No God but One: Allah or Jesus? A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity
Nabeel Qureshi, No God but One: Allah or Jesus? A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016. 320 pp. $17.99, paper.
Stories of converts from Islam to Christianity are plentiful. Indeed, according to some reports unprecedented numbers of Muslims are coming to Christ across the world. Notably less common, however, are testimonies of former Muslims that ascribe a significant role to Christian apologetics. Nabeel Qureshi represents one such case—perhaps the best-known case given the success of his first book,
Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, in which he recounted his personal journey from Islam (specifically the Ahmadi tradition) to Christianity. His conversion was driven not only by increasing unease with traditional Islamic teachings but also by historical arguments against major Islamic claims. A significant component of Qureshi’s story involves his friendship with David Wood and his encounters with Christian apologists Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, whose arguments eventually persuaded him that Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection were historical events.
Qureshi’s first book served as an apologetic as well as a testimony, but it didn’t directly and systematically address the historical and theological issues at stake between Christianity and Islam. Qureshi’s most recent book,
No God but One, does precisely that. As Qureshi puts it, his first book reflects “the heart” of his story, while this one represents “the mind” of his story. His stated goal is to defend two basic theses: “that the differences between Islam and Christianity have great implications, and that the evidence of history strongly supports the Christian claims” (13). The wording of his second thesis already hints at the methodology he adopts for establishing the truth of Christianity.
The book is thus structured into two halves addressing two crucial questions: (1)
What are the differences between Islam and Christianity? (2)
Can we know whether Islam or Christianity is true? The second question somewhat understates Qureshi’s goal, which is not merely to argue that we
can know whether one of the two religions is true, but that examining the historical evidence shows us precisely
which one is true. Each half of the book is further divided into five parts, and each of these into four short chapters, resulting in a book with 40 easily digestible chapters. In the remainder of this review, I will briefly summarize the main issues addressed in the book before offering an assessment of its content and approach to those issues.
Part 1 (“Sharia or the Gospel?”) contrasts the Islamic and Christian views of salvation: law-keeping versus grace-receiving. The two faiths present very different diagnoses of the human condition, and thus offer very different solutions. To put matters bluntly: Islam teaches that we can (and must) save ourselves, whereas Christianity teaches that only God can save us.
Part 2 (“
Tawhid or the Trinity?”) examines the different views of God represented by each faith. While both are monotheistic—each can affirm the biblical
shema—the God of the Quran is “a monad” with no internal interpersonal relations (the Quran states emphatically that Allah has no son) but the God of the New Testament is triune. The last of these four chapters raises the vexed question of whether Muslims and Christians “worship the same God.” Readers in search of an unambiguous answer to the question will not find one here (although to be fair, that’s partly because the question itself is ambiguous and thus susceptible to different answers depending on how it is interpreted). Nevertheless, we are left in no doubt that the Islamic and Christian views of God are diametrically opposed at significant points. The two religions cannot be reconciled.
Part 3 (“Muhammad or Jesus?”) contrasts the two founders of Islam and Christianity, although much of the material focuses on Muhammad’s view of Jesus (a merely human prophet) versus Jesus’s own view of himself (the incarnate Son of God). Along the way, Qureshi seeks to defuse some of the common objections Muslims have raised against the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Part 4 (“The Quran or the Bible?”) compares the two holy books of Islam and Christianity, laying out not only the major differences between the Islamic and Christian understandings of divine inspiration but also traditional Muslim views on the corruption of the Bible. Qureshi closes this section of the book with a personal testimony of how the Bible penetrated his heart in a way that the Quran never did, speaking words of deep comfort in a time of sorrow.