What Does a Christian Need to Know About Islam? Session 2

Love hearing that singing. I must have been right at the right point where it just echoes right back at me. It sounded, I was gonna say, I sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. That didn't sound, that didn't come out right.

We're not doing a session on Mormonism today, but some of you know that we were just up there last weekend and stuff going on there. There was really major, major things going on there. Just so, such a blessing how many people came up to us and told us that they had been delivered out of Mormonism through our ministry over the years.

You know, we went up there for a long time. The first time, I remember one of the first trips up there was in my 1964 Dodge Dart. No two body panels were the same color. And for years we stayed at Motel 6 and just barely made it and sowed a lot of seed.

And we're seeing a harvest. Pray that that will continue. It's very, very encouraging. All right, how many of you saw the presentation I made at, I think it was this, I think it was this January at G3 on reaching out to our Muslim friends?

Two, all right, whew. Yeah, there was only four views on the YouTube video, so we found two of them. All right, so I don't have to worry too much about repeating myself. Let's just put it that way. Actually, many people there felt it a very convicting presentation.

Certainly not the way to make myself popular amongst my own people, but there are definitely some strong things I need to say. And if they apply to you, great. If they don't, just pray for me as I speak to others.

Why Personal Relationships Matter in Christian-Muslim Apologetics

Over the past, starting in 2006, so we're just coming up on, you know, 13, 14 years ago, I began seriously dealing with the subject of Islam with a debate that I did with Shabir Ali. Ironically, I'll be debating Shabir in a couple weeks in Atlanta in the United States.

Once again, I've lost track of how many times we have debated, but from that time onward, I have had the opportunity to get to know a number of Muslim men, primarily. You can understand that culturally.

Somewhere, I forget where it was, but I had done a debate with Adnan Rashid in London, and Adnan is a big Pakistani guy. He's much bigger than I am. And he was used to engaging with people at Speaker's Corner.

Everybody know what Speaker's Corner is in London? I've actually not gone there myself. That's not really my style. Believe it or not, yelling and screaming is not my thing. And that's pretty much what happens there.

But that's what he had grown up with as far as his experience with Christians. He and I were doing two debates in Dublin, Ireland, one at the university, the City College, and then the next night at Trinity College.

And between the two, we had lunch together. And that was the first time we had done anything other than to shake hands, sit down at a table, and then start arguing with another in a debate. And I wanted to do this because I just sensed something about Adnan, and what I did during that time period is I explained to him why I do what I do.

Why I do what I do with whether it's Roman Catholics or Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, whatever else it might be. And basically introduced him to a human being who he already knew that I really do seek to accurately represent those that I, even those with whom I disagree.

No one ever came up to, I never took a class on apologetics until seminary. And I was already deeply involved in apologetics that time. No one ever came up to me and said, the most important thing you can do as a Christian apologist is to accurately represent what the other side says.

No one ever told me that, but I am absolutely convinced of it, and I'm convinced of it because if you're going to present to someone, and I believe that there's no reason, there's no reason for me to be an apologist if I am not seeking to present the gospel in all of this.

That's why we're here, that's what my calling is. There is no office of apologist. And so yes, apologetics does encourage the believers and it grounds them in their faith and all those things, but especially when I'm engaging in debate, I have to represent Christ.

He is the truth, therefore I cannot be untruthful in anything that I do in a debate, even if it gives me an advantage. I'm absolutely convicted about that. And so I'm not saying that I've been perfect in that because I'm, when it comes to Islam, I've said many, many times, I am a student of Islam.

I don't think that starting at the age I started, you could ever exhaust the amount of information on that particular subject or many other particular subjects these days, does that matter? So I may misrepresent out of ignorance, but I never do it out of intent to try to gain an advantage over someone.

And so I had the opportunity of sharing with Adnan, and I think if you go online and you watch those two debates knowing they took place on consecutive nights, and now knowing that in between, there is a personal meeting, you will see a real difference in how Adnan and I interacted with each other the second night, because now there was a personal connection.

