1.“There Is No God but Allah”

Zwemer begins with the Muslim creed, the shahada (confession of faith): there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. It is very short, he notes, yet it stands at the base of all Muslim law, worship and life. Muslims whisper it into the ear of a newborn child and say it at the hour of death. It is repeated in every call to prayer and written on banners, buildings and coins. The first half of the creed expresses tawhid, the Arabic word for the oneness of God, the central belief of Islam. To join partners to God is the opposite sin, called shirk.

The English historian Edward Gibbon called the first half of the creed “an eternal truth.” Zwemer agrees that it is true that there is one God. But he argues that a bare belief in one God is not enough. What matters is the character of that God. In his words, quoting another writer, “the essential point is the character attributed to this one God.” He also warns against arguing from the name alone. Arab Jews and Christians, then and now, also call God “Allah,” because it is simply the Arabic word for God. The same word, he says, can carry very different ideas, so we must study what the Qur’an and Muslim tradition actually teach about Him.

Zwemer then suggests three sources for Muhammad’s ideas about God: what can be known of God from nature, the beliefs of the Arabs around him, and what he heard from Jews and Christians in Arabia. A Muslim reader would reject this at once, because Muslims believe the Qur’an was revealed by God, not gathered from human sources. Students should know that this is an outsider’s historical theory, not something Muslims accept.

2.Allah, the Divine Essence

In chapter II Zwemer looks at the name and the inner nature of God. He shows that Arabs before Islam already knew a high god called Allah. Pre-Islamic poets used the name, the Ka‘ba in Mecca was called the house of God, and a few seekers known as the Hanifs had turned away from idols before Muhammad began to preach. In Zwemer’s view, Islam took up and sharpened a belief that was already present in Arabia.

His main point is that Muslim teaching about God’s essence is mostly negative: it tells us what God is not. The great imams discouraged speculation about God’s being, and theologians such as al-Ghazali (died 1111) described God by denial: He is not a body, He has no limits, He is not contained in anything. Sura 112 of the Qur’an, which tradition treats as the heart of the doctrine, says that God is one, the eternal, who neither begets nor is begotten, and that none is equal to Him. The classical commentators, Zwemer notes, understood “begetting” in a physical, bodily sense.

Against this Zwemer sets the positive revelation of the Bible: “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), God is light (1 John 1:5), and “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Christians also deny that God has a body or a physical son. But Scripture does not stop at denials. It tells us who God is.

3.The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names

Chapter III studies the “beautiful names” of God (in Arabic al-asma’ al-husna). The Qur’an tells believers to call on God by them (Qur’an 7:180), and a well-known tradition says there are ninety-nine and that whoever recites them will enter Paradise. Devout Muslims count them on a string of prayer beads, and the repetition of God’s names, called dhikr (remembrance), is a chief practice of the Sufi orders. Zwemer notes that the number is fixed by tradition and that the lists differ from book to book.

He then goes through the names one by one with the comments of the classical scholars. The list opens with “the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and he admits that many names are beautiful. But he points out that many names speak of power and sovereignty, such as “the Compeller,” and that one name describes God as the One who leads astray whom He wills. He also observes that “Lord” (Rabb), the title the Qur’an uses most, is not on the list, and that four names, “the First, the Last, the Outward, the Inward,” became favourites of the mystics.

For fairness, a modern student should add what Zwemer gives little weight to. The list also includes names such as al-Wadud, “the Loving” (Qur’an 85:14), and Muslims today often point to God’s mercy and love. A Christian witness will do better to listen to how a Muslim friend understands these names than to assume the worst.

4.The Attributes Examined

In chapter IV, the longest in the book, Zwemer sorts the names into groups. Muslim scholars spoke of “terrible” attributes of majesty and “glorious” attributes of beauty. By his own count, names of power, pride and sovereignty are more numerous than names of mercy, and he concludes that power is the ruling idea. He argues that Muhammad saw God’s greatness in creation clearly, but gave much less weight to God’s moral character.

His sharpest claim is that the Qur’an gives little place to God’s holiness. He notes that the commentators and dictionaries explained the word “holy” (quddus) mainly as being free from defect, not as moral purity. Linked to this, he argues, is a light view of sin. He reports that for most Muslim authorities “sin is a conscious act committed against known law,” so that sins done in ignorance hardly count. He also argues that ritual purity and moral purity are treated almost alike.

Zwemer then turns to justice. Quoting al-Ghazali, he shows that in orthodox teaching God owes nothing to anyone and is bound by no duty. He concludes that God, so described, “does not appear to be bound by any standard of justice.” Even God’s knowledge, he says, is pictured mainly as seeing everything, down to the steps of an ant on a black stone at night. He contrasts this with Psalm 139, where God searches and knows the heart: “Search me, O God, and know my heart” (Psalm 139:23). Muslims would answer that God is called “the Holy” and “the Just” and that the Qur’an warns sinners often and strongly. Zwemer’s counts and conclusions are his own reading and should be weighed with care.

