Talking With Muslim Friends

Before you answer a Muslim friend, you must be able to describe what he believes in a way he would recognise. That is not a courtesy added to apologetics; it is a condition of it. A Christian who attacks a version of Islam that no Muslim holds has won nothing, and has taught his friend that Christians do not listen. So begin here, and read this section as a Muslim would want it read.

Islam means submission, and a Muslim is one who submits to God. Muslims believe that God, whom they call Allah, the Arabic word for God which Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews also use, is one, eternal, all-powerful, merciful and utterly unlike anything he has made. This oneness is called tawhid, and it is the centre of everything. The greatest sin in Islam is shirk, associating anything or anyone with God as a partner in his divinity. Muslims believe that God has spoken through a long line of prophets, among them Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus, and that the last of the prophets was Muhammad, who lived in Arabia from about 570 to 632. They believe that from about 610 until his death God revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. The word qur'an means recitation, and for Muslims the Qur'an is the very speech of God, in Arabic, not a book written by Muhammad.

Muslim practice is often summed up in the five pillars: the confession of faith, that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger; prayer five times a day; giving to the poor; fasting in the month of Ramadan; and the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for those who are able. Alongside the Qur'an, Muslims draw on the hadith, reports of the sayings and actions of Muhammad, and on centuries of legal and theological scholarship. Most Muslims are Sunni; a substantial minority, concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon among other places, are Shia, who differ over the leadership of the community after Muhammad. There are mystical traditions, called Sufism, and there is a great deal of everyday or popular practice, such as protective charms and visits to the tombs of holy men, that some Muslim scholars approve and others condemn. The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, not an Arab nation. Your friend in Kano, Mombasa, Dhaka or Birmingham will not be identical to a Muslim in Riyadh, and the first rule is to ask him what he believes rather than to tell him.

Muslims honour Jesus, whom the Qur'an calls Isa. This surprises many Christians. The Qur'an teaches that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary (Sura 19 and Sura 3:45-47), that he is the Messiah, that he worked miracles, and that he will return before the last day. It calls him a word from God and a spirit from him (3:45, 4:171). Sura 19, named Maryam after Mary, is one of the most beautiful passages in the Qur'an, and Mary is the only woman named in it. What the Qur'an denies is that Jesus is the Son of God or divine, and, in the reading most Muslims have held, that he died on the cross. A Muslim who honours Jesus as a prophet is not being insincere when he says he loves Jesus. He means it, and you should believe him.

Notice, finally, what a Muslim often thinks Christians believe. Many have been taught that Christians worship three gods, that the Trinity is the Father, Mary and Jesus, that the Son of God means God took a wife and fathered a child, and that the Bible has been changed. Many have watched Western films and assumed that the way people live in them is what Christianity produces. Some of these impressions you will need to correct gently. Some, especially the last, you will need to admit have a basis in the lives of people who call themselves Christians.

State the objection at full strength, as a thoughtful Muslim would put it. God is one, and that is the first truth of every prophet, as the Torah itself says. The Qur'an warns those who say that God is the third of three (5:73) and tells the People of the Book not to say Three (4:171). Sura 112, which Muslims recite constantly, says that God is One and eternal, and in Pickthall's 1930 translation, 'He begetteth not nor was begotten.' To say that a man is God, or that God has a Son, is to make the Creator into a creature, to divide what cannot be divided, and to commit shirk. The Muslim is not being stubborn. He is defending the majesty of God, and he believes that you, without meaning to, are diminishing it.

The first thing to say is the thing you share. Christians also confess that God is one. Jesus himself names as the first commandment 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One' (Mark 12:29). The Trinity is not three gods. It is not the Father, Mary and the Son; Mary is honoured by Christians as the mother of Jesus but has never been part of any orthodox confession of God. And the title Son of God does not mean, and has never meant in Christian teaching, that God took a wife or produced a child in a bodily way. On these points you and your friend agree completely about what would be blasphemy. Say so. Many Muslims are relieved to hear it, and some have never heard a Christian say it.