The other person isn't just simply a target, isn't just simply a mouth speaking certain words, it's a human being. You understand more about where he's coming from, he understands more about where you're coming from.

And especially amongst the Muslims with whom I can become familiar, they realize that I am a Christian who will not compromise, who has read the Quran numerous times, who has read all of Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and major portions of Jami 'at Tirmidhi and other of the Sunni Hadith, and even portions of the Shia Hadith.

I have done my due diligence, if you've read my book on Islam, I've done my due diligence in accurately representing what the text of the Quran says and things like that. You may disagree with my conclusions, but at least you see that.

And so I'm uncompromising, I defend the Trinity, I defend the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I defend things that there are other people who debate Muslims will not defend. And yet for all of that, what they don't really know what to do with is I care about them as individuals.

I don't treat them as just some enemy. I treat them as an individual. I want to see the best for them. And of course, I make it very clear, the best for them is to know who Jesus really is. And I know what they want for me.

It changes everything when you have that kind of an encounter. And it changes your heart. Some of you know, how many of you have seen my dialogue with Yasir Qadhi? Okay, that's about 20%. I would highly recommend it to you as a follow-up to this conversation to watch that two-night discussion.

I think it was a Tuesday and Wednesday evening. The first night was in a church in the Memphis area, and the second night was in the mosque where he's the imam there in the Memphis area. It was not a worship service for those people who tried to lie about that.

The church made itself available, provided the security and the food and the goodies. And then the next night, we did the same thing at Yasir Qadhi's mosque where he was one of the imams. He's left there now.

He's now in Dallas. It truly opened my eyes to see how people responded to my encounter with Yasir Qadhi. Not only was it very obvious that I was the one that got the blowback, Yasir Qadhi did not. His community did not have a problem with him having me in.

And if you've watched those dialogues, you know that the introduction he gave to me at the mosque was stunning. He told of sending me his 16-CD series, Light and Guidance, which I had listened to multiple times, that I started sending him questions with Arabic about things that he had said.

And he basically told his people, we've never met someone on the Christian side who knows as much about what we believe as this man does. And then he starts asking me questions like, we Muslims don't get the Trinity.

Could you explain it to us? Why did a part of God have to die? And there's no pushback. One of the things that Yasir told me, he says, look, James, I don't want to debate you because it's not fair. I'm not stupid.

You studied my faith. I have not studied yours. So that really puts me at a disadvantage. And I get it, but I sensed in Yasir Qadhi the first time he began listening to his materials. And I had listened not only to his CDs, but I had downloaded everything I could from the net.

His lectures, I listened to his in-depth lectures on Hadith sciences and the rules of how you determine the Sahih Hadith and Hassan and all the rest of that stuff. And yes, I'm riding through August weather in Phoenix on a bike, sweating profusely, listening to Yasir Qadhi lecture on Hadith sciences.

And he's impressed by that. He says, I can't get my own students to do that. And why? Well, in those dialogues on the first night, one of the things I brought up was, what do you want from me? And here's what I want for you.

And I did the same thing, if any of you were watching live just last week with Alma Alred, a Mormon at the University of Utah. We need to make it clear. We don't believe the same things. So what is it that you want from me?

What is it that I want for you? And we made that very, very clear, that I wanted him to come to know who Jesus Christ truly was, that he was king of kings and lord of lords, that is not shirk. I'll explain what that is in a moment.

To believe that and to come to have peace with God through faith in Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, for him, he wants me to say the Shahada, which is the means by which you become a Muslim. By confession in Arabic, la ilaha illallah wa muhammadan wazoolallah.

There is only one God worthy of worship and Muhammad is his prophet. And to submit to Islam and to the teachings of Islam and to not engage in shirk, which most Muslims believe we Christians are doing in regards to Jesus Christ.

And so we made it very, very clear that both of us understood, but that there were other things we needed to talk about. We also needed to talk about how do we live in the same community when both of our communities are being put under tremendous pressure by the secular society around us to abandon our fundamental beliefs.

And for example, God created men and women and it was good. How do we, do we just ignore one another in that context? Or how do we, is there any way we can get together to try to stop the society from forcing our children out of our homes and into beliefs like that?

