Podcast: What Your Muslim Neighbor Misunderstands about Christianity (A. S. Ibrahim)

November 14, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Our Muslim Neighbors and Gospel Hope

In today's episode, A. S. Ibrahim talks about misconceptions that Muslims may have about Christianity and misconceptions that Christians may have about Islam, and how those can even lead to ineffective evangelism with our Muslim neighbors.

Reaching Your Muslim Neighbor with the Gospel

Reaching Your Muslim Neighbor with the Gospel

A. S. Ibrahim

In Reaching Your Muslim Neighbor with the Gospel, A. S. Ibrahim seeks to provide his readers with insight and practical tips to engage and share the gospel with Muslim friends and neighbors.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:44 - Ayman’s Story

Matt Tully
Ayman, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

A. S. Ibrahim
Thank you very much for having me. It’s a joy and honor to speak with you and with your audience;

Matt Tully
Likewise. Thank you so much. Ayman, you were born in Egypt, you also have two PhDs in Islamic studies, and you now teach at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. It’s probably not the most typical story for the professor at Southern Seminary, so I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about your story.

A. S. Ibrahim
I was blessed to be born in Egypt. I love Egypt. Egypt is a wonderful country, and I grew up there as all Egyptians grew up around me—mostly they were Muslim. They are followers of Islam. I still have many of my friends in Egypt. Some of them are Muslim, some of them abandoned Islam and became Christian, and some of them are just secular Muslims. But I was so privileged to encounter Islam in that context, being in a Muslim majority country and seeing firsthand what Muslims say, what Muslims do, what Muslims believe about their faith and how they promote it and how they live it. So that’s where I grew up in my context. And then I worked as an engineer for several years in Egypt, but my love for preaching surpassed my love for working as an engineer.

Matt Tully
What kind of engineering were you doing?

A. S. Ibrahim
Electronics and telecommunication. But I had an eight to five job as an engineer, and then after five my life begins. By this, I go to church, preach in different churches, have Bible studies, and have prayer meetings. So as Christians in Egypt—evangelical Christians—it was just our life to be involved in the church. After several years of doing this engineering in the morning and at night I go to church and do evangelism in events and stuff like that, I realized my need for the theological education. At that time, I sensed God’s leading me to begin a theological degree. Where is the university? America. I applied at several institutions, and I got accepted in one in particular that was able to help me financially. I came and I did my MDiv. As I was doing my MDiv, I began to get invitations to do a PhD in Islam to be able to help English-speaking Americans understand about Islam and Muslims. That’s how I began my first PhD and so forth.

Matt Tully
Wow. How did your parents become Christians?

A. S. Ibrahim
I was born in a nominal Christian family. My father used to go to church, to the Coptic Orthodox Church every Sunday, just to say, Our Father and come back home.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting to think of nominal Christians in a Muslim majority nation. Why do you think he and your mother would continue to embrace the term “Christian” in that context?

A. S. Ibrahim
Christianity exists in several of the Arab world countries. Christians are there, even in the blocked countries where there is a claim that no Christians exist—like Morocco, for example. Most people would tell you, We don’t have Christians. We have only Jews and Muslims. That’s not actually true. There are Christians. Not only Westerners who are coming to Morocco, but also you have converts to Christ. But these are not public numbers or public records. Now, in Egypt we have the Coptic church. By the way, the word “Coptic” speaks about ethnicity. So I am a Coptic because I was born in Egypt and I am a Christian. We have Coptic Orthodox, Coptic Catholics, and Coptic evangelicals, because Coptic is an ethnicity rather than what many people think as a religious group.

Matt Tully
Denominational.

A. S. Ibrahim
No, it is not. My parents just went to church and practiced what they believed. It’s a Christianity. That’s what some called “simple believers”. Now, when I was nine and a half, by God’s grace, I went to an evangelical church. I heard Jesus loves you, he wants you to follow him, and so forth—the gospel—and I accepted Christ, and I began to follow him in a serious way. At that time, I reflected Christ. I spoke about Christ with my family, and one after another came to the Lord in that kind of encounter. So yeah, that’s my story growing up.

