Is the Qur’an Compatible with the Bible?

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind. There is no doubt that Islam is very much a religion of glory, a religion of power, and a religion that although it has many elements of peacefulness in it, I don't want anybody to misunderstand that, condones violence and justifies violence in the name of God and the spreading of Islam. It was almost 20 years ago that Islamic extremists staged the deadliest terror attack ever carried out on American soil. If you were alive then, you probably remember it like it was yesterday.

You remember where you were, what you were doing, and quickly realized the world would never be the same. People wanted to know what motivated these terrorists. They wanted to know what Muslims believe.

That's why Dr. R.C. Stroll invited a special guest to the studio to discuss Islam. And while the world has changed a bit since then, the religion has not. So we'd like for you to hear that interview this week, and I think you'll find that the insights we gain will help us navigate our relationships with Muslim neighbors and co-workers. I've invited a person to be with us today who has inside knowledge about Islam. And so I'm welcoming today to our program, Abdul Salib. Abdul, thank you for being with us today. Thank you, R.C., for inviting me.

It's a privilege to be with you today. I have lots of questions, and I'm sure that Christians all over the country have questions that they would like to have answered, and I'm going to try to be the point man to throw those questions at you if you can help give us some clarity and insight into understanding the historic nature of Islam. I'm sure you're interested in how the news media in America interprets Islamic religion, the holy war, jihad, all of that sort of thing, but one of the things I noticed, Abdul, is they constantly refer to the followers of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden as fundamentalist Muslims. Sometimes they'll use language like fundamentalist extremists or fundamentalist radicals, and the reason I cringe a little bit is because I'm aware as an American Christian that the American media often uses the term fundamentalist to refer to what we would call orthodox Christians, even though it's a derisive term.

That's correct. And when you hear the term fundamentalist Muslim, what does it mean to you? Well, actually, R.C., it basically means the same thing to me, that a fundamentalist Muslim is a Muslim who is taking his Koran very seriously.

Just like the Christian world is struggling with secularism, the Islamic world is also filled with millions of nominal Muslims who are just Muslims in names. So in fact, when I also hear fundamentalist Muslims, I am not just hearing some radical fringe group within Islam, but in fact these are the devout Muslims who want to take their faith very seriously and spread Islam and also combat secularism and unbelief. Well, historically, the term fundamentalist with respect to Christianity, of course, grew up out of the so-called modernist liberal controversy at the beginning of the 20th century, and the fundamentalist movement was led by very serious orthodox scholars, theologians, for example, from the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, responding against 19th century liberals who had all but destroyed the very basic tenets of Christianity, such as most of the elements of the Apostles Creed, the resurrection of Christ, the atonement, the virgin birth, and so on, and still wanted to call themselves Christians. And so these scholarly people said, no, you're negotiating the foundational truths of classical biblical Christianity. And of course today the term fundamentalist means anti-intellectual, moralistic, and so on, but it has that pejorative connotation, and yet in its origins it referred to classical orthodoxy. Now that's my question. When you talk about bin Laden and the Taliban and these people, would you say that they represent the lunatic fringe of Islam or that they represent classic, orthodox, real fundamental Muslims?

I would say somewhere in between our see. The Taliban actually are doing things that are, in fact, a little bit on the extreme side, that even as we know the records of the origin of Muhammad himself and the history of Islam, that even some of the extreme ways that they are interpreting Islam was not even done at the time of Prophet Muhammad. So that's an important issue that we need to acknowledge. At the same time, they are not just some radical weird fringes of Islam, they are very much devout Muslims. And let's also say that, of course, not all Muslims are pro-Taliban, but there are many other movements within fundamentalist Islam that have as much hatred toward the West, the Christian faith, democracy as the Taliban do, but right now they're not taking arms to show that anger and hatred towards the Christian church. So my point is the Taliban are not the only representatives of orthodox Islam. However, what they are doing is very much within mainstream Islam. I don't know if I've answered your question or not.