So there were things we needed to talk about. Well, the pushback was all on my side. You would not believe the attacks that I experienced from Christians, especially because I said I had learned so much about Islam from Yasir Qadhi.

Oh my goodness, you apostate, you servant of Satan. How could you learn anything about Islam from a Muslim? Seriously, seriously, these people were literally saying that the only way to learn about Islam, if you're a Christian, is from another Christian.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have learned things about Islam from other Christians. There are other Christians that know more about Islam than I do. That's fine. But, for example, when I was studying Arabic, Yasir Qadhi's Arabic is really clear, it's really good, it's easy to understand.

And this guy knows a lot about the subject. And so I was able to gain a tremendous amount of information and I've learned about Mormonism from Mormons and I've learned about atheism from atheists. Got some press town down here, I'm not sure.

I learned a long time ago, when I first met my first two Mormon missionaries, it was only a month or a month and a half before I had exhausted pretty much every Christian book that was available on Mormonism.

And I had noticed in those books, they're constantly quoting from books like Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Marvelous Work and Wonder, Articles of Faith, Mormon Doctrine, Resounding Concrete, Journal Discourses.

So I realized I've got to, I'm done with reading the Christians, I need to go read the Mormons. And so I built my library. And when I started studying Islam, I started building my Islamic library. Because that's how you get meaningful firsthand knowledge of what somebody else believes.

And yet there are many Christians, and I believe it is primarily because of fear, that think that that's a terrible, horrible thing to do. So let me start by saying, we've been started for quite some time now, but let me start by saying, that for me, one of the greatest things we have to overcome in reaching out to our Muslim friends and neighbors is fear.

Part of that fear is the physical fear, the fear of jihad, the fear of, look, how long ago was it that I saw the video of someone running through the streets of downtown Sydney with a knife? What was that, six months, eight months?

I forget when it was. And we see these things, I was getting ready to teach my first day of Christian high school on September 11th, 2001. And we see these things, and they enter it, I ran across London Bridge less than three weeks before the guy drove his car across, running people over, and then jumped out and started stabbing people.

So I get it. So I understand that level of fear. But to be honest with you, for most of us, it is a fear of saying or doing something out of ignorance that will end up causing some type of confrontation that we just don't want to engage in.

And as a result, you all know that there are certain times in our lives when we have an opportunity to say a word in behalf of the Lord to someone, to open up a conversation of spiritual truth. There is that one opening.

And if you don't take it almost immediately, the door closes. And if we're filled with fear, if there is a higher fear factor than love factor, we won't take those opportunities. The door will close. And so I am convinced that one of the first messages I have to deliver to my brothers and sisters is we are in a situation where we have a message that this community desperately needs to hear that is not available within the borders of their community.

The vast majority. Let me just do it, let me go ahead and do it. How many of you have read the Quran? Okay, is that all the Quran or parts of the Quran? Okay, if it's only parts, put your hand down. All the Quran.

Okay, that's actually more than normal. Half of you are going, that's because I'm a Muslim. Okay, nevermind. Most of the time when I ask that question, it is a very small percentage. And normally somebody's going, parts, you know, I read a little bit of this or a little bit of that.

If I asked the same question in a Muslim audience, you'd get about the same percentage, probably a little bit less. There is not a lot of meaningful communication going on between our two communities.

And most of our people are frightfully ignorant of what the Quran teaches and what it says, especially because we are addressed in it. We're called the Al-Kitab, the people, the book, the Al-Anjil, the people, the gospel.

We are specifically addressed in it. And yet, if a half a percent of Western Christians had to have any knowledge of what the Quran actually says to us, I'd be stunned. And when it goes the other direction, the vast majority of Muslims have never read any of the gospels.

They've never read any of Paul. They've never worked through Hebrews. Which surprises me a little bit because, I mean, the Quran says that the Quran and Anjil were sent down by God. And yeah, the modern Muslim may not think that Hebrews is a part of that.

