This site has been hard on Paul of Tarsus. It has not been written against Christians, and this page is addressed to them: to the Christian reader who has followed the evidence this far and wants to know what a Muslim would say next. It is not a sermon and it asks for no decision today. It sets out, as plainly and as kindly as it can, what Islam teaches about the faith every person is born with, what it shares with the Christian, the one thing it asks, and where a reader who wants to go further might begin. The late Ismaʿil Raji al Faruqi, a Palestinian scholar who spent his working life in the study of Christianity and in conversation with Christians, described the Muslim’s task in such conversations as turning “confrontation and reciprocal condemnations between the religions into a scholarly investigation” of how each one grew, “to the end of separating the historical accretions from the original given of revelation”.¹ That is what the rest of this site has tried to do with Paul. This page tries to say what is left when the accretions are taken away.

The faith every person is born with #

Islam does not begin by asking anyone to become something foreign. It begins with a claim about every human being: that each of us is created already turned towards God. The Qurʾān calls this the fiṭrah, the original nature in which God shapes each person.

فَأَقِمۡ وَجۡهَكَ لِلدِّينِ حَنِيفًا ۚ فِطۡرَتَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلَّتِى فَطَرَ ٱلنَّاسَ عَلَيۡهَا ۚ لَا تَبۡدِيلَ لِخَلۡقِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ ٱلدِّينُ ٱلۡقَيِّمُ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَكۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يَعۡلَمُونَ

“So direct your face [i.e., self] toward the religion, inclining to truth. [Adhere to] the fiṭrah of Allāh upon which He has created [all] people. No change should there be in the creation of Allāh. That is the correct religion, but most of the people do not know.”²

The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ explained the verse with an image every parent understands:

مَا مِنْ مَوْلُودٍ إِلاَّ يُولَدُ عَلَى الْفِطْرَةِ، فَأَبَوَاهُ يُهَوِّدَانِهِ أَوْ يُنَصِّرَانِهِ أَوْ يُمَجِّسَانِهِ،

“There is no child but is born upon the fiṭrah; then his parents make him a Jew, a Christian or a Magian.”³

Al Faruqi made the fiṭrah the centre of his account of Islam. God, he wrote, “has created all humans capable of knowing Him in His transcendence. This is an innate endowment, a fiṭrah (sensus communis, the state of nature in which every man is born) which all humans share.” It is, in his words, “a faculty with which humans recognize divine ultimacy, unity and transcendence”.⁴ Every person, then, carries within them the knowledge that there is one God above all things, who is like nothing He has made. The Christian has it. The Muslim has it. It is older than either name.

If that knowledge is inborn, why do people believe such different things about God? Al Faruqi’s answer is gentle, and it blames no one’s heart. Departures from that inborn knowledge, he wrote, come from “nature and history. Forgetfulness, mental laziness, passion and vested interest, Islam explains, are the causes of such and continue from generation to generation.”⁵ Behind the variety of the world’s religions he saw “the primordial religion of God”, al-dīn al-ḥanīf, “with which all men are born before acculturation makes them adherents of this or that religion”.⁶ A Christian is not, in this view, a person who has chosen to stand against God. He or she is a person who received the faith of their parents, as the hadith says, and was taught to understand the one God through doctrines that grew up long after ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him, many of them in the letters of Paul.