I think you have. You know, the President of the United States has argued and has stated over and over again that America and its declaration of war against terrorism is not at war with any particular nation, and is certainly not at war with a religion, but only against the criminal element of terrorists and those who harbor these terrorists. Now, the press is following on that has been making a point over and over again that true Islam is a religion of peace and love. Do you agree with that? No, I see.

I don't. In fact, the other day I was listening to NBC today and they had Karen Armstrong and an imam of a mosque in New York. And the reporter said, isn't actually the Koran also doesn't the Koran also have passages that basically say turn the other cheek? And the imam actually got choked on that question because there is no such thing in Islam. The media is trying to portray Islam as a religion of peace and love.

But let me set the record straight, R.C., for you and all the listeners. There is no separation of church and state in Islam. Politics is very much part of the very fabric of the origin of Islam. And the goal of Islam from day one that it came on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century was to dominate the world.

The Koran is filled with passages and the traditions that go back to Mohammed that say that every Muslim should be involved in this struggle to spread Islam around the world. Islamic theology divides the world into two categories, the house of Islam and the house of war. Islam does not accept pluralism. Islam did not come on the scene to just say we are one way and one many ways to God. Islam claims an exclusive path to that one true God. And Islam declares that basically all the other religions have been corrupted. The religion of Moses has been corrupted. The religion of Jesus has been corrupted. And it's the task of Muslims to spread the true faith to the whole world.

All right, Abdul. Of course, very shortly after the terrorist attack on our nation, there was a major prayer service held in the National Cathedral. And there were representatives there from the Roman Catholic world, from the Protestant world, from the Evangelical world, representatives from Judaism, and also from Islam in this joint prayer service.

And, of course, in the opening prayer, the invocation was offered by the dean of the National Cathedral. Pray to God in words something like this that we pray to the one who is the God of Abraham, of Mohammed, and of Jesus. Same God, right?

I was in the Middle East, actually, RC, when I saw that program. And I believe the wording was, Pray in the name of the God of Abraham, the God of Mohammed, and the Father of Jesus Christ. And I almost fell from my chair because that's an important point here that the God of Mohammed, the Allah that is portrayed in the Quran, has some radical differences with the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as portrayed in the Bible.

Can you tell us a little bit about it? Because, you know, part of the popular, what I call civil religion in America, has this, I think, naive view that we all worship the same God just by different names. And even though there may be some points of difference in our rites and rituals and all that, at the bottom, and its core, there's no real difference between Judaism and Islam and Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism, you know.

Tell us about that. Tell us about Allah. Yeah, I wish I had time to read you scores of Quranic verses that disprove this idea that we basically all worship one God or the same God. Allah has very different characteristics.

Let me mention some. The word holiness as ascribed to God has only been used twice in the entire Quran. We meet a God in the Quranic pages that changes its minds, changes its promises, does not guarantee any assurance of salvation to the believers, and a God that basically there is no emphasis on the Quran on the holiness of God. The Quran opposes very, very explicitly that anybody who claims the doctrine of the Trinity, any Christians, basically, it's a doctrine that will actually condemn you to go to hell if you believe such a thing.

All right, let me just interrupt you a second. So that one clear difference between the Christian view of God and the Muslim view of God is that the Christian view of God is that God is triune. That's correct. And Christianity, of course, affirms the deity of Christ.

That's correct. Where does Christ fit in with the Quran and Islam? Jesus is just a prophet, although he was born of Virgin Mary, and he did many miracles, and he's called the Word from God, the Spirit of God. He is just another human being. He's just a prophet. And anybody who ascribes deity to Christ is a blasphemer, commits the unpardonable sin of Shirk, which is attributing partners to God, and is doomed to hell.

I have verses in the Quran in front of me I could read for you. Does the Quran deny that Christ died on the cross? That's correct.

In Surah 4, verse 157, the Quran explicitly denies that Jesus ever was killed on the cross or crucified. And therefore also denies the resurrection. That's correct. So it'd be really hard to have a compatible ecumenical relationship between an orthodox view of the Quran and classical Christianity.

That's correct. Let me give you just one verse, R.C. Surah 9, the 9th chapter of the Quran, verse 30.