5.God, His World and His Decree

Chapter V asks how God relates to the world. Zwemer quotes at length the traveller William Gifford Palgrave, who said that in Arabic thought God is “the only Agent, the only Force, the only Act,” and every creature is simply passive. Zwemer, who had lived in Arabia for more than thirteen years, argues that this picture fits the Wahhabi movement best, and that the Wahhabis were trying to return to early Islam. He concludes that orthodox Islam is “at once deistic and pantheistic”: philosophers and mystics tended to see God as the only real force in all things, while ordinary believers pictured Him as far away from the world.

Chapter VII continues this theme with the doctrine of God’s decree, qadar, the belief that God has measured out and fixed all things beforehand. Zwemer quotes Qur’an passages and the creed of the Turkish scholar al-Birgivi (Zwemer writes “Al Berkevi”), which teaches that both good and evil happen by God’s decree, though God does not approve of evil. He argues that this is not a form of Calvinism but fatalism, and he describes three schools: those who denied human freedom, those who stressed it, and the middle path of the Ash‘ari theologians. He also contrasts the Muslim phrase inshallah (“if God wills”) with James 4:15, where the same words go with personal responsibility.

Scholars today use the word “fatalism” for Islam much more cautiously. Muslim teaching has always insisted that people are accountable for their deeds on the Day of Judgment, and Muslims themselves have long debated how God’s decree and human choice fit together, as Christians have. Zwemer’s deeper point still deserves attention: in his reading, Islam has no place for God as Father, and so the doctrine of His will is not warmed by His love.

6.The Qur’an and the Trinity (Chapter VI)

Chapter VI is the heart of the book for our course. Zwemer opens with a saying of the American writer James Freeman Clarke, that false systems are “commonly true in what they affirm, false in what they deny.” Islam, he argues, is known as much by what it denies as by what it affirms, and its chief denial is the Trinity. He insists this is no small matter for Christians. With the German historian F. C. Baur, he says that in the fourth-century struggle between Arius and Athanasius “the existence of Christianity was at stake.” The Trinity includes the Incarnation of the Son and the person of the Holy Spirit, so he studies the Qur’an on all three.

He first looks at the direct passages, all from the later suras given at Medina. The Qur’an tells the People of the Book not to say “Three” (Qur’an 4:171), condemns those who say God is “the third of three” (Qur’an 5:73), and pictures God asking Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as two gods besides God (Qur’an 5:116). Zwemer concludes that the Qur’an understood the Trinity as three gods: God, Mary and Jesus. He shows that the Muslim commentators did not agree. Al-Zamakhshari described the Christian belief more accurately than the Qur’an seems to, while the later Jalalayn commentary still named the three as God, Jesus and His mother. (Zwemer’s verse numbers follow an older European system; we give the numbers used today.)

He then turns to the Qur’an’s picture of Jesus. It affirms His virgin birth and miracles, but it denies the Incarnation. It says that God does not take a son, and that Jesus is like Adam, created from dust (Qur’an 3:59). It denies that He was crucified (Qur’an 4:157), and a tradition says that Jesus will break the cross when He returns. As for the Holy Spirit, the Qur’an speaks of “the holy Spirit” in a few places (Qur’an 2:87, 2:253, 16:102), and the commentators identify this Spirit with the angel Gabriel.

Where did the idea of Mary as part of the Trinity come from? Older writers such as Gibbon and George Sale suggested a small sect, the Collyridians, who were said to offer worship to Mary. Zwemer doubts that this sect was important or even well attested. He shows that the churches Muhammad could have met—in Yemen and Najran, in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and in Syria—confessed the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. His conclusion is that the Qur’an rejects something Christians never taught. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not God plus Mary plus Jesus. It is one God, eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

7.Why Father, Son and Holy Spirit Matters in Witness

In his last chapter Zwemer sums up. He asks whether the Qur’an’s claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God holds. He grants that Muslims are true monotheists and that Allah shares many attributes with the God of the Bible, so Allah cannot simply be classed with idols. Yet he judges the Muslim idea of God “inadequate, incomplete, barren and grievously distorted” compared with the Christian revelation. The fuller Christian idea, he argues, is found only in the Trinity: a God who is love within Himself, who comes to us in His Son and lives in us by His Spirit.

This book helps the pastor in four ways. First, begin with common ground. Christians also confess, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4). We are not polytheists, and we reject shirk as strongly as any Muslim. Second, correct the misunderstanding gently. When a Muslim friend says that Christians worship God, Mary and Jesus, agree that such a belief would be wrong, and explain that the Church has never taught it. Third, explain the Trinity positively, not only by denials. God is one in being and three in Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). The Son is not a second god born of a wife; He is the eternal Word of God who became flesh (John 1:1, 14).

Fourth, show why it matters. Because God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, love is not something He began to show when He made the world; it belongs to who He is. Because the Son became man and died on the cross, God can be both just and merciful. And because the Spirit lives in believers, we can call God “Abba, Father!” (Galatians 4:6). Zwemer saw that this is exactly what is missing in the Muslim picture of God. For a Muslim neighbour, the good news is not that God is less one than he believed, but that the one God has come near in Jesus Christ.