Matt Tully
Most of us here in America are used to the inverse where there are a lot of nominal Christians, or a lot of Christianity around us. That’s the norm. And increasingly, we might have Muslim neighbors who are in the minority still. What was it like for you growing up in a context where Islam was the dominant religion all around you?

A. S. Ibrahim
I encountered the Muslims all that time. Some of them were really good friends. Some were harsh and harassed me and my sisters as Christians. It’s normal, but you cannot avoid being surrounded with Muslims. It’s just the fact of me growing up in Egypt. I would say that for the most part, I had lots of ideas about Islam and about Muslims that were shaped by my context. Some of them were really not good. I felt that Muslims are, especially in the media, are not kind to Christians. That’s the fact. But I also had great experiences with my Muslim neighbors, in terms of talking about religion. So they don’t want to be a Christian, but we talked about religion and they were not harsh against me. So I would say that there is a variety of encounters that shaped my ideas about who these Muslims really are, until I began to travel in my early twenties to other parts of the Muslim countries and I encountered different Muslims. Apparently, and that’s what I discovered, Muslims are shaped by their own context and they are different from one country to another. Actually, I discovered that we should talk about Islams, not an Islam. And that’s actually a part of what I wrote in my book, that Islam is practiced differently and Islam is interpreted differently.

Matt Tully
Does it seem parallel to the way there’s a variety of denominational and theological traditions within Christianity?

A. S. Ibrahim
True, but not only that. Yes, we have denominations and Islam has some sort of denominations, yes. But the fact is the majority of our Muslim friends, or our Muslim neighbors, the majority by far don’t really know a lot about their faith. They just hear something in the mosque. They just are satisfied with what they hear. They don’t question their faith. They don’t question anything about the teachings. They just live Islam as they are taught. And this is a major point that we need to emphasize because don’t think of Muslims as the truly solid, well-educated people in Islam. Actually, they are not—most of them, at least. I only began to encounter educated Muslims when I was in my years of university. When I came to the academic arena for my PhD, these are the educated Muslims in their religion. Many Muslims will be educated in other fields, but not Islam. Islam for them is, Yeah, I should be just nice. That’s it. Is that Islam? Oh, yeah. That’s my Islam. Okay.

10:15 - Why Is It Important for American Christians to Understand Islam?

Matt Tully
I want to get into more of those misconceptions that sometimes we as Christians can have—American Christians, in particular—about Muslims. But before we get into that, I guess I want to take a step back and ask a broader question. And it’s kind of illustrated even by you. You serve as director of the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and you’ve written a number of books. This is your first book with Crossway, but you’ve written other books on different facets of Islam, including the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and even Arabic as a language. And so I wonder if you could speak to the American Christian listening right now and explain why is it important for us as American Christians to understand Islam? Why should we make that an emphasis in some way in our lives, in our churches, in our work?

A. S. Ibrahim
You cannot avoid the fact that Islam is around you everywhere you go. Muslims are around us everywhere we go. If you compare statistics from the past century and this century in terms of the number of Muslims around you, many immigrants are here who claim to be Muslim, whether actually they are practicing or not. But the fact is Muslims are around us. I don’t believe that Islam as a faith is the fastest growing religion, as you might hear elsewhere. I think this concept, or this idea, needs some more nuance to it.

Matt Tully
You wrote an article for World Magazine recently where you talked about that, and I think the statistic that was put out by Pew was that by 2050, there would be the same number of Muslims as there are Christians in the world. You thought that was misleading, perhaps?

A. S. Ibrahim
Actually I wrote this first in the book with Crossway. This is actually in the book first before it went out on Word Magazine. But the fact is, yes, when we say that Islam is the fastest growing religion, I ask you, What do you actually mean? Do you mean the message is convincing to more people every day? It’s growing and embracing—

Matt Tully
Through conversions?

A. S. Ibrahim
No. Actually, this is not supported by the data we possess. Not that it’s good or bad, I just want to add nuance on the fact that people say Islam is the fastest growing religion. This is actually not supported because we understand that the growing number is basically birth rate.

Matt Tully
A higher birth rate among Muslims, generally?

