(Editor’s note: With edited comments from a Christian point of view put in brackets and noted as ‘Editor’s note’. The aim is to discuss in the same spirit as the original document was written).

I n t r o d u c t i o n

We ought to view all monotheistic religions (religions which enjoin belief in one God) in the spirit in which St. Peter viewed them when he said, "Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him." [Acts10:34,35]

The same is the spirit of the oft-repeated definition of "Muslims" in the Qur'an: "Those who believe and work righteousness" (al-lazina amanu wa amalu-s-salehat) [Qur'an 2:25, 2:62, 2:25 etc.]. And "Trust in the Lord and do good," as the Psalms say. [Psalms 37:3]

(Editor’s Note: Good. Does that then mean that you accept that all so-called Muslims who do not genuinely work righteousness are not truly Muslims? I suspect not. And yet that is what this is saying. When Peter spoke of working righteousness he meant by obeying the teaching of Jesus Christ, and that included loving their enemies and doing good towards those who used them badly. Do all Muslims do this? But there is the further question as to what we do believe. It is not sufficient to believe in one God. As James declared, ‘well done! The Devil also believes - and shudders’ (James 2.19). We have to believe in God as He really is. The essential difference with Christianity is that we require belief in a Saviour Who came down from Heaven as God made man, and Who saves from sin and can make us accounted as righteous before God. So the same Peter said, ‘There is salvation in no other, for there is no other Name (other than the Lord Jesus Christ) under Heaven given among men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4.12). )

It is essential that any discussion of Islam as a monolithic religion must begin with its very fundamental concept of unity of God (Tawhid). In this context, it is also important to note that the creed of Islam is very simple. To become a Muslim, one has only to declare in sincerity, and preferably in the presence of a person already professing Islam, "I testify that there is none worthy of worship (god) but God, and that Muhammad is the Prophet of God".

(Editor’s Note. But what about the working of righteousness? A man can say the words you have cited and be a suicide bomber, or a wife-beater. Thus you are already contradicting your previous definition. We ask again then, what has now happened to the doing of righteousness? Peter meant ‘working righteousness all the time’ to all men. What you have described appears to be an intellectual perception only, as if, having bowed to the need to be truly righteous it can now be forgotten. That is why in the present day Christians are constantly being murdered throughout the world by Muslims who claim to be ‘doing righteousness’. It makes nonsense of righteousness. Or will you deny that they are Muslims? How then do people become Christians? By believing in Jesus Christ as our living Saviour Who died for us and rose again and personally responding to Him as our Lord. It demands a total commitment. And yes I will deny that people are Christians who are not prepared for that. Jesus said, ‘Except a man deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me he CANNOT be My disciple’, and greatly stressed the need to obey His teachings).

The first part of the Muslim creed is a dialectically rigorous rejection of polytheism in favour of monotheism. It underlies the pivotal Muslim doctrine of divine unity (Tawhid), and has historical antecedents in both Judaism and Christianity.

(Editor’s Note: Of course Christians also firmly believe in the unity of God. We believe that there is one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with the word ‘Son’ indicating ‘One Who has the same nature as the Father’. They are inter-personal relationships within the Godhead. They are not the caricature put forward by Muslims who have not understood the doctrine of the Triune God).

The first part of the creed presupposes a cosmology that includes an invisible as well as a visible world. Underlying the cosmology of this first part of the creed, which is universalistic and acknowledged by all monotheistic faiths, is a concept of prophesy which is particularized and, by demanding recognition of Muhammad as God's Prophet becomes unacceptable to non-Muslims. None of the teachings of prophets who preceded Muhammad are denied. From Adam and Abraham to Solomon and Jesus, the Biblical and even extra-Biblical prophets are affirmed, many of their actions and utterances being lauded in the pages of the Qur'an. For this reason Muslims do not subscribe to the Jewish view which according to Jewish tradition asserts that prophecy ceased about 400 B.C. so that there could be no new scriptures after that time.

(Editor’s Note: Firstly we would point out that the Jews only believed that prophecy had ceased for a time. The cessation was only seen as temporary. In the days of Jesus they were actually expecting the coming of ‘the Prophet’, an expectation more than fulfilled by Jesus, because Jesus came and was MORE than a prophet. He was God come among men. Secondly we must point out that while we can agree your initial premise to a certain extent, it is simply not true to say that Islam recognises the Jewish and Christian prophets. It claims to do so but then dismisses all that they said by claiming falsely that it has been distorted. They are lauded only by fictitiously being turned into Muslims which they decidedly were not. )

Christians maintain, on the contrary, that prophecy continued and that the writings that eventually became the New Testament were also divinely inspired. But since Muslims maintain and believe that Muhammad is also the last prophet, the revelations communicated through him supersede, even as they mark the culmination of all earlier SCRIPTURES. The authority of both, Jewish and Christian scriptures is subordinated to the content of Muslim revelation, and the former serve as a theological, not merely a chronological, preamble to Islam.

(Editor’s Note. But of course that is only if you accept that Muhammad was a superior prophet to the Lord Jesus Christ. Being the last prophet does not mean that he was a superior prophet. Indeed he pointed to Jesus Christ as the coming Messiah. However, any comparison of the ethical teaching of the two demonstrates Jesus to be far superior (see for example Matthew 5-7). Furthermore Jesus Christ was the culmination of all previous prophecy, It was to Him that it pointed. Thus He can have no successor, for HE was not only a prophet but more than a prophet. The whole of the Bible culminated in Jesus Christ. Whatever truth there may be in Muhammad being a ‘prophet’ (i.e. a religious teacher with a message from God) it was not possible for him to be superior to Jesus Christ. Indeed he stressed that Jesus would come again as the Messiah. For Jesus Christ is the LORD, the living God. And as we have said he is the culmination of all prophecy (even Muhammad’s).)