This is why many Westerners who embrace Islam prefer to say that they have “reverted” rather than “converted”. They do not feel that they have taken on something alien. They feel that they have come home to something they always half knew. Islam, al Faruqi wrote, calls itself dīn al-fiṭrah, the religion of nature, reason and balance.⁷

Born innocent #

The fiṭrah has a consequence that many Christians find the most surprising thing about Islam. If every child is born turned towards God, no child is born condemned. “Islam holds that man is created innocent,” al Faruqi wrote. “No matter who his parents were, who his uncles and ancestors, his brothers and sisters, his neighbors or his society were, man is born innocent. This repudiates every notion of original sin, of hereditary guilt, of vicarious responsibility”. Every person, he said, “is born with a clean slate”.⁸

For a Christian raised on Paul’s letter to the Romans, this changes the whole shape of religion. Al Faruqi put it sharply: in Islam, “the term ‘salvation’ has no equivalent in the religious vocabulary”, for “there is no saviour and there is nothing from which to be saved”. A person “begins his life ethically sane and sound, not weighed down by any original sin, however mild or Augustinian”.⁹ He was not saying that people do not sin. The Qurʾān knows human weakness well. He was saying that a person who sins has done a wrong that he or she can turn from, and that God receives the one who turns. There is no inherited debt that only a divine death can pay, and so there is no need for anyone to die in your place. Ezekiel said as much, and so, in his parables, did ʿĪsā. The case is set out on Original sin: what ʿĪsā taught and what Paul added.

A Christian who looks into Islam often finds more that is familiar than expected. Muslims believe in ʿĪsā ibn Maryam as the Messiah, born of the virgin Maryam, a prophet who healed the sick and raised the dead by God’s permission, and whom God raised up to Himself. They believe in the Torah given to Mūsā and the Injīl given to ʿĪsā. The Qurʾān tells Muslims to say:

قُلۡ ءَامَنَّا بِٱللَّهِ وَمَآ أُنزِلَ عَلَيۡنَا وَمَآ أُنزِلَ عَلَىٰٓ إِبۡرَٰهِيمَ وَإِسۡمَـٰعِيلَ وَإِسۡحَـٰقَ وَيَعۡقُوبَ وَٱلۡأَسۡبَاطِ وَمَآ أُوتِىَ مُوسَىٰ وَعِيسَىٰ وَٱلنَّبِيُّونَ مِن رَّبِّهِمۡ لَا نُفَرِّقُ بَيۡنَ أَحَدٍ مِّنۡهُمۡ وَنَحۡنُ لَهُۥ مُسۡلِمُونَ

“Say, ‘We have believed in Allāh and in what was revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Descendants [al-Asbāṭ], and in what was given to Moses and Jesus and to the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we are Muslims [submitting] to Him.’”¹⁰

The Qurʾān speaks of Christians with a warmth that may surprise those who know Islam only from the news. It says that the nearest of people in affection to the believers are “those who say, ‘We are Christians.’ That is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant.” And it describes them hearing the revelation: “you see their eyes overflowing with tears because of what they have recognized of the truth. They say, ‘Our Lord, we have believed, so register us among the witnesses.’”¹¹ Humility before God, and tears at the recognition of truth: these are the qualities the Qurʾān sees in the best of Christians, and they are the qualities with which it hopes a Christian will read it.

The one thing Islam asks #

There is one point on which Islam cannot meet the churches halfway, and it is better to say so honestly than to hide it. Islam asks that God alone be worshipped, with no partner, no equal and no one beside Him. “The only principle which admits of no exception in Islam,” al Faruqi wrote, “is al tawḥīd“, the oneness of God.¹² The Qurʾān’s invitation to Christians and Jews is built on it:

قُلۡ يَـٰٓأَهۡلَ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ تَعَالَوۡاْ إِلَىٰ كَلِمَةٍ سَوَآءٍۭ بَيۡنَنَا وَبَيۡنَكُمۡ أَلَّا نَعۡبُدَ إِلَّا ٱللَّهَ وَلَا نُشۡرِكَ بِهِۦ شَيۡـًٔا وَلَا يَتَّخِذَ بَعۡضُنَا بَعۡضًا أَرۡبَابًا مِّن دُونِ ٱللَّهِ

“Say, ‘O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you — that we will not worship except Allāh and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allāh.’”¹³