A. S. Ibrahim
Actually, this is not actually now the case. The Muslim family now, due to some economic reasons and some other factors, are having the same number of children as the average Western, in general. It was the case in the past, which made the fact that Muslim families have more children, but that’s not actually the case now for various reasons. I can talk about this later, but this is why I’m saying are you talking about Muslims having more babies, or are you talking about a convincing message? Because it the statement Islam is the fastest growing religion usually comes in the context of, Oh, it seems convincing. It seems more people are embracing Islam. Actually, no. By secular estimations and research outlets, it seems that Muslims are, as never before, abandoning the faith—not to Christianity and to embrace Christianity per se, but actually Muslims now have access to a wealth of information that they didn’t have before. So under their fingertips, they can look up Muslim theological arguments, and now the Internet opens the doors for everyone to question everything. So the belief system of Islam is being questioned as never before, and actually, many Muslims are thinking about their religion critically, which was not the case in previous generations when we relied only on the mosque’s preaching.

Matt Tully
Are there statistics that speak to conversions from Islam to Christianity versus from Christianity to Islam?

A. S. Ibrahim
We don’t have this yet. We have statistics that are clear and are done by secular universities and secular entities, like Pure Research and all this, that say that Muslims do not identify as Muslim anymore in many locations. For example, you think of a country like Iran, this is a country that claims to be 95% Muslim—like, hard Muslims, like really Muslim. Two years ago, over 60%—I can’t remember the number—of Muslims in Iran are not anymore identifying as Muslim. This is huge.

Matt Tully
Wow.

A. S. Ibrahim
This is huge. Think about America. You hear that Islam is the fastest growing religion. Okay, go to the second level of this question. The net outcome of Muslims abandoning Islam in America and Muslims embracing Islam in America is zero. So what do we talk about here? The growing thing, or the fastest growing, thing needs nuance. And that’s what I was arguing.

16:07 - Why Are Muslims Here in America?

Matt Tully
What are some of the other most common misconceptions about Islam that you encounter, maybe even particularly in your classes that you teach at the seminary among seminary students?

A. S. Ibrahim
I think I have some of the best students. I have to admit that. So I usually don’t get a lot of misconception because many of my students really love their Muslim neighbors and talk about them in the best way possible and want to really reach them with the gospel. But the point is that overall we can all agree that Islam has been an unknown religion for so long.

Matt Tully
What do you mean by unknown? Someone might say, Islam is in the news all the time.

A. S. Ibrahim
But you’re talking about since 9/11. But before that, who would care to talk about Muslims or Islam? You’re talking about atheists or whatever. But now Islam is on the forefront of public discourse. And we hear a lot of news of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and all this brings Islam up front. So the average person on the street in America would tend to think that Muslims are here to harm me. I actually don’t think so. So, why are Muslims here near me in America? I think they just like the life in America more than their own country. Truly. Honestly, they are just normal people. Muslims happen to be Muslim, and they love Starbucks. I always say that. They love drinking coffee. They love to be in a country where there is no one on their shoulder all the time telling them what to do and what not to do, which is the fact in Muslim majority countries. Let’s be honest. Someone from Syria or Iraq coming to America—why? I think it is a better quality of life for them. Probably they had traumatic situations that led them out of their homes. So we need to just think about those as our Muslim neighbor. I always say that we cannot think of all Muslims are the same. I think the majority of Muslims around us as are cultural Muslims.
So why are they Muslims? They are born in a Muslim family. And then there is a minority that are really theologically educated in Islam. This is a minority. They don’t want to harm anyone. And actually, they understand Islam based on the context they are in. And then there is a very tiny minority who are radical and extremist. We cannot deny that. But the problem is you cannot really take this tiniest minority and say all Muslims are that way.

Matt Tully
And yet they, in terms of the news that we’re exposed to, they tend to dominate the news. Any other common misconceptions, even theological misconceptions that you’ve encountered among Christians?

A. S. Ibrahim
Not that much, but because, again, it comes back to Islam is unknown.

Matt Tully
So there aren’t even misconceptions just because we don’t know anything about them.

A. S. Ibrahim
We don’t read about Islam and Muslims that much. We tend to think that they either just hate Christianity. And I would say they disagree with Christian claims, and that’s true. I would say they are not really like Christians in the West. They don’t really have a clear understanding about what does Islam really teach? They don’t. I touch, in part, on this topic in my book. But other than this, I would say misconception necessitates that you already know something. But Islam is pretty much unknown, and that’s why many Christians just say, Oh, they are just fanatics. They are just hate us. So just general ideas without specifics.