This is basically what I'd call the bottom line verse here. Surah 9, verse 30 says, And the Christians call Christ the Son of God, that's the same from their mouth, in this they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say, God's curse be on them, how they are deluded away from the truth. Surah 9, verse 30 says, Christians who claim that Jesus is the Son of God are under the curse of God.

Now the Bible in 1 John, chapter 5, verses 11 and 12, says, In fact, those who believe in Jesus as the Son of God are the ones who have eternal life. So the two books cannot be compatible in who Jesus is and what is the one way to God. Well, Abdul, you have co-authored a book with Dr. Norman Geisler that's entitled Answering Islam, and the subtitle interests me in as much as it's called The Crescent in the Light of the Cross. Now, you see two symbols. When you see the universal symbol of the Christian faith, it is the symbol of the cross, which is not a very glorious symbol at all. It's the sign of suffering and of death. And yet the sign of Islam is the crescent. What's the significance of that?

It's actually, R.C., a good question, but very controversial question. We do not know really the origin, the historical origin of that symbol. Some say it's the moon god and it shows the pagan roots of Islam.

Some say this is the miracle that Muhammad did, the splitting of the moon. Some say it was a cultural symbol that Islam adopted. So there's not one unanimous view, but there is no doubt that Islam is very much a religion of glory, a religion of power, and a religion that, although it has many elements of peacefulness in it, I don't want anybody to misunderstand that, condones violence and justifies violence in the name of God and the spreading of Islam. So often when we picture Jesus, we think of him as gentle and meek, the Prince of Peace, and the most widely image that you see of Muhammad is as he is brandishing a scimitar or a sword. Is that not right?

It is correct. And let me just say this, R.C., there are many beautiful passages in the Quran. There are many traditions about Muhammad, about what a fair person, what a just person and a humble person he was. I don't want to say, let's disregard all these things. But one second, what I want to emphasize is that we also have a dark side to Islam. There are many passages in the Quran and there are many traditions that go back to Prophet Muhammad and the history of Muhammad's life that portrayed the dark side of Islam, the side that Muhammad sponsored many of his opponents to be assassinated in his own lifetime.

All right. Well, let me ask the more generic question for our listeners benefit, Abdul. I think the average American Christian really knows very, very little about Muhammad. If you would say, when did he live, I think the guesses would be all over the calendar. So can you give us a nutshell capsule summary of who was Muhammad, when did he live and all that sort of thing? Muhammad appeared in the 7th century in the Arabian Peninsula. He was a merchant.

He appeared publicly. That's correct. I mean, what I was going to say, in the year 610 at the age of 40, he proclaimed his prophethood to the Arabian people. And he was actually born exactly 500 years after the fall of Jerusalem. That's correct.

That's right. 570 AD he was born. In 610, he claimed that he had received revelations from God and that was the beginning of the Quran. And his ministry lasted 23 years.

All right. So for 40 years, what was he doing before he... We don't know much. Islamic history, of course, fills that gap. But he was supposed to be a very fair merchant. He was involved in business for his wife who was 15 years older than him. And he had a reputation for being an honest person. Okay. And so he starts this religious movement in the year 610.

That's correct. What were the basic elements of this religious movement? The basic elements in the beginning, in the first 13 years of his time in Mecca, he was actually just a proclaimer. He was a preacher.

He was a warner. These are the words that the Quran uses of him. He invited the pagans who were worshipping idols in Mecca to turn to the one true God. He was talking about the day of judgment, vivid portrayals of hell awaiting those who disobeyed God and worship idols. So basically, he had a role as a warner, as a preacher, inviting people to abandon idolatry, to live justly and righteously, to help the poor, the orphans. And he actually faced a great deal of rejection and persecution in the first 13 years of his ministry in Mecca.

And then what happened? What was his so-called hajjara? Yeah, and what happened was he was invited by another city, the city of Yathrib, which then later became Medina.

He was invited by the folks living in that city to come and join them. And that's when many people see a tremendous shift in the character of Muhammad and in fact in the style of the Quran. So Muhammad, in the last 10 years of his life, he became also a political ruler of a city.