It is a well known fact that there is no trace today of the scrolls of Abraham. We are also aware of the sad story of the Torah of Moses and how it was destroyed by Pagans several times. The same fate befell the Psalter. As for Jesus, he had not had the time to compile or dictate what he preached. It was his disciples and their successors who gleaned his utterances and transmitted them to posterity in a number of recensions [a critical revision of the text], of which at least 70 recensions of the Gospels are known, and with the exception of four, all are declared by the Church to be apocryphal.

(Editor’s Note. Your ‘well known facts’ are exaggerated. While we do not have the original tablet on which Abraham made his record, we do have indications of colophons in Genesis which demonstrate that what was in those tablets is recorded in Genesis, being incorporated into Genesis by Moses. In contrast Muhammad left no tablets. He could neither read nor write. But Abraham certainly ensured that the tradition was recorded in covenant tablets and passed on. And we have copies of the ‘scrolls’ of Abraham in the Torah, which has been assiduously and carefully copied through the centuries. We know of no statement anywhere that the Torah was destroyed by pagans. This is another Muslim myth. The originals would have been carefully preserved and copied, and saved from enemy hands. The same is true of the Psalter, which incidentally was never subjected to the same dangers. Forgive me for saying so but your arguments (if they can be called arguments) are too glib. They are merely assumptions made from a Muslim viewpoint. Jesus carefully taught in a way designed to aid the memory and He trained His disciples to remember by heart what He preached in the same way as Muhammad did, but He also arranged for one of His disciples to be a scholar so that he could write His words down. That is why He called Matthew. The four Gospels were accepted from the beginning because they were written by men who were either Apostles or were supervised by Apostles. The so-called apocryphal gospels (which Muhammad so relied on) do not come from 1st century AD and were little more than romances. Thus your argument is invalid. )

For such reasons, both the Torah and the Gospels are regarded as corrupted (Arabic term Tahrif, which means altering the words or misrepresenting the meaning) in their present form. Consequently, in these earlier revelations, whatever disagrees with the Qur'an is abrogated by the Qur'an.

(Editor’s Note: Regarded by who? By Muslims of course, not by anyone else. They are biased witnesses. By comparison of manuscripts, many of which are extremely ancient, we have a text of the New Testament which is 99 % reliable, which is more than can be said for the Quran. And these manuscripts date before the time of Muhammad, and actually existed at a time when Muhammad actually authenticated the Gospels. Thus the Injil (Evangel, Gospel), far from being corrupted, is in pure form, as in fact Muhammad himself accepted, for he told his followers to read it in that form. (It is his followers who refuse to believe Muhammad). And as Jesus, even in the Quran, is greater than Muhammad, being the Messiah, and far greater as the Lord of all, His word has not been abrogated. Muhammad is in fact no authority on it. Indeed he did not know what Jesus really taught, for example, about the triunity of the one god. He thought that the Trinity was God, Mariam and Jesus, which was a late Gnostic heresy).

It is because of such application of this principle of abrogation that the Qur'an retells many stories found in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. No doubt the majority of Muslims, therefore, acquire their knowledge of the Bible solely from the Qur'an. Nevertheless, many Muslims have studied and several novelized lives of Jesus have been published in the twentieth century, especially in Egypt.

(Editor’s Note. And I thought that we were trying to be serious. So you obtain your knowledge of the Bible from very much abbreviated and distorted presentations from the Quran, which are often historically inaccurate, and from novels about Jesus. God help us if we have to try to rely on anything so foolish.)

The Muslim position on this issue is twofold:

a) that the injil [Arabic for 'Bible'] like the Qur'an, was a real Scripture -- the original Word of God, sent down from the heavens and transmitted to the human Messenger (Prophet) Jesus on earth, through the medium of the celestial messenger (the angel Gabriel), as the highest form of infallible divine inspiration called wahy in Arabic.

(Editors’ Note. But the Muslim position is simply inaccurate, The Injil in the form in which you are describing it WAS Jesus. He was God’s Word to man. He did not require angelic messengers. The Word of God Himself was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1.14). Jesus came from the presence of the Father where He had been for all eternity and came AS the Gospel. Our message is a person not simply a body of teaching, and thus the message has not been lost. And His Apostles recorded His words in writing and they have been carefully preserved ever since. The Muslim view of this is unhistorical and ignores all the FACTS.)

Christians have lost their injil,

(Editor’s Note: As I have just pointed out this is simply a total misrepresentation of the truth. It is a Muslim Myth not based on reality. We still have our Injil in reliable form. It is not lost at all, just ignored by Muslims ).

Whereas Muslims have managed to meticulously preserve every word of their Qur'an in its original purity.

(Editor’s Note. This also is a Muslim Myth. All the records made by the people to whom Muhammad committed the Quran apart from one were destroyed for political reasons, and one copy suitably altered up to suit the person’s own opinions was disseminated among Muslims, thereby hoping to force all Muslims to do away with their own recensions and use this one. That one, however, omitted large parts of what were in the others (something acknowledged by the early reciters of the Quran. Besides, the attempt failed and even today different versions of the Quran are used in different parts of the world and by different Muslim sects. Furthermore recent discoveries of very early copies of the Quran reveal considerable differences in those early copies. The Quran of which Muslims so proudly boast is in fact unreliable, and that quite apart from it containing the ‘Satanic verses’. It is Muslims who have lost large parts of the teaching of Muhammad)