Nabeel Qureshi Quotes

All suffering is worth it to follow Jesus. He is that amazing.

If truth doesn’t exist, then it would be true that truth doesn’t exist, and once again we arrive at truth. There is no alternative; truth must exist.

I could not put the Bible down. I literally could not. It felt as if my heart would stop beating, perhaps implode, if I put it down.

Would it be worth it to pick up my cross and be crucified next to Jesus? If He is not God, then, no. Lose everything I love to worship a false God? A million times over, no! But if He is God, then yes. Being forever bonded to my Lord by suffering alongside Him? A million times over, yes!

Now I knew what it meant to follow God. It meant walking boldly by His Spirit of grace and love, in the firm confidence of everlasting life given through the Son, with the eternal purpose of proclaiming and glorifying the Father. Now I had found Jesus.

This is only one of the reasons why a strong friendship is critical. A surface-level relationship might snap under the tension of disagreement, but by living our lives together, we were forced to reconcile.

Truth silences falsehood.

Only the exceptional blend of love, humility, hospitality, and persistence can overcome these barriers, and not enough people make the effort.

The gospel is not just an answer that works; it is the only answer that will work.

The words do matter, but they matter because they constitute a message. The message is paramount. That’s why the Bible can be translated. If the inspiration were tied to words themselves as opposed to their message, then we could never translate the Bible, and if we could never translate it, how could it be a book for all people?

believe ideas can be dangerous, even popular ideas held by millions, and I furthermore believe we ought to be able to discuss such ideas freely. Unfortunately, there is a growing mob mentality even in the United States that allows unpopular ideas to be shouted down and the people voicing them to be accused of closed-mindedness and bigotry.

On the rare occasion that someone does invite a Muslim to his or her home, differences in culture and hospitality may make the Muslim feel uncomfortable, and the host must be willing to ask, learn, and adapt to overcome this. There are simply too many barriers for Muslim immigrants to understand Christians and the West by sheer circumstance. Only the exceptional blend of love, humility, hospitality, and persistence can overcome these barriers, and not enough people make the effort.

While I was wallowing in self-pity, focused on myself, there was a whole world with literally billions of people who had no idea who God is, how amazing He is, and the wonders He has done for us. They are the ones who are really suffering. They don’t know His hope, His peace, and His love that transcends all understanding. They don’t know the message of the gospel. After loving us with the most humble life and the most horrific death, Jesus told us, “As I have loved you, go and love one another.” How could I consider myself a follower of Jesus if I was not willing to live as He lived? To die as He died? To love the unloved and give hope to the hopeless?

Political correctness is for acquaintances, not friends.

After loving us with the most humble life and the most horrific death, Jesus told us, “As I have loved you, go and love one another.” How could I consider myself a follower of Jesus if I was not willing to live as He lived? To die as He died? To love the unloved and give hope to the hopeless?

The irony of Ramadhan is that, after binging on buffets every morning and every evening, people usually gain weight during the month of fasting.

But what if His majesty is not as important to Him as His children are?

the Crusades were launched in defense of the Byzantine Empire after two-thirds of the Christian world had been conquered by centuries of Muslim attacks. Muslims

We are the son, and God is the father. We have incurred a debt against God, and we can’t pay Him back. So in His mercy, He pays our sins for us. The wages of our sin is death, and He died on our behalf, balancing the accounts.

It should not be assumed that the Quran is the Islamic analogue of the Bible. It isn’t. For Muslims, the Quran is the closest thing to an incarnation of Allah, and it is the very proof they provide to demonstrate the truth of Islam. The best parallel in Christianity is Jesus himself, the Word made flesh, and his resurrection. That is how central the Quran is to Islamic theology.94

Even science is inductive, relying on observations and best explanations, not always deductive conclusions.

Now, if it were the case that Christianity were true, would you want to know it?

had long before realized that people who wanted to avoid the truth usually succeeded.

If I really wanted to know God, I had to cast myself upon His mercy and love, relying completely upon Him and His willingness to reveal Himself to me.

Effective evangelism requires relationships. There are very few exceptions.

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

it is the life of Muhammad to which Islamists appeal in order to justify their terrorism.

All suffering is worth it to follow Jesus. He is that amazing. I pray that I will meet you someday, my dear friend, so we can rejoice and praise God together for our joys and our sufferings.

these traditions did not come from the Quran. They are found in hadith. From marital rites to martial restrictions, commercial laws to civil suits, the vast majority of sharia and the Islamic way of life is derived from the hadith.