And he and his followers started organizing raids and attacks to the pagan caravans that were passing by. And the justification was that for all these years, Muslims were oppressed, Muslims were persecuted, and now it's our turn to show you guys, you know, who has the power. So it was in the last 10 years that the Islamic religion endorsed the idea of picking up the sword and fighting in the cause of God and spreading the faith. And where does the Quran come in? Well, all these 23 years, various revelations supposedly from God through Angel Gabriel came to Prophet Muhammad, and these 23 years of various revelations were all pieced together shortly after his death. So he did not actually write the Quran, but nevertheless the content of it supposedly had its origin in him.

That's correct. He was supposedly an illiterate person. In fact, that's what Muslims claimed is the great miracle of the Quran, that an illiterate person produced such a beautiful book of poetry, and his secretaries would write down his revelations, and then they were collected after his death. Now, is the Quran the only holy book or scripture for Islam? The Quran is the only holy book in Islam, and it's the only book that is viewed to be the word of God. However, both Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, the two main sects within Islam, have traditions, have hadiths, and these are people who collected the sayings of Muhammad, and they are viewed also as having a great deal of authority in the average everyday life of a Muslim. Okay, well, the word that we keep hearing now coming out of Afghanistan, and being mediated, of course, through the press, is the word jihad.

This is not a normal part of English vocabulary either. Can you tell our people what a jihad is? Yes, jihad means struggle. And as we have heard many times in the media in the last few weeks, that it is not just a holy war, that it is true that there are Islamic traditions say that the greater struggle is to kill the elements of our sinful nature. However, it also carries within it the very strong connotation that a struggle is not just a spiritual struggle with our inner sinful desires, but also a physical outward struggle, which can be an intellectual struggle by, you know, writing books, promoting Islamic ideas, and it can also be a struggle of sword and violence to, again, spread Islam and fight unbelief. Is it true, Abdul, that classical Islam, not just some sect that deviates from it, sees the killing of an infidel as a virtue?

It's correct, R.C. It is really true, and I have tons of passages in front of me, both from the Quran and from the traditions of Prophet Muhammad, that condone such violence. Now, let me say this, again, it's very important, because the vast majority of Muslims are not the kind of people who would go out and kill people. This is not the issue. The vast majority of Muslims ignore a good part of their darker side of their traditions.

That's not an issue. But, again, the point that we need to emphasize in this country is that those who do engage in violence have perfect justification for doing what they do based on the Quran and the life of Muhammad. Muslims pride themselves that they are the final religion, they're the most perfect and elevated religion of all humanity. In fact, you hear many times people use this illustration that Judaism is like elementary school, Christianity is like high school, and Islam is like the university.

You kind of graduate into the spiritual maturity when you become a Muslim. And then the question is, well, how come, if Islam claims to be a higher form than even the teachings of Christ, how come then you see Islam actually going back to many issues that we encounter in the Old Testament? There doesn't seem to be any progress from Christ to Islam when you compare it in those terms. Well, you know, at the beginning of all of this there was a statement from him indicating an attack against American imperialism and so on, and little or nothing said about the state of Israel. Then more recently his rhetoric has shifted somewhat to talk about one of the main reasons for the target on America was because of our support for the Jewish state in Israel.

How does this fit in with contemporary Islamic religion? Yeah, R.C., truly the seeds of hatred toward the Jews and the Jewish religion are all over the Quran and Islamic traditions. There is a very, very well-established tradition of Prophet Muhammad written in the oldest biography of Muhammad written by a Muslim historian that says, kill the Jews wherever you find them. There are passages in the Quran that tell Muslims that whoever befriends Jews and Christians becomes one of them and God will not guide that person. So the idea of anti-Jewish sentiments are very strong that go back to the very roots of Islamic religion and history. Well, that's interesting. I mean, some of the people today tend to think, at least in this country, that all of this hostility between the Arabs and the Jews was fueled by the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. Yeah, that is not true at all. In other words, this far antedates that particular historical event. Is that what you're saying?