20:28 - Common Misconceptions about Christianity among Muslims

Matt Tully
Let’s flip that question around then. What are some of the maybe more common misconceptions that the average Muslim in America might have about Christianity as a religion?

A. S. Ibrahim
Most Muslims tend to think that Christians worship—theologically first—that Christians worship three gods, that the Bible is corrupt. How did they reach these ideas? Probably in the mosque.

Matt Tully
They’ve been taught that. How would Islam, as a theological system, how does it view Christianity? Is Christianity a distortion of the truth?

A. S. Ibrahim
It’s good to ask this, but I don’t think Islam sees anything. It’s how Muslims interpret it. And for the most part, Muslims tend to think of Christianity as an eclipsed religion. It’s surpassed by the beauty of Islam. It’s surpassed by the better claims of Islam. So that’s the general idea. Islam surpassed everything that came before it.

Matt Tully
Judaism and Christianity.

A. S. Ibrahim
Mohamed is the best of humankind. That’s a general claim. Muslims tend to think this way without questioning any of these beliefs. Some of the major misconceptions that come from the Muslim side of things is Christians corrupted their Bible. Whenever you bring a Bible into a conversation with a Muslim they’ll say, Oh, no. I don’t read that. It’s corrupt.

Matt Tully
They just dismiss it.

A. S. Ibrahim
So I say, Why are you dismissing this although your Quran actually values my Bible? So it’s a misconception, and we need to overcome this misconception. Another one that is really weak is that Muslims, for the most part, believe that Christians worship three gods.

Matt Tully
How do you address that? I think probably most people listening right now, we believe in this doctrine of the Trinity. It’s a central pillar of Christianity, and yet it can feel, even for the best of us, hard to fathom and certainly hard to explain. So how would you go about explaining the doctrine of the Trinity to a Muslim?

A. S. Ibrahim
It’s a big topic, and I discuss it in detail in the book, but I need to first say that most Muslims have a wrong idea about the Trinity. Most Muslims don’t think of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They usually think of Father, Mary, and the Son.

Matt Tully
So they don’t even have the right persons in place.

A. S. Ibrahim
It’s a misconception based on some ideas that are offered in the Quran, the scripture of Islam. So I say, What do these Muslims you’re talking with talk about? If they are having the bad, or the wrong, idea about the Trinity, I just fix it. And then most of them will just say, Oh yeah, sure. Let’s go on.

Matt Tully
So they’re ready to go on to the next conversation?

A. S. Ibrahim
Sure. Yeah. But even if they have a problem thinking about the plurality within the unity of God, they have to answer to many things in their religion, including how the Quran, according to their views, is eternal with God. I ask, How would you reconcile this? We have two eternal beings. How would you solve this? And Muslims say, Oh, I never thought of that. So that can be a direction. Another direction is the logical argument of the Trinity, which I detail in the book. So there is a lot of things that you can talk about in terms of presenting the Triune God, because I think having a strict monotheistic belief in God is really not helpful. It doesn’t solve many problems in Islam. But having a plurality within the unity of God actually makes a lot of sense. And this is something that Christians should be adamant and really strong about. It’s the beauty of the Trinity.

Matt Tully
So you’re arguing that the Trinity as a doctrine is actually a helpful thing in witnessing to Muslims.

A. S. Ibrahim
Oh, absolutely. Oh my goodness. It’s a beautiful thing. The Triune God is a wonderful thing to embrace, not to avoid talking about.

Matt Tully
You’ve mentioned beauty a couple times when it comes to theology, that Islam would, generally speaking, kind of of view itself as this more beautiful culmination, or surpassing, of Christianity. Is beauty an important concept in Islam?

A. S. Ibrahim
I don’t think so, but beauty is a good thing in general. I think it’s just my appreciation of how Christian theology makes sense. Think about the Cappadocians and how they marveled at the Triune God. Gregory of Nazianzus, how he worshiped God in Trinity. Muslims don’t have this. And at the same time, it’s difficult to make a case for the strict oneness of God apart from the plurality of God. I mentioned this earlier about how the vast majority of Muslims insist that the Quran is eternal. It’s uncreated, so it’s God. How can you handle this? So it doesn’t work to have that strict monotheism. It requires plurality within the unity of God.