On one occasion during the salaat, I was restless and fidgety. Out of nowhere, I felt a swift spank on my behind. I turned around to see who it was, but there was no one behind me. I surmised it was my uncle, who was standing next to me, so after finishing the salaat, I tearfully accused him of the spanking. Without flinching, he pointed up to the sky and said, "No, it was Allah." My eyes went wide, and I thought, "If only I had turned around faster, I would have seen the hand of Allah!" Twenty years later, he confessed it was him, but in the meantime, I was honored to have been spanked by God Himself.

Jesus did not pay the penalty for our misdeeds so we can continue disobeying God with abandon; rather, in dying on the cross, Jesus not only canceled our spiritual debt but also cured our spiritual disease. When we put our trust in Christ, He forgives our sins and also begins the work of changing us from the inside to become holy and loving like Him, and like God our Father. Jesus does this through the Holy Spirit, whom He sent. Salvation by grace does not mean we stay impure sinners forever. Rather, it means that God forgives all our sins and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves by paying the penalty for our sins and working to eliminate sin from our lives. He does this in two stages: while we are mortal, the Holy Spirit changes our hearts so that we begin to live in a way that is more pleasing to God, even though we still commit sin; and then in the resurrection at the end of history, we will be made morally and spiritually perfect beings.

While I was wallowing in self-pity, focused on myself, there was a whole world with literally billions of people who had no idea who God is, how amazing He is, and the wonders He has done for us. They are the ones who are really suffering. They don’t know His hope, His peace, and His love that transcends all understanding. They don’t know the message of the gospel.

A few Muslims dissent on this view, and the Ahmadi jamaat is among them. These Muslims argue that if any part of the Quran could be canceled, then it would not be the eternal word of God. They resort instead to harmonization of apparently abrogated verses, like the tenuous interpretation above. The difficulty for this view, though, is that the hadith are full of accounts of abrogation.

son who has stolen from his father’s business. If after wasting the goods, the son returns to the father and sincerely seeks forgiveness, it is within the father’s right to forgive him. But not all would be settled yet; the accounts haven’t been balanced. Someone has to take the hit for the stolen goods. If the father wants, he has every right to pay for his son’s debt from his own account.

Islam requires us to believe that Jesus was so incompetent as a teacher and prophet that he was not able to instill this most simple fact in his followers’ minds: that he was merely a human. Given that Islam’s central proclamation is tawhid, this means Jesus was an abject failure. In fact, he was worse than a total failure, since he left his disciples believing the exact opposite of tawhid.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ami and Abba. Your undying love for me, even when you feel I have sinned against you, is second only to God's love for His children. I pray you will one day realize His love is truly unconditional and that He has offered forgiveness to all. On that day, I pray that you would accept His redemption so we might be a family once again. I love you with all my heart.

All of the principal authors of the New Testament writings — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, and the unnamed author of Hebrews — attest to the divine claims, nature, and prerogatives of Jesus. These men wrote from thirty to sixty years after Jesus’ death; all of them except Luke were Jewish men who spent part of their lives in Judea and Galilee. They all either knew Jesus personally or knew people who had known Jesus personally.

His last words hung in the air, their gravity slowly sinking in. After a few heavy moments, I spoke. “Then what hope is there for us, David?” David smiled reassuringly. “Only the grace of God.” “But why would He give me His grace?” “Because He loves you.” “Why would He love me, a sinner?” “Because He’s your Father.” David’s words hit me powerfully. I had heard Christians call God “Father,” but it never clicked. Only when trying to figure out why God would give me mercy and grace when I deserved none did the gears start turning.

This difference between Eastern and Western education can be traced to the disparity that divides Muslim immigrants from their children. Islamic cultures tend to establish people of high status as authorities whereas the authority in Western culture is reason itself. These alternative seats of authority permeate the mind, determining the moral outlook of whole societies. When authority is derived from position rather than reason, the act of questioning leadership is dangerous because it has the potential to upset the system. Dissention is reprimanded and obedience in rewarded. Correct and incorrect courses of action are assessed socially, not individually. A person’s virtue is thus determined by how well he meets social expectations, not by an individual determination of right and wrong. Thus positional authority yields a society that determines right and wrong based on honor and shame. On the other hand, when authority is derived from reason, questions are welcome because critical examination sharpens the very basis of authority. Each person is expected to criticially examine his own course of action. Correct and incorrect courses of action are assessed individually. A person’s virtue is determined by whether he does what he knows to be right and wrong. Rational authority creates a society which determines right and wrong based on innocence and guilt. Much of the West’s inability to understand the East stems from the paradigmatic schism between honor/ shame cultures and innocence/ guilt cultures. Of course, the matter is quite complex, and elements of both paradigms are present in both the East and the West. But the honor/ shame spectrum is the operative paradigm that drives the East and it is hard for Westerners to understand.