But if you read it in context, it's pretty obvious that the writer intended the Anjil to refer to the gospel, to refer to the scriptures that the Christians had. And I know the author didn't understand what the canon was, and we can get into all that.

But if it seems strange to a Muslim that Christians are not overly concerned about what the Quran says to them, realize it seems pretty strange to us that given that Surah 5 specifically draws a chain of authority from Moses and the Old Testament, and Jesus and the New Testament, to Muhammad and the Quran, might wanna know what's in those previous revelations where it's specifically said would be Netzal, sent down by God.

But that's not the case. And I think part of the reason for that goes back to Muhammad. There is a story in the Hadith when one of the companions of Muhammad was reading from the Old Testament. Muhammad came in, he asked him what he was reading from, and he said from the Old Testament, and Muhammad's face changed color.

In other words, he became angry. And basically said, is not what I have given you enough for you? And so there's sort of a tradition there that has led, I think, the vast majority of Muslims to not have any real idea what is contained in the pages of the Christian Bible.

And hence, the only Jesus that they know is the Jesus that is presented in the pages of the Quran. There are very few references, less than 100 grand total, either by direct use of the term Isa, or by reference by other names to Jesus in the Quran.

And the Jesus of the Quran, this is a quotation from a liberal Mormon scholar in England, is not a person, he's an argument. He's not a person, he's an argument. He only speaks once from identifiable historical location, which, ironically, is from his cradle.

And that's a story that was actually borrowed by the Quran from the Arabic infancy gospel, which was written about 500 years after Christ. The author of the Quran did not know what the New Testament canon was, or what was contained therein.

And hence, a number of times, assumes that certain stories that actually came from the Gnostics were a part of the New Testament. And they're not, not even historical. But that's the only time Jesus speaks from an identifiable place, is that one time.

Otherwise, Jesus just sort of floats around and says things. And the fact is, if that's the only Jesus that you've been exposed to is what's in the Quran, you could never love him. Because he's not lovable, he's not a person.

He's just an argument. And so, one of the greatest things that you can do is to get your Muslim friend to start reading the Gospels. It doesn't matter which one. Mark would be fine. I've had a long-term project that I just can never get around to doing.

I don't know if I ever will. But I would love to translate Mark, so I don't have to worry about copyright issues, translate Mark, and provide study notes in a booklet form that could be just handed out for free, introducing Muslims to the story of Jesus from Mark.

Because there's a lot about who Jesus really is in Mark. There really is. It doesn't have to be John. You don't have to have that. You can have much more. You can get all that in Mark as well. Anyway, if you can get them to read anything from the Gospels, this is a great move forward on our part.

But again, we won't do it if the fear factor is greater than the love factor. You can call it the obedience factor. Christ tells us to bear testimony. So if you wanna go that direction, if you need to have a drill sergeant to tell you to do it, okay, fine.

But in reality, if we recognize that we have here a people who have been given a message, in essence, when you think about what we disagree with, with the Muslims on, you can think about it like this.

You have the Jews, and they had a particular understanding of who they thought the Messiah was going to be. Jesus comes, and he's a whole lot more than that. He is the fulfillment of all sorts of different streams of prophecy that were found in the Old Testament.

Most of the intertestamental theories about who the Messiah would be had focused in on one stream of that, and maybe a stream over here. He's all of that and more. And so when he starts focusing upon who he himself is, when he, in John chapter six, identifies himself as the living bread, this scandalizes people.

And in John chapter eight, he goes so far as to start using the language of I am of himself. Prin abadam genesai, ago I me. Before Abraham was, I am. They pick up stones to stone him. Who are you? You're only 50 years old, and you've seen Abraham's day.

Yeah, before Abraham was, I am. And earlier in that chapter, he had said, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. Those are strong words, very strong words that the vast majority of Muslims have never, ever heard.

And so the Jews, you have fulfillment in Christ, and the Jew says, no, I'm not going there, and rejects Jesus as Messiah. So you have the great fulfillment, the incarnation, the Christian scriptures, the cross, everything else there.

