Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60070. Whether there is religious freedom in Islamic lands is a question that invites two bad answers. One says no, never, anywhere, which is inaccurate. The other says the situation is much like anywhere else, which is worse than inaccurate because it makes light of real suffering. I want to give you the picture…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60051. Are Islam and Christianity compatible? The question is asked in several different senses, and a great deal of confusion comes from answering one sense while the questioner meant another. Sometimes it means whether Muslims and Christians can live peaceably as neighbours, which is a social question. Sometimes it means whether the two faiths…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60012. Islam and Christianity share a great deal of vocabulary and disagree about almost everything that vocabulary refers to. Both speak of one God, of prophets, of revelation, of Jesus, of judgement, and the overlap makes the differences harder to see rather than easier. I want to describe what Muslims actually believe, accurately enough…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60017. The question of whether the Qur’an proves the Bible reaches me from two directions at once, and the people asking it want opposite things. Some Muslims say that the Qur’an confirms the Torah and the Gospel, and that a Christian ought therefore to accept the Qur’an as the final word in the same…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60016. Whenever this question comes up, people are usually asking two different things at once, and it helps to separate them before deciding whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. One question is whether both faiths teach that there is only one God. The other is whether the God each describes is in…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12045. Defending religious liberty while believing that idolatry is a sin against God feels, to a lot of people, like holding two contradictory positions at once. I get asked this most often when the conversation turns to Islam in Britain, and the question underneath it is usually sharper than the words used: why should…