It was then that I realized the value of apologetics and what the arguments had done for me. All my life, barriers had been erected that kept me from humbly approaching God and asking Him to reveal Himself to me. The arguments and apologetics tore down those barriers, positioning me to make a decision to pursue God or not. The work of my intellect was done. It had opened the way to His altar, but I had to decide whether I would approach it. If I did, and if I really wanted to know God, I had to cast myself upon His mercy and love, relying completely upon Him and His willingness to reveal Himself to me.

The latter interpretation is obviously more tenuous, but only if one believes in the doctrine of abrogation. Surah 2:116 and 16:101 of the Quran both apparently teach that Allah can cancel older sections of the Quran with newer ones. Traditionally, Muslims developed a field of Quranic exegesis called “the abrogator and the abrogated” in which they strove to determine the criteria and history of Quranic abrogation. Some Muslim scholars taught that up to five hundred verses of the Quran no longer apply because later verses abrogated them. Other Muslim scholars taught that as few as five verses were abrogated.

Beyta, they weren’t following Hazrat Isa. They stopped following him a long time before. They turned Jesus into a god, and so they dishonored Hazrat Isa and blasphemed Allah! That is why Allah sent Muhammad and Islam as the final message for all of mankind. It embodies all the messages that Allah sent through the prophets: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Moses, David, Elijah . . . all of them brought messages from Allah to their people, and although the people accepted their messages at first, later generations corrupted them all. Light gets dimmer the farther it gets from its source! That is why we cannot trust the Bible today; it is corrupted. Only the Quran is perfect. Only Islam is incorruptible. Allah will guard it until the message spreads and the world becomes Muslim. That is when the day of judgment will come. That is the day Islam will be victorious.

Easterners who embrace an authoritarian mindset need to be reminded that religious authorities are not all created equal; some are worth following, and some are not. If the credentials of the leaders are not scrutinized and their messages not weighed, how can one know which should be followed? The Bible encourages us to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21 ESV) and warns, “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1 ESV). The question is, Will Easterners have the courage and tenacity to apply the needed tests? This can be challenging because, as Nabeel reminds us, “When authority is derived from position rather than reason, the act of questioning leadership is dangerous because it has the potential to upset the system. Dissension is reprimanded and obedience is rewarded.

He used the term jihad in both spiritual and physical contexts, but the physical jihad is the one Muhammad strongly emphasizes.33 The peaceful practice of Islam hinges on later, often Western, interpretations of Muhammad’s teachings, whereas the more violent variations of Islam are deeply rooted in orthodoxy and history.34

read an expert contribution on East meets West by Mark Mittelberg,

clamber

Asbab-an-nuzul: A body of Islamic literature purporting to detail the circumstances of specific Quranic revelations

An interpretation of Jesus’ nature, identity, or role; for example, the Quran has a lower Christology than John, since he is just human in the former yet divine in the latter.

Ancient of Days

Muhammad dictated the contents of the Quran to his scribes over a period of twenty-three years. Only after his death was the Quran collected into a book. Verses that had been dictated years or decades apart are frequently found side by side in the Quran, often with no obvious connection.

The result is that Muslims place relatively little weight on surrounding passages when trying to interpret sections of the Quran. For context, they turn instead to historical commentaries, hadith called asbab-an-nuzul.

Conjecture

nihari, a rich beef curry,

Injil

Injil: The book that Muslims believe Allah sent to Jesus, often considered to be the gospels of the New Testament

polemical.

coerced

A staple of his parlance was the word cartoon, which he used to refer to anything from a graph to a video.

disgusting! To have to eat, to grow fatigued, and to sweat

What if’ is not much of an argument if there is no evidence. Second, you know the Quran tells Christians to ‘judge by the Injil.’39 That means they still had it in Muhammad’s day. The Injil is not a lost scripture.

just try to win the argument instead of honestly looking for the truth.

cheeky,

To read an expert contribution on growing up Muslim in America by Abdu Murray, a lawyer, apologist, former Shia Muslim, and author of two published books on Islam and other major worldviews, click here.

One of my male cousins was reprimanded when he tried to marry a Filipina, but he “came around” and fully recovered, ultimately marrying a Pakistani girl.

The hadith were not collected into books until a long time after Muhammad ’s death. Many false hadiths had been fabricated, and it was difficult to determine which ones were accurate. Imam Bukhari sifted through five hundred thousand hadith and picked out the five thousand most accurate.

