My free Quran form the Local Mosque
When a Christian and a Muslim debate, often the holy books are in the crosshairs. The Christian tries to find errors in the Quran, and the Muslim will do the same thing with the Bible. A good tactic? I don’t think so.
I’ve seen this little Muslim meme trending online lately so it’s time for me to respond to it. It’s actually not hard to respond to in the slightest. The Christian has a few options and I’m going to go through them. Ijaz Ahmad has put this on his website and it’s getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately no one is responding to it properly. This type of argument is exactly what to expect from street dawah and dawah booths in Western countries. We need to be prepared. Before you read any further, think about how you might respond to this.
It is true that most Christians don’t know the Bible that well. In this day and age, we’re bound to run into some young zealous Muslim who engages in dawah and wants to sell Islam to us. The answer is simple, we need to know our Bible and how to debate.
Ijaz Ahmad put the following video up not that long ago. Here is my response.
In this day and age, the crusades have been used as baton to beat the Christian over the head and shame them in their faith. This is true for both liberals and Muslims. We could draw up a list of pros and cons about the crusades and come up with many under each column. I should just point out that Thomas Madden, Jonathan Riley Smith, and Edward Peters are the ones to read on the crusades.
St. Paul The Apostle
For most Muslims, the Apostle Paul is the big baddy in the New Testament. Why is this? Islamic sources reference Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the earthly disciples of Christ and says they’re all Muslims. However, the apostle Paul is never mentioned. I suppose this means Muslims can take a stand with or against Paul. However, as we’ll see it’s always against.
In 2014 I was on a trip to Europe. I only spent two days in Serbia, but I really loved it there. I’m definitely going to go back. I was particularly attracted to the anti-Western mentality that they had there. One thing that I noticed was the religiosity. Serbia is a deeply religious country. They are part of the Eastern Orthodox communion and the Orthodox faith forms an integral part of their society. It’s pretty impressive. I wish all Catholic countries were this observant.
A prophet cannot die outside of Jerusalem. Jesus died outside of Jerusalem. Either Jesus is a false prophet or he didn’t die since the Gospels say that he died outside of Jerusalem! Checkmate Christian apologist!
After watching the debate between Shabir Ally and David Wood, I started thinking about what kind of debates I’d like to see Muslims engage in. The more debates that I thought of, the more I noticed something interesting. In these ideal debates, not one of them was with an apologist defending Christianity. The more I though about it, every Muslim debate that I’ve seen was with an apologist defending the Christian viewpoint. Here are the three debates that I’d like to see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYL5TZ9jJqg
On March 3, 2018, David Wood and Shabir Ally debated on the topic Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? For those who don’t know, Shabir Ally takes a very unorthodox position on this issue. It’s a very modern position not found in the classical Islamic period. While most Muslims would say that someone else was made to look like Jesus, Shabir Ally has another theory. Jesus was placed on the cross, left to die, taken down, received no medical attention, then is assumed into heaven from the tomb. Apologists such as Yusuf Ismail, Sami Zaatari, and Zakir Hussain have all debated this topic and do not accept this theory. Instead they go with a more traditional substitution theory.