To give another being a share in the worship that belongs to God alone is what the Qurʾān calls shirk, “association”. It is the gravest error the Qurʾān names, because it touches the very thing the fiṭrah knows. Muslims believe that to worship ʿĪsā, however much he is loved, is to give him what he never asked for. The Qurʾān pictures him on the Day of Judgment saying to God, “I said not to them except what You commanded me — to worship Allāh, my Lord and your Lord”.¹⁴ In the Gospels he says the same: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”¹⁵

Yet even here the Qurʾān does not close the door. Straight after its sternest words about the doctrine of the Trinity, it asks a question in the tone of an invitation, not a sentence:

أَفَلَا يَتُوبُونَ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ وَيَسۡتَغۡفِرُونَهُۥ ۚ وَٱللَّهُ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ

“So will they not repent to Allāh and seek His forgiveness? And Allāh is Forgiving and Merciful.”¹⁶

The Arabic word for repentance, tawbah, means “turning back”. It is the word of Ezekiel’s “if the wicked will turn”, and of the son in the parable who “arose, and came to his father”. Nothing in it asks a Christian to stop loving ʿĪsā. It asks a Christian to love him as he asked to be loved: as the servant and messenger of the God he himself worshipped, and not in God’s place.

Paul and the message of ʿĪsā #

The argument of this whole site comes down to one claim: that the doctrines which stand between the Christian and the fiṭrah do not come from ʿĪsā. The divinity of Christ, original sin, salvation by belief in a death and resurrection, the setting aside of the law ʿĪsā kept: each of these can be traced to the letters of Paul, a man who never met ʿĪsā in his lifetime and who, by his own account, said he received his gospel “neither … of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ”.¹⁷ The disciples who had walked with ʿĪsā knew him as “a man approved of God”, and his brother James led the church in Jerusalem that kept the law.¹⁸

A Christian does not have to accept every argument on this site to see the point of the question. If the words of ʿĪsā in the Gospels and the words of Paul in his letters point in different directions, which of the two should a follower of ʿĪsā follow? Islam’s answer is that the Qurʾān came to restore what ʿĪsā had taught, and to confirm what remained of it. To leave Paul’s doctrines behind is not to leave ʿĪsā. Muslims would say it is the way back to him.

No compulsion, and no hurry #

The Qurʾān says plainly: “There shall be no compulsion in [acceptance of] the religion. The right course has become distinct from the wrong.”¹⁹ Faith that is forced is not faith. Al Faruqi explained why. A deed has moral worth, he wrote, only when it is freely willed, and so Islam prescribes that others “be invited, educated, warned, and adequately moved”, approached “with a view to convincing them”, so that if they act, they act “voluntarily and consciously”.²⁰ The Muslim’s task, in his words, is to draw people to the primordial religion “with comeliness and arguments ever more sound”.²¹

No one should be rushed into a change of faith, and no honest Muslim would want it so. Questions take time to answer, and a decision about God is the most serious decision a person makes. A reader who needs months or years, or who reads all of this and remains a Christian, is owed respect, not pressure.

If you would like to go further #

For the reader who wants to look further, a few simple steps are enough to begin.

Read the words of ʿĪsā on their own. Read the sayings in Matthew, Mark and Luke without the letters of Paul beside them, and ask what he taught about God, about prayer and about forgiveness. The prayer he taught is examined on The prayer ʿĪsā taught, and the prayer Paul taught.
Read the Qurʾān for yourself. A good English translation, read from the beginning, lets it speak for itself. Many readers start with Sūrah Maryam, the nineteenth chapter, which tells the story of Maryam and ʿĪsā.
Ask God directly. If God is near, as both the Gospels and the Qurʾān say, then a sincere prayer for guidance, made in your own words to the God of Ibrāhīm, is heard. The opening chapter of the Qurʾān is such a prayer: “Guide us to the straight path”.²²
Talk to a Muslim. A Muslim friend, or the imam of a local mosque, will usually be glad to answer questions, without obligation. The author of this site can be reached through the Contact page.