Sahih Bukhari: A classical collection of hadith, often considered by Sunnis as the most trustworthy accounts of Muhammad’s life

Without the isnad, the hadith was considered worthless. Muslims put less stock into sirah literature than hadith specifically because sirah does not record isnad.

chain of transmission was called the isnad,

But even the most accurate ones are the word of Muhammad , not the word of Allah. We must not equate the hadith to the Quran.

Isnad: The chain of transmission for a particular hadith Sahih Sittah: The six books of hadith that Sunni Muslims consider most authentic

In books of hadith, it says that Muhammad used to open his fasts by first eating a date, so Muslims all around the world do the same thing. Of course, we usually ate our dates in the car on the way to the iftar, because we were running late.

Traditionally, Muslims and Christians have shared this understanding. Each believes in truth, not the least because they believe their faith is true. But their common perspective extends much farther. They have roughly analogous beliefs in monotheism, spiritual and physical realms, angels and demons, good and evil, a final judgment, heaven and hell, the inspiration of scriptures, and many more peripheral beliefs.

Regarding Jesus, there are two issues on which Muslims particularly disagree with Christians: that Jesus died on the cross and that Jesus claimed to be God. The Quran specifically denies both of these beliefs.

Islamic cultures tend to establish people of high status as authorities, whereas the authority in Western culture is reason itself.

positional authority yields a society that determines right and wrong based on honor and shame.

Rational authority creates a society that determines right and wrong based on innocence and guilt.

What is worse, some Muslims do receive poor treatment from Westerners and Christians, and this only serves to bolster their notions that all Westerners and Christians are the same way.

They did not categorize religion with belief but with cultural identity. The tragedy here is that no one has given them a reason to think otherwise. If they were to intimately know even one Christian who lived differently, their misconceptions might be corrected, and they might see Christianity in a virtuous light.

shahada,

To read an expert contribution on the historical Muhammad by Dr. David Wood (PhD in philosophy, Fordham University), Director of Acts 17 Apologetics and host of Jesus or Muhammad, click here

niggling

Muslims believe that salvation is a matter of doing more good deeds than bad.

irenic

khutba,

sirah

There isn’t really a case for Buddhism. It’s a path you can choose to follow. I follow it because of the meditation, but I wouldn’t tell anyone else that they should follow it or that it’s true in some sense.

hadith

jinn,

Conjecture is not enough. You need proof.

Christianity teaches that sin is so destructive it shatters souls and destroys worlds. It’s like a cancer that slowly consumes everything. That’s why this world went from perfection in the garden of Eden to being the sick and depressing place it is today.

If I had said that I didn’t want to know if Christianity was true, David would not have pursued our conversations any further. He had long before realized that people who want to avoid the truth usually succeeded.

A surface-level relationship might snap under the tension of disagreement, but by living our lives together, we were forced to reconcile.

The suffering is what transformed me into a true follower of Jesus.

We named our ministry Anastasis Apologetics, a Greek reference to the center of our message, Jesus’ resurrection.

Glorified is my Lord . . . Who is my Lord? Who are You, Lord? Are You Allah, the God of my father and forefathers? Are You the God I have always worshiped? The God my family has always worshiped? Surely You are the one who sent Muhammad 1 as the final messenger for mankind and the Quran as our guide? You are Allah, the God of Islam, aren’t You? Or are You . . .” I hesitated, fighting the blasphemy I was about to propose. But what if the blasphemy was the truth? “Or are You Jesus?

Muslims believe that every single word of the Quran was dictated verbatim by Allah, through the Archangel Gabriel, to Muhammad. The Quran is therefore not only inspired at the level of meaning but at the deeper level of the words themselves. For this reason, Muslims do not consider the Quran translatable. If it is rendered in any language other than Arabic, it is not Quran but rather an interpretation of the Quran. A book can be a true Quran only if written in Arabic. This is why it is such an important belief for Muslims that the Quran has always been exactly the same — word for word, dot for dot.

That was one of the reasons I enjoyed talking with her. She was brutally honest and intimidatingly intelligent.

They rarely said “I love you” directly; that is too crass for traditional Pakistani ears. Love is implicit and understood, expressed through provision by the parents and obeisance by children.

If I had known just how boundless is the love of God, just how transformative His grace and mercy, just how liberating His exemplary life and death, I would have run to Him years sooner with all my might.

In the appendix to Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, there is a dialogue between the editors of the book and the author: “Why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?” Ehrman’s response is illuminating: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.