And basically what Islam does is does a U-turn back to where the Jews are. So many of the prophecies of who Jesus is in the Old Testament are interpreted by many modern Muslims about Muhammad. Or you have texts about, for example, I mean, I've literally listened to a Muslim, Jamal Badawi, he's pretty elderly now, I never got a chance to debate him, but I wanted to.

But he had a whole series of lectures out on Muhammad in the Bible. And he actually went to Isaiah 9 -6, unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. But when he went through the descriptions, he skipped mighty God.

He applied all the rest of them to Muhammad, but not mighty God, which is right there. You can't just skip that one, you gotta keep it in there. But it's Judaism, fulfillment in Christianity, U-turn back to the Jewish stance.

And in fact, many Muslim apologists, it's called dawah in Arabic, it's interesting, they recognize that evangelism and apologetics, you can't separate them. So dawah is just calling to Islam. Those who engage in dawah, they will frequently utilize Jewish sources and Jewish argumentation against Jesus, Isaiah 53, and things like that.

Because that's what they've done. They've basically gone back to the starting place. And so our job, and it's a tough one for a lot of us, is to try to overcome our fears, our ignorances, to be used of God in the lives of the Muslim people that God brings us across, to begin that process.

And it can be a very long process. Another thing, if you're into the quick convert type thing, this is not what you wanna be involved in. It's frequently a very, very long process, and a lot of people just aren't in it for the long term.

And so I encourage Christians to pray and ask God, God, have I been obedient to you in preparing my heart to be a witness to those that you might place in my life, and that includes the Muslims? Or do I have a prejudice that would keep me from doing what I need to do?

And knowing what I know, do I keep that to myself? That's really the question that we have to ask ourselves. Now, it has been, on Thursday evening, we're gonna have a debate right in here, right? Right here?

Hopefully not using Skype this time. With Abdullah Kunda, and Abdullah has five times joined my seminary classes via Skype to interact with my students and answer questions about Islam, which means if it's during the day in America, you know he's been getting up like at three o 'clock in the morning to do that.

He did that once wearing a New England Patriots jersey because he's a big Tom Brady fan, which we'll try not to hold that against him. And some of you have no idea who that is. Don't worry about it. By the way, I haven't kept up with the World Cup.

What's, what's, it's done? Lots of games still ahead, but how's Australia doing? Oh, doesn't look like you all are overly excited about this, so we'll just move along. I was in South Africa, and they were really, really excited about it, but you all are just sort of like, eh, whatever.

Do a haka, man, who cares, you know? But Abdullah, Abdullah is extremely unusual because Abdullah actually read my book on the Trinity, and before we had the debate here in New South Wales in 2011, he attempted to express an Islamic perspective in such a way that a Christian can understand it.

That's extremely unusual. I've known many Muslims for many years. He's the first one who has read my book and then attempted to then communicate his objections in a meaningful fashion so we could understand where he was coming from.

That's extremely unusual. Almost always, we are the ones building that bridge. But you can just tell that Abdullah and I have great respect for one another. It doesn't mean we believe the same things.

It doesn't mean we believe that these issues are negotiable. We can't create Chrislam. There is no such thing. If you try to change Islam into something that's amenable to Christianity, it's no longer Islam.

If you try to change Christianity into something that's amenable to Islam, it's no longer Christianity. The reality is that Surah 112 in the Quran, the third ayah says, lem yeled walem yuled. He begetteth not, nor is he begotten.

And it's very, very clear that that ayah, that verse in that surah, is aimed at the Christian faith. And since that surah was considered by Muhammad to be particularly important, it's about as close to a definitional or creedal statement you're gonna get in the Quran.

There is no way that we can both be right. We could both be wrong, I suppose, on a logical basis, but we can't both be right at the same time. And the world doesn't seem to understand that, but a believing Muslim or a believing Christian should.

And so that leaves us in the situation of having to engage in constant and respectful dialogue with one another. We can't just lay it on the side and say, let's just pretend like our differences don't exist.

Three Barriers to Communicating the Gospel to Muslims

What are those differences that we have to be most concerned about? Well, I'd say that there are three major barriers that exist between you and the Muslim to be able to communicate the gospel to them, okay?