There is a scholarly argument about whom the Qur'an's criticisms were aimed at. Some Christian and some Western scholars think the Qur'an was answering forms of Christian belief and devotion current in seventh-century Arabia, including popular devotion to Mary, rather than the creeds of the councils. Muslims generally hold that the Qur'an rightly rejects every form of the Trinity, since all of them, in a Muslim's view, associate partners with God. You do not need to settle this to have the conversation. You need only to be clear about what the church actually confesses: one God, eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons sharing one divine being, not three beings sharing a name.

Then go to John 1. The Christian claim is not that a man became God, which would be shirk, but that God's own eternal Word became man. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God' (John 1:1). 'The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us' (1:14). The verb is the tent verb, skenoo, and John is thinking of the tabernacle where the glory of the God of Israel lived among his people. A word is not a second being separate from the one who speaks it; it is the speaker's own mind expressed. That is one reason the church found the language of Word so useful. The Qur'an itself calls Jesus a word from God (3:45, 4:171), and some Christians use this as a bridge. Be careful with it. Muslim commentators usually understand the phrase to mean that Jesus was created by God's word of command, Be, as Adam was (3:59), and they will rightly object if you pretend the Qur'an means what John means. The bridge is the question it raises, not an agreement it proves: what does it mean that God's word came as a man?

Be honest about what this reply shows and what it does not. It shows that Christians are not polytheists and that the doctrine of the Trinity is not the crude idea many Muslims reject. It does not prove the Trinity. Christians believe the Trinity because God has revealed himself as Father, Son and Spirit in the history of Jesus, in the baptism where the Father speaks and the Spirit descends (Matthew 3:16-17), in the command to baptise 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' (Matthew 28:19), and in the worship of Jesus by Jews who never stopped confessing one God, as the lesson Who Did Jesus Claim to Be? set out. Your Muslim friend may reply that the incarnation still compromises God's transcendence, since the Creator cannot become a creature. That is a real objection, and the Christian answer is a real answer: the God who is great enough to make the world is great enough to enter it without ceasing to be God, and the transcendence the Bible teaches is not distance but holiness. You may not persuade him. You will have shown him that the question is about who God is, and that Christians have thought about it as seriously as he has.

The second question is the cross. Sura 4:157 speaks of those who boasted that they had killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, and says, in Pickthall's 1930 translation, 'they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them.' The next verse says that God raised him up to himself. For most Muslims through history this has meant that Jesus did not die on the cross at all.

Muslims have read the verse in several ways, and you should know them. The most widespread view in classical commentary, reported in various forms by the great commentator al-Tabari (died 923) and others, is that God made someone else look like Jesus, and that this other man was crucified while Jesus was taken alive to heaven. Commentators differed about who the substitute was: a volunteer disciple, Judas, or another. A second view, held by the Ahmadiyya movement founded in India in the late nineteenth century, is that Jesus was put on the cross but did not die there, recovered, and later died a natural death; most Sunni and Shia Muslims reject both this view and the movement. A third reading, put forward by a small number of modern Muslim and Western scholars, among them Mahmoud Ayoub and Todd Lawson, is that the verse denies that Jesus' enemies achieved what they boasted of, rather than denying that he died, since it was God who raised him and not men who had the last word. Most Muslims you meet will hold the first view, but do not assume; ask.

Take the Muslim objection at its strongest. It is not only a claim about history. It is a claim about God's faithfulness. God rescued Abraham from the fire, Moses from Pharaoh and Noah from the flood. Would he abandon his greatest prophet to a shameful death at the hands of his enemies? A prophet killed in disgrace looks like a prophet God failed. To many Muslims the cross is not good news but an insult to Jesus, and they reject it out of love for him.

The Christian answer has two parts, and they should be kept distinct. The first is historical. That Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate is among the most secure facts of ancient history. It is reported by Paul within a few years of the event (1 Corinthians 15:3), by all four Gospels, by the Roman historian Tacitus in his Annals, and, in a passage scholars accept in its core though not in every phrase, by the Jewish historian Josephus; even sceptical scholars such as Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan treat it as certain. The lessons Did Jesus Exist? and The Resurrection set out that evidence. The Qur'an was given about six hundred years later. You may say, gently, that a historian has no evidence from the first century that anyone thought someone else had died in Jesus' place. Your friend will reply that God's revelation outweighs any human report, and that is consistent from his side. Then the question becomes which revelation, which the next section takes up.