Becoming a Muslim needs no priest, no ceremony and no church. It is the sincere testimony, made with understanding, that there is no god but God and that Muḥammad is His messenger. For a Christian, the Prophet ﷺ added a word about ʿĪsā that is worth knowing:

مَنْ شَهِدَ أَنْ لاَ إِلَهَ إِلاَّ اللَّهُ وَحْدَهُ لاَ شَرِيكَ لَهُ، وَأَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا عَبْدُهُ وَرَسُولُهُ، وَأَنَّ عِيسَى عَبْدُ اللَّهِ وَرَسُولُهُ وَكَلِمَتُهُ، أَلْقَاهَا إِلَى مَرْيَمَ، وَرُوحٌ مِنْهُ، وَالْجَنَّةُ حَقٌّ وَالنَّارُ حَقٌّ، أَدْخَلَهُ اللَّهُ الْجَنَّةَ عَلَى مَا كَانَ مِنَ الْعَمَلِ

“Whoever testifies that there is no god but Allāh alone, who has no partner, and that Muḥammad is His servant and His messenger, and that ʿĪsā is the servant of Allāh and His messenger, and His word which He cast to Maryam, and a spirit from Him, and that Paradise is true and the Fire is true, Allāh will admit him to Paradise, whatever his deeds.”²³

A Christian who comes to Islam does not lose ʿĪsā. He or she keeps him, as the word of God and a spirit from Him, the Messiah, honoured and loved, and finds beside him the God he worshipped, one, near and merciful. Whatever you decide, this site hopes you will take the question seriously, and wishes you well in the search.

In short #

Islam teaches that every person is born upon the fiṭrah, already knowing the one God (al-Rūm 30:30; al-Bukhārī 1359).
Al Faruqi called the fiṭrah an innate faculty all humans share, and traced religious differences to history, not to bad hearts (Al Tawhid, pp. 23–24, 47).
Every person is born innocent, with no inherited sin (Al Tawhid, p. 67).
Muslims believe in ʿĪsā as the Messiah and in the Injīl given to him (Āl ʿImrān 3:84).
The one thing Islam asks is that God alone be worshipped, and the door of turning back to Him stays open (Āl ʿImrān 3:64; al-Māʾidah 5:74).
There is no compulsion in religion, and no hurry (al-Baqarah 2:256).

Isma’il Raji al Faruqi, Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life, 2nd ed. (Herndon, Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992), p. 48. ↩
Sūrah al-Rūm 30:30. Qurʾānic verses are rendered after Saheeh International. ↩
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 1359, from Abū Hurayrah, who then recites al-Rūm 30:30; also no. 1385. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 23. He compares it to the faculty Rudolf Otto, borrowing from Kant, called a sensus communis, by which all people perceive the holy (The Idea of the Holy, chapter 5). ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, pp. 23–24. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 47. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 123. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 67, citing al-Najm 53:38–39 and al-Baqarah 2:286. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 7. ↩
Sūrah Āl ʿImrān 3:84. ↩
Sūrah al-Māʾidah 5:82–83. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 123. ↩
Sūrah Āl ʿImrān 3:64. ↩
Sūrah al-Māʾidah 5:117. ↩
Matthew 4:10 (KJV). His other sayings about God and himself are gathered on Who is Christ? ʿĪsā ibn Maryam in his own words. ↩
Sūrah al-Māʾidah 5:74, following 5:73. ↩
Galatians 1:11–12. The evidence is set out in Seven doctrines: God, the cross and faith and Was Paul an apostle? A self-appointed one. ↩
Acts 2:22 (KJV); see James, the brother of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam. ↩
Sūrah al-Baqarah 2:256. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 77. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 48. ↩
Sūrah al-Fātiḥah 1:6; see al-Baqarah 2:186. ↩
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 3435, from ʿUbādah ibn al-Ṣāmit. ↩