Three major barriers. One, the biggest one, right at the start, there's two theological, and one that's both theological and historical. Number one is the issue of shirk. Now, shirk is the unforgivable sin.

Now, when we hear unforgivable sin, we hear something that doesn't actually map over to Islam. When we think of unforgivable sin, that means if you've committed it in your life, there's never forgiveness and you're lost.

You'll never be saved. In Islam, if you die upon shirk, as what's called a mushrik, if you die upon shirk, there can be no forgiveness for you. What that means is you can die outside a right relationship of the law and still be saved in the sense of received paradise.

Allah can do that. He can simply forgive sins. One of the most famous hadiths is of the man who had murdered 99 people, and when he inquired about repentance, he was sent to this particular city, he died on the way, and Allah commanded that if he was one cubit closer to the city he was going to to find out about repentance, then the city he had come from, that he would go to paradise.

And then in some versions of the story, God actually made the earth shrink between him and that city, so he was one cubit closer, and he went to paradise. Mass murder, 100 people, but he wasn't a mushrik.

He hadn't engaged in idolatry, and so he was able to be saved. So we have a different understanding of, when we hear that, be careful. Shirk is unforgivable because it is the worst sin. It is what we would call idolatry, but it's actually worshiping anyone or anything in the place of Allah.

There's actually different forms of shirk. There's major and minor shirk, and there's shirk in the name and attributes of God, and shirk in God's worship, and so on and so forth. But it is associating anyone or anything with Allah.

The vast majority of Muslims, not necessarily in Western countries, but certainly in Islamic countries, but a large portion in Western countries as well, believe that what we do, what we just did in the hymn we sang, was to engage in shirk.

Because Islam believes that Jesus was a mighty prophet of God, but he was a mere rasul. He was merely a prophet. He was merely a man. Virgin born, taken to heaven, not resurrected from the dead, because he wasn't crucified, we'll get to that in a moment, but merely a rasul.

Allah has no sons, according to the Quran, because he has no wife, which tells you what the Quranic understanding of that relationship is, and it has nothing to do with what our belief in Jesus as the son of God means.

God doesn't have to have a wife to have a son in the sense we're talking about. But the author of the Quran was confused on that point. But he is merely a prophet of God who raised people from the dead, created little clay birds, breathed life into them, and they flew away, which is a story the author borrowed from the infancy gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic source, which of course did not happen historically.

So he was powerful, but only a prophet of God. Virgin born prophet of God. So if you acknowledge that what Paul taught is that Jesus is Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton, or a name of Jehovah, Yahweh in the Old Testament, that the fathers identify as Yahweh, the sons identify as Yahweh, the spirit is the spirit of Yahweh.

If you believe that Peter taught that in 1 Peter 3 .15, that Paul taught that in Philippians chapter two and numerous other places, that John taught that in John chapter 12. If you believe in the deity of Christ as it is enunciated in the New Testament, then the vast majority of Muslims will believe that you have engaged in shirk because they believe he's a mere human, you are elevating him to a position that was not his.

Now obviously, if all those passages that I just mentioned to you and many others in the New Testament happen to be true, then that's not shirk because Jesus has always been God and so I'm not associating something lesser than God with God, I'm not engaging in shirk.

There is no interaction in the Quran with any of those texts, there is no evidence whatsoever in any source I've ever read that would indicate that Muhammad or any of his companions had any serious knowledge of the theology of the New Testament at all, none.

And I can say that as a person who's not only read the early, I've read through Tahrir literature from the early periods, I've read the historical stories of historical histories of Muhammad and like I said, I've read all of Bukhari and Muslim.

That should give me a firm ground for having found something that would substantiate the idea that Muhammad or any of his companions did have a meaningful understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Instead, I get all sorts of reasons to believe otherwise. In fact, in Surah 5, verse 16, Allah says to Jesus at some point in the future, did you say to men, worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah?

