad deeds, Allah will give us paradise.”

a Quranic verse that is a point of controversy among Muslims. Some Muslims argue that this verse was abrogated by a later Quranic verse that says, “If someone comes to Allah with a religion other than Islam, it will not be accepted from him.”

Other Muslims, our jamaat among them, reconcile the two verses by arguing that “Islam” here does not refer to the faith-system, but to the broader meaning of the word, peace.

the doctrine of abrogation.

teach that Allah can cancel older sections of the Quran with newer ones. Traditionally, Muslims developed a field of Quranic exegesis called “the abrogator and the abrogated” in which they strove to determine the criteria and history of Quranic abrogation.

Some Muslim scholars taught that up to five hundred verses of the Quran no longer apply because later verses abrogated them. Other Muslim scholars taught that as few as five verses were abrogated. Regardless of the exact number, most...

A few Muslims dissent on this view, and the Ahmadi jamaat is among them. These Muslims argue that if any part of the Quran could be canceled, then it would not be the eternal word of God. They resort instead to harmonization of apparently abrogated verses, like the tenuous interpretation above. The difficulty for this view, though, is that the hadith are full of accounts of abrogation.

To do so would be to depart from tradition.

TRADITION IS THE OUTWARD STRUCTURE of Islam, the body animated by the soul of Islamic teaching.

every single day was imbued with tradition.

But these traditions did not come from the Quran. They are found in hadith.

The hadith were not collected into books until a long time after Muhammad ’s death.

Muslims put less stock into sirah literature than hadith specifically because sirah does not record isnad.

I was very interested in the hadith, not so much in their content as much as in their history and the ways Muslim scholars assessed them.

What I didn’t plan, though, was to experience God in a very personal way. God was going to perform a miracle that changed my life forever.

Public email was still in its nascent phase, and international phone calls were too expensive to justify.

I turned to God.

could not get past the gold and silver streaks. To me, there was nothing else for it: they meant God must exist.

Of course, I already believed that God existed.

That day, I no longer just believed that God was real. I knew God was real. And I knew God cared for me.

Four years later, when my world started falling apart, that 1 percent made all the difference.

difference between Eastern and Western education can be traced to the disparity that divides Muslim immigrants from their children: Islamic cultures tend to establish people of high status as authorities, whereas the authority in Western culture is reason itself. These alternative seats of authority permeate the mind, determining the moral outlook of whole societies.

When authority is derived from position rather than reason, the act of questioning leadership is dangerous because it has the potential to upset the system. Dissension is reprimanded, and obedience is rewarded. Correct and incorrect courses of action are assessed socially, not individually. A person’s virtue is thus determined by how well he meets social expectations, not by an individual determination of right and wrong.

when authority is derived from reason, questions are welcome because critical examination sharpens the very basis of authority. Each person is expected to critically examine his own course of action. Correct and incorrect courses of action are assessed individually. A person’s virtue is determined by whether he does what he knows to be right or wrong.

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

Much of the West’s inability to understand the East stems from the paradigmatic schism between honor-shame cultur...

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.

doing the right thing did not even enter into the equation, and neither did guilt.

an honor-shame culture might see things differently from a Western culture of guilt and innocence.