Absolutely. When Muhammad moved to Medina, R.C., there were three Jewish tribes living in the suburbs of that city. And Muhammad expelled the first group, looted the second tribe, and he killed 700 men, all the men of the third Jewish tribe. This goes back to the time of Prophet Muhammad himself. And these anti-Jewish feelings, again, are very much part of the Islamic fabric. Well, we see then that this hostility has its roots not just at the time of Muhammad in the 7th century, but even back into antiquity, doesn't it? That's correct.

I mean, as a Christian, when I look at the Genesis account and God's covenant being extended through Isaac and not Ishmael, I see that the roots are really, I find them in the book of Genesis. And then again between Jacob and Esau. That's correct.

I mean, those things have far, far, far reaching consequences, didn't they? That's correct. I've been told, I don't know how accurate this is, maybe you can help me, that there are today approximately 250 million Muslims surrounding 5 million Jews in the Middle East. Is that basically accurate?

That's correct, yes. No wonder the Jews in Israel have a hard time sleeping at night. That's right, and of course I am not here to condone everything that the Israeli government or army has done, but yes, there's definitely not a very balanced situation there in the Middle East. And there are those who are absolutely committed to the total destruction of the Jewish state, is that right?

That's very right. See, Muslims, I think it's part of the human nature, but I think I see it more in the Muslim world that because they view themselves as the final religion and as the greatest of all peoples, so the fact that in the last few centuries the Western world has far surpassed the Islamic world in terms of technology and science and wealth and prosperity, this has created deep levels of frustration in the Muslim world. They ask themselves, why has God abandoned us?

Why are we not the great nations that we are supposed to be if we are following the one true God and the final most perfect religion? So all these deep feelings of frustration and hatred are surfacing themselves in many ways, whether it's being anti-Israeli, being anti-U.S., anti-Christianity, they go back to that deep issue that Muslims must be the ruling people in the world and they don't find themselves in that situation, and so this is an attempt to get back to that position of power and world domination. That is helpful information, isn't it? We've heard a portion of an interview that Dr. R.C. Sproul did with Abdul Salib, a former Muslim and now a Christian missionary to Muslims here in the U.S. Perhaps you have Muslim neighbors or co-workers and you're wondering how to interact with them and perhaps share the gospel with them. So I hope you'll join us the rest of this week here on Renewing Your Mind as we share more of this interview. And we're offering the entire interview to you in a two-CD set. It's titled The Dark Side of Islam, and it's yours for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You'll find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. Many of us understand Islam from a geopolitical perspective. The Islamic terrorists who make the headlines determine most of our opinions of Muslim people, but as Christians, we must understand the religion itself. Simply calling it another of the world's great monotheistic religions hides the fact that Muslims deny the deity of Christ and deny salvation by faith alone. These facts should cause us to pray for those trapped in this false religion. So again, we invite you to request this two-CD set, The Dark Side of Islam.

Our number again is 800-435-4343, and our web address is renewingyourmind.org. And on behalf of all of my colleagues here at Ligonier Ministries, thank you for your gift of any amount. By the way, you can find more helpful resources when you go to tabletalkmagazine.com. For example, there are more than 100 articles on the topic of Islam. Each month, Table Talk provides a Christian perspective on a current topic, plus it provides daily guided Bible studies. Dr. Sproul said that Table Talk Magazine exists to help establish us in the Word to deepen our understanding of God.

So we invite you to learn more when you go to tabletalkmagazine.com. Thank you for being with us today, and we hope you'll make plans to join us again tomorrow for more of Dr. Sproul's interview with Abdul Salib as they address a common misconception that Christians and Muslims serve the same God. Muslim theologians are very emphatic that we cannot know God. We only know His commands. We only know His will. Our commands have been given to us in the Koran, but we don't know what God is like.

So these are some fundamental issues that differentiate the portrait of the God that we encounter in the Bible as opposed to the one that we encounter in the Koran. Join us tomorrow on Renewing Your Mind. www.mooji.org