That's the only place in the entirety of the Quran I've found three. Because the Quran says do not say three, it is better for you. There's only one Allah. Every time it says do not say three, the next sentence is there is only one God, Allah.

So what the Quran is saying is do not say there are three gods. Well, we don't say there are three gods, that's the whole point. There's only one God, three persons, they're distinguished from one another.

One God, Yahweh, there's not three different Yahwehs or anything like that. Being in person are not the same thing. But the author of the Quran did not understand what the doctrine of trinity is, even though he's writing 300 years after the Council of Nicaea.

And over 200 years after the conclusion of the last of the Christological controversies. So it's not like the information wasn't there. Remember, for the Muslim, the Quran is not Muhammad's understanding anyway.

For the Muslim, at least the believing Sunni Muslim, the Quran is eternal, the Shiites don't believe that, but the Sunnis, well, it depends on what the Sunnis believe. I just did a debate on this subject and it's pretty obvious my Sunni proponent didn't believe the Quran is eternal in any meaningful sense either.

But at least historically, the Sunni have stood by the idea that the Quran is uncreated, it's as eternal as the law. That's becoming a less and less popular belief, it seems, amongst many. But it is the very words of Allah, it's not the words of Muhammad.

This is not Muhammad's interpretation. Muhammad is basically what we would call a dictation machine. The angel Jibril received the Quran from Allah on what's called Laylatul Qadr, the night of power. It's one of the last days in the month of Ramadan.

And then over the course of about 32 years, he piecemeal dictated the rest of the Quran to Muhammad who then gave it to his followers in memorized form, not in a written form. And so it's not Muhammad thinking about God, it's not Muhammad theorizing about God, these are the very words of God that are eternal.

So it doesn't matter how much of the trinity Muhammad understood. If the Quran is God's very word, God knew what the trinity was in 625 or 632. Whether the trinity is true or false, God at least understood it, right?

And so God could have accurately represented it, but it's nowhere to be found in the Quran. And so this idea of shirk is that because Jesus isn't God in Islamic theology and we treat him as such, then you are engaging in the one sin that will not be forgiven.

Now, Muhammad asked permission of Allah, according to Islamic sources, to pray for his parents who died as Mushrikun. Sorry, I just used the Hebrew rather than Arabic. Mushrikun, it's the plural ending, it's im in Hebrew, un in Arabic.

Died as Mushrikun and Allah said no, would not allow him to pray for his parents. The one exception is the story of Abu Talib, Abu Talib. I like narrating Hadith, especially in a taxi cab with a Muslim driver, it's very fun.

I think I've probably gotten the long route more than once because of that, but that's okay, because they were fascinated. To find somebody sitting in the back of your cab who's a Christian scholar, but is narrating Hadith to you, gets a lot of conversations going, and trust you me.

So one of my favorite stories is the story of Abu Talib. Abu Talib was Muhammad's uncle. He was one of the leaders of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. And the Quraysh controlled the Kaaba, and hence profited from the pilgrims coming to worship at the Kaaba.

And so when Muhammad starts preaching against the Kaaba and against polytheism, there are many people in the Quraysh tribe, of which he is a member, who want to get rid of him. Well, his uncle Abu Talib protected him, would not allow them to do this.

So from 610 approximately, so for about 12 years or so, there is this situation in Mecca before they leave for Medina. And Abu Talib protects Muhammad up to the point of his death and he's on his deathbed and Muhammad comes in and he says, uncle, you know that I'm a prophet of Allah.

You need to say the Shahada, I'll pray for you. The other people, the other rest of the family is on the other side of the bed going, don't you dare deny the ancestral gods. And long story short, Abu Talib dies as a mushrik.

He does not embrace Islam. But Muhammad is given permission to pray for him. And so as a result, when Muhammad prays for Abu Talib, Abu Talib gets the best place in hell. I always stop right there because the look and everyone, and anyone who's still awake anyways.

And once it gets quiet, you see some people like, hell, what, me? Sort of fun to watch. That's why you stay awake. Everybody always goes, so what is the garden spot of hell anyways? I've always sort of wondered, you know, what's that like?