The second part is theological, and it answers the objection about God's faithfulness. In the New Testament the cross is not God failing to rescue Jesus. It is the plan of God carried out through human wickedness: Jesus 'was delivered up by God's set plan and foreknowledge,' and 'God raised Him from the dead, releasing Him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep Him in its grip' (Acts 2:23-24). Jesus himself predicted it: 'the Son of Man must suffer many things' (Mark 8:31). The cross is where God wins. Colossians 2:15, the anchor of the next lesson, says that Christ disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them, 'triumphing over them by the cross.' And it is where the deepest problem, which is not shame but sin, is dealt with: 'He was pierced for our transgressions' (Isaiah 53:5). The Christian does not ask his Muslim friend to believe that God abandoned Jesus. He asks him to consider that God's rescue was greater than an escape: not rescue from death, but rescue through death and out the other side.

The third question is about scripture, and it shapes the other two. The Qur'an speaks with respect of earlier revelation. It names the Tawrat given to Moses, the Zabur given to David and the Injil given to Jesus, and it calls Jews and Christians the People of the Book. It tells the People of the Gospel to judge by what God revealed in it (5:47), and in one verse it tells Muhammad that if he is in doubt he should ask those who read the scripture before him (10:94). Yet most Muslims today believe that the Bible Christians hold has been changed, so that where it disagrees with the Qur'an, the Qur'an is right. This charge is called tahrif, corruption.

Muslim scholars have meant two different things by tahrif, and the difference matters. Many earlier commentators spoke mainly of corruption of meaning: Jews and Christians had misread or misapplied their scriptures, or hidden parts of them. Later writers, especially the Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm in the eleventh century, pressed the stronger claim of corruption of the text itself, and that has become the common popular view. The lesson Has the Text Been Changed? dealt with the textual evidence: thousands of Greek manuscripts, some from the second and third centuries, long before Muhammad, and the fact that the Bible of the seventh century is substantially the Bible we read now. If the text was corrupted, it must have happened before the earliest manuscripts, which leaves it hard to explain why the Qur'an, centuries later, would tell Christians to judge by their Gospel.

Some Christian apologists press this into a dilemma: if the Qur'an affirms the Gospel Christians held in the seventh century, and that Gospel teaches the death and deity of Jesus, then either the Qur'an affirms what contradicts it, or it was mistaken about the Gospel. State the Muslim reply fairly. Many Muslims hold that the Injil was a revelation given to Jesus himself, a single book, not the four Gospels written by others about him, and that the Qur'an's respect is for that original revelation, not for the documents the church preserved. Others hold that the verses in question speak to the Christians of Muhammad's day about what remained true in their books. You may think the dilemma is strong, and many Christians do. Present it as a question to think about together, not a trap to spring, and be ready to hear the answer.

There is a deeper difference underneath the argument about manuscripts. For Muslims, the Qur'an is the eternal word of God given in Arabic, and translations are interpretations rather than the Qur'an itself. Christians do not think of the Bible that way. Its books were written by many human authors over many centuries in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, inspired by the Spirit through their own minds and styles, and Christians have always translated it, believing it remains God's word in any language. So the nearest Christian parallel to the Qur'an is not the Bible but Christ. In Islam, the eternal word of God came as a book. In Christianity, it came as a man, 'full of grace and truth' (John 1:14). Many Christians who talk with Muslims have found that seeing this changes the conversation, because the question is no longer which book is more perfect but where God has spoken most fully.

Christians who love Muslims and want them to know Christ disagree, sometimes sharply, about how to go about it. You should know the main disagreements and hold your own view with humility.

The first is whether Allah is the God of the Bible. Arabic-speaking Christians have called God Allah since before Islam, and the Arabic Bible uses the word on every page, so the word itself is not in dispute. The question is whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Some Christian thinkers, such as Miroslav Volf in Allah: A Christian Response (2011), argue that they refer to the same one Creator, even though Christians believe Muslims understand him in a seriously incomplete way, much as Paul could tell the Athenians that he was proclaiming the God they worshipped as unknown. Others argue that a God who is not Father, Son and Spirit, and who has no Son, is not the same God, since who God is cannot be separated from what he has revealed about himself, and they point to Jesus' words that no one comes to the Father except through him. Both sides agree that only in Christ is God fully known. They disagree over whether Muslims are reaching for the true God imperfectly or worshipping a different conception altogether. You can talk with your friend from either position, but do not present your own as the only one Christians hold.

