Evangelising Muslims — a complete guide

Muslims are among the most sincerely devout people in the world. They believe in one God, in prophets, in scripture, in judgement and in moral accountability. They pray five times daily, fast for a month a year, and give to the poor as a religious obligation.

This creates both real common ground and real divergence. Effective witness requires knowing both accurately, and knowing which is which.

Start with what is shared

Do not begin by attacking. Begin by acknowledging what a Muslim friend already believes that is true.

• One God, creator of all, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing.
• Prophets including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus.
• Revelation — God has spoken, in books.
• Judgement — a real day, real accountability, heaven and hell.
• Moral seriousness — sexual ethics, sobriety, honouring parents, care for the poor.

Muslims often find Christians less morally serious than they expected, and that observation is frequently fair. Do not be defensive about it.

What Muslims believe about Jesus

More than most Christians realise. In Islam, Isa (Jesus) is:

• A prophet and messenger of God, one of the greatest.
• Born of a virgin — the Quran affirms the virgin birth (Surah 19:20-21), and Mary (Maryam) is the only woman named in the Quran, with a chapter bearing her name.
• A miracle-worker — healing the blind and lepers, raising the dead, by God's permission (Surah 3:49).
• The Messiah (al-Masih) — the title is used, though not with the Christian meaning.
• Sinless — many Islamic traditions hold him uniquely so.
• Returning at the end of time.

That is a remarkably high view, and it is a genuine bridge. A Muslim friend already honours Jesus. The question is who exactly they are honouring.

The three real divergences

1. The crucifixion is denied. "They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them" (Surah 4:157). Most Islamic interpretation holds that God substituted someone else — often said to be Judas — and took Jesus up alive.

2. His deity is denied. To call Jesus God is shirk — associating partners with God, the gravest sin in Islam.

3. The Bible is held to be corrupted (tahrif), which is how the contradictions between the two books are explained.

Everything else follows from these three. And the first is the most vulnerable.

The crucifixion: the strongest ground

This is where the historical evidence is overwhelming, and it is worth being precise.

The crucifixion of Jesus is among the best-attested events in ancient history:

• Roman: Tacitus (c. AD 116) records that Christus "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus."
• Jewish: Josephus, and the Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a), which records that Yeshu was hanged on the eve of Passover.
• Christian: all four Gospels, and the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 dated by most scholars to within five years of the event.
• Scholarly consensus: even radically sceptical scholars affirm it. John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar and no friend of orthodoxy, wrote that the crucifixion "is as sure as anything historical can ever be."

The Quran was written approximately six hundred years later, in Arabia, with no access to contemporary sources. Not one first-century document — Christian, Jewish, Roman or otherwise — denies the crucifixion.

Ask gently: if God allowed everyone for six centuries, including the eyewitnesses and the hostile authorities, to believe a falsehood about this, what does that say?

Answering "the Bible is corrupted"

Take this in three moves, and the first is the strongest because it comes from their own source.

The Quran endorses the earlier scriptures. It calls the Torah and the Gospel guidance and light (Surah 5:44-46). It instructs: "let the people of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed therein" (Surah 5:47). Surah 10:94 tells the doubter to "ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you."

If the Christian scriptures were corrupt in the seventh century, these instructions make no sense. The Quran commands people to consult books that would then be worthless.

The manuscripts predate Islam. We have substantial New Testament manuscripts from the second and third centuries — P52 from around AD 125, extensive papyri from around AD 200, complete codices from the fourth century. All of these predate Muhammad by centuries, and they contain the deity of Christ, the crucifixion and the resurrection. So any alleged corruption must have happened before the Quran affirmed those books.

Ask the practical questions. Kindly, not as a trap: What exactly was changed? When? By whom? Where is the uncorrupted version? No Islamic source provides an answer, because no such account exists.

Answering "God cannot have a son"

This is the objection where Christians most often defend the wrong thing.

The Muslim objection assumes a biological meaning — that God took a consort. Surah 6:101 asks: "how can He have a son when He has no consort?"

Agree with the rejection. Christians reject that too, and say so first. Then explain what is actually meant.

"Son of God" in Scripture is a statement about eternal relationship and shared nature, not about generation in time. John's prologue uses Logos — the Word — precisely to convey something eternally proceeding from God as a word proceeds from a mind, without division and without a beginning.

The Nicene Creed anticipated this misunderstanding sixteen hundred years ago: "begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father." Begotten, not made means exactly: not created, not produced, not the result of a union.

Nabeel Qureshi said this single clarification removed the largest obstacle he had. He had spent twenty years rejecting something Christians also reject.

The Trinity, briefly

Do not attempt a full defence before establishing what is being rejected.

Ask: "what do you think Christians believe about the Trinity?" Very often the answer is three gods, or God-Mary-Jesus (a misunderstanding the Quran itself appears to address in Surah 5:116).

Then: "we do not believe that either. Let me tell you what we do believe."

One God — as strongly as Deuteronomy 6:4 says it. One being, three persons. Not three beings; not one person in three costumes. The word person is doing work that the English word does not naturally carry, and it is worth saying so.

Questions worth asking

Not as traps. As genuine questions, asked warmly, that are hard to set aside afterwards.

"You believe Jesus was a prophet. What do you do with what he said about himself?" A prophet speaks God's words. If Jesus said "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6), then either he is telling the truth or he is a false prophet. There is no third option that preserves both prophethood and the denial.

"How do you know you will be forgiven?" In Islam, judgement weighs deeds and rests finally on God's mercy, which is not guaranteed to any individual. Most Muslims, asked honestly, will admit they do not know. Then ask whether they would want to know — and explain why a Christian can. This question reaches the heart more often than any historical argument.

"Muhammad never raised anyone from the dead. Jesus did, and was himself raised. What do you make of that difference?"

"Why would God allow the whole world to be deceived about the crucifixion for six hundred years?"

How to do this well

Build a real friendship. Muslim cultures are hospitality cultures. Accept invitations. Extend them. Eat together. Meet the family. This is not a strategy; it is the ordinary shape of love, and it happens to be indispensable here.

Count the cost honestly, on their behalf. For a Muslim, conversion can mean losing family, community, employment, marriage — and in some countries, life. Do not treat a decision lightly that will cost them everything. Qureshi's book spends as much time on that grief as on the arguments, and you should know that before you press.

Know your own faith. You will be asked hard questions by people trained to ask them. Muslim apologetics is a developed discipline. Read.

Respect the Quran physically. Do not put it on the floor or on top of other books. Small courtesies communicate loudly.

Pray for dreams. This is not folklore. An extraordinary proportion of Muslim converts — documented across many countries by researchers like David Garrison — report a dream or vision of Jesus, often described as a man in white. Ask God for this specifically.

Be patient. Qureshi's conversion took years, and it broke his family's heart. This is not a conversation you win in an evening.

And remember what you are asking

"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all" (1 Timothy 2:5-6).

The most important thing you can offer a devout Muslim friend is not a defeated argument. It is the possibility of assurance — of knowing, rather than hoping, that they are forgiven.

That is what they do not have, and it is the thing they most want.