26:46 - The Dangers of Insider Movements

Matt Tully
You’ve been fairly critical of the insider movement in relation to Christian evangelization of Muslims. So I wonder if you could briefly describe what that insider movement entails. What is that? And why would you have concerns about that when it comes to sharing the gospel with Muslims?

A. S. Ibrahim
This is a very good question, and it needs a session on its own. However, I think the insider movement discussion, for the most part, it’s like we wrote books on that and articles on that.

Matt Tully
What was the heyday of the discussion about this?

A. S. Ibrahim
It’s whether we should encourage Muslims to remain in their religious, cultural, and social context after they accept Christ.

Matt Tully
What was the argument behind this? Some people were saying that was a good thing. We should encourage them to stay. Why would they have said that?

A. S. Ibrahim
I don’t want to encourage Muslims to remain or not to remain. In fact, I would love for Muslims who accept the Christ to remain in their context. My issue is regarding their adoption of their religious system or their religious features of Islam. Many Muslims that I know of encountered Christ, so they wanted to have nothing to do with Islam anymore. They wanted to depart from that religious system completely. Now, some Western missiologists would come here and say, Oh, no. You don’t need to abandon Islam in that way. Do it in your heart. You can actually still go to the mosque and practice what you’ve been doing. Just in your heart, you are worshiping the true God. I’m like, Why you’re doing that? The guy wanted to abandon everything he adopted in his previous former religion. And then these missiologists would say, I don’t have a problem with you reading the Quran, because the Quran has truth in it and can actually lead you somewhat to truth. I’m like, Why are you doing that?

Matt Tully
So what would their answer be to that?

A. S. Ibrahim
I don’t know. I do know that they have some answers, and probably they have good intentions. But an Egyptian Christian, I don’t think this is helpful because from what I saw, there is even in the Bible a clear cut between you and your former religious belief system once you come to Christ. Now, there is a lot of details to the arguments from the insider movement proponents. Again, I don’t really see the insider movement proponents as good or bad. Actually, I think they probably have good intentions. But I don’t think their arguments are helpful. And just to end with this note: everywhere I go in the heartland of Islam, when I encounter local believers, they don’t want to buy into these ideas.

30:26 - A Gospel of Hope

Matt Tully
Maybe as a last question, as you consider the spread of both Christianity and Islam around the world, what gives you hope?

A. S. Ibrahim
We really need to emphasize the gospel of hope. If Muslims around me—just regular people—need one thing today, I probably will say they need the gospel of hope. The gospel can be identified as the gospel of freedom and the gospel of many other things. But the gospel of hope, because in my understanding of Islam and Christianity, and even Judaism, there is something so unique about Christ. And that’s the hope. Even we call the Holy Spirit the Spirit of hope. And in my estimation, the gospel is the gospel of hope in that sense, because Muslims as people need this hope. They need the hope of eternal life. They need the hope of redemption. They need the hope of the forgiveness of sin. Oh my goodness. It’s so burdensome.

Matt Tully
How does Islam deal with the problem of sin and guilt?

A. S. Ibrahim
There is no dealing with it. You wait until Allah forgives or does not forgive. You don’t have eternal security at all. You can’t. It’s not talked about. It’s not offered. You don’t have any kind of eternal hope. What you do as a Muslim is that you do practice things. You live out your Islam in duties—prayer duty, alms-giving duty, pilgrimage duty in Mecca, and so forth—and then Allah will decide. You don’t have any guarantee. You can do every good thing in your life, but then Allah doesn’t really admit you to paradise.

Matt Tully
It's kind of just his own arbitrary decision.

A. S. Ibrahim
Absolutely. And God leads people astray or leads them to paradise. But actually, it’s so interesting that Allah leads people astray in one of the most repeated passages in the Quran. So the point is, gospel of hope. Give hope through the gospel to your Muslim neighbors, because everyone needs hope, but Muslims around us cannot find this hope in their texts. But we have a central message of hope.

Matt Tully
Ayman, thank you so much for sharing a little bit with us from your own experience and study. We really appreciate it.

A. S. Ibrahim
Thank you very much for the opportunity. God bless you and your audience.

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