The second disagreement is about contextualisation. Some Christian workers use the Qur'an's own verses about Jesus, especially Sura 3:42-55, as a starting point, a method popularised under the name the Camel Method by Kevin Greeson. Some go further and support believers from Muslim backgrounds who follow Jesus while continuing to call themselves Muslims and to take part in mosque life, an approach usually called insider movements. Defenders argue that this lets the gospel travel through families and communities without forcing people to adopt a foreign culture, as Paul became like a Jew to Jews, and that many Muslims have come to faith this way. Critics, including many believers from Muslim backgrounds, argue that it blurs the confession of Christ as Son of God and Lord, can leave people treating Muhammad as a prophet, and lets Christians avoid the cost of open discipleship. Both sides cite Paul. The lesson Contextualisation in the Missions track sets out the wider debate, and this is a place where you should listen to the believers from Muslim backgrounds in your own region before forming a view.

The third disagreement is about tone. Some Christians, such as Nabeel Qureshi (1983 to 2017), a former Ahmadi Muslim who wrote Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (2014), combined deep warmth towards Muslims with direct public debate about the evidence for Islam and Christianity, and believed that honest argument is a form of love. Others favour quieter dialogue and friendship and worry that public debate hardens both sides. In 2007, 138 Muslim scholars and leaders published an open letter called A Common Word Between Us and You, inviting Christians to common ground in the love of God and neighbour, and Christian responses ranged from warm welcome to cautious criticism. There is room for both debate and dialogue. What there is no room for is mockery of Muhammad, the Qur'an or your friend, which wounds and does not persuade. The lesson Gentleness and Respect applies with full force here.

Respect means you treat your Muslim friend as someone who loves God and wants to obey him, and you take his faith as seriously as you want him to take yours. Learn to pronounce the words he uses. Do not handle a Qur'an carelessly in front of him, since for Muslims the physical book is treated with great reverence. Offer hospitality that he can accept, with food he can eat. Ask him to pray for you, and pray for him. Many Muslims are more comfortable talking about God than many Christians are, and you can talk about God together.

Accuracy means you never claim more than you know. Do not quote the Qur'an unless you have checked the reference, and do not quote the hadith at all unless you know which collection it comes from and how Muslims rate it. Do not repeat stories about Islam you heard in a sermon or saw online without checking them. Describe your friend's faith as he describes it, and then ask questions. If you do not know the answer to his question, say so and promise to look. It is better to say I do not know than to be caught out in an error, because then he will doubt everything else you said.

Safety is not optional. In some countries leaving Islam is punishable by law, and in many communities a Muslim who becomes a Christian faces rejection by his family, loss of marriage, inheritance or work, and sometimes violence, including from relatives. Classical Islamic law prescribed death for apostasy, and while many modern Muslim scholars reject that ruling, often citing the Qur'an's statement that there is no compulsion in religion (2:256), the danger to converts in many places is real. So never pressure a Muslim friend to make a public profession, to be baptised in public, or to tell his family before he is ready. Never post photographs of converts or their baptisms online, never share their stories with names or places, and never put a new believer in the position of having to choose between Christ and safety because of your enthusiasm. Let him make those decisions, with the help of a local church that knows the situation. Jesus told his disciples to be 'as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves' (Matthew 10:16). The lesson The Persecuted Church in the Missions track explains how believers in such places live and how you can stand with them.

Your own safety matters too. Where it is against the law to try to persuade a Muslim to change religion, know the law and its penalties before you speak, and do not take risks with other people's lives that they have not chosen. Friendship, hospitality, honest answers to honest questions and a life that shows the love of Christ are almost always possible, even where public preaching is not.

Your practical step this week. Read Sura 19 (Maryam), which you can find free online in Pickthall's translation, and then read Luke 1 and 2. In your notebook make two columns, and write what each says about Mary, the birth of Jesus and who Jesus is. Then write, in your own words and in no more than half a page, an answer to the question your Muslim friend is most likely to ask you: how can God have a Son? Use John 1:1-14, make clear what Christians do not believe, and end with a question you could ask your friend in return. If you have a Muslim friend, ask him, at a good moment and with no pressure, what he believes about Jesus, and listen to the whole answer before you say anything.