8.Taking It to Heart

1.Why Zwemer Wrote This Book

Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867–1952) was an American missionary of the Reformed Church in America. He served for many years in Arabia, in the region of the Persian Gulf, and later lived in Cairo, Egypt. He edited the journal The Moslem World and later taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. Christians often called him “the apostle to Islam.” By 1912 he had spent more than twenty years among Muslims, and he had read the Qur’an, its main commentators and many books of tradition in Arabic.

His purpose in this book is simple. Christians who work among Muslims need to know which Jesus their neighbours already know. Muslims do not start from nothing. They have a picture of Jesus, called Isa in Arabic, drawn from the Qur’an and from later stories. Some parts of that picture agree with the Gospels, some do not, and some are missing. Zwemer believed that a missionary who understands this picture can build on what is true in it and patiently fill in what is lacking.

The book moves in a clear order. It begins with the names of Jesus in the Qur’an. It then gathers what the Qur’an says about his life, death and “translation” (his being taken up to God). Next it surveys the stories of later tradition, from his birth to his second coming. Then it describes his person and character and his teaching as Muslims see them. It ends with counsel on how to preach Christ to Muslims who already know the name of Jesus. Two technical words help here: a sura is a chapter of the Qur’an, and hadith are the reports of what Muhammad said and did.

2.The Names of Jesus in the Qur’an

Zwemer begins with names because names carry great weight in Arab culture. Orthodox Muslims, he notes, use only the names the Qur’an itself gives to Jesus. The most common is Isa, which appears about twenty-five times, often with the phrase “son of Mary.” Scholars disagree about where this form of the name came from; it is not the Hebrew or Aramaic form, Yeshua, that the first disciples used. Zwemer lists several theories and holds none of them firmly.

The Qur’an also calls Jesus al-Masih, “the Messiah,” eight times. Yet it never explains what the title means. Many Muslim scholars linked it to wandering or to Jesus’ life without a home. Zwemer observes that “the homelessness of Jesus” deeply impressed Muslim imagination. The Gospels give the title its full meaning: the Anointed One promised by the prophets, the King from David’s line (Matthew 16:16; Luke 4:18).

Two titles stand out above the rest. In Qur’an 3:45 the angels announce to Mary “a word from Him,” and in Qur’an 4:171 Jesus is called God’s Word, which He conveyed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. Zwemer notes that no other prophet in the Qur’an receives these titles. Muslim teachers explain “Word” to mean that Jesus was created by God’s command, “Be!” But Christians hear in it an echo of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Zwemer saw these titles as an open door for conversation. (Zwemer used an older verse numbering, so his references sometimes differ by a few verses from modern editions; CTS gives the modern numbers.)

Even so, Zwemer is clear that in Islam “Jesus Christ does not occupy the supreme place.” Muslims rank him among the great prophets, with Noah, Abraham and Moses, and they rank Muhammad above all. Jesus is honoured, but as one prophet among many, and the Qur’an forbids making distinctions between the prophets (Qur’an 2:285).

3.The Qur’an’s Account of His Life

Zwemer next gathers the scattered Qur’an passages about Jesus into one story, following the order of the Gospels. The Qur’an is not arranged by time, so he groups the verses by subject. The annunciation is told twice. In Qur’an 3:42–47 the angels tell Mary that God has chosen her and purified her above all women, and that she will bear a son though no man has touched her; God “creates what He wills.” In Qur’an 19:16–21 a spirit from God appears to her in the form of a man and announces a pure son, “a sign” and “a mercy.”

The birth itself is told in Qur’an 19:22–33. Mary withdraws to a distant place and gives birth at the trunk of a palm tree, where God provides water and ripe dates. When she returns, her people accuse her, calling her “sister of Aaron.” She points to the baby, and the infant speaks from the cradle: he is God’s servant, given the Book, made a prophet, and he says peace be on him the day he was born, the day he dies and the day he is raised. (Muslim commentators explain “sister of Aaron” as a way of naming her family line; some Christian critics have seen in it a confusion with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron.)

The Qur’an mentions Jesus’ miracles only briefly, in sura 3 and sura 5. He makes birds of clay and breathes into them, heals the blind and the leper, and raises the dead, all “by God’s permission” (Qur’an 3:49; 5:110). In Qur’an 5:112–115 the disciples ask for a table spread with food to come down from heaven; Zwemer thought this was a distant memory of the Lord’s Supper. Compared with the Gospels, he found the Qur’an’s record of Jesus’ works “meagre.” The Gospels give whole chapters to his teaching, his healings, his conflicts and his death. The Qur’an gives a few verses, and almost nothing of what Jesus taught.

4.Jesus in Muslim Tradition

Because the Qur’an says so little, Muslim writers filled the gaps. Zwemer draws especially on al-Tha‘labi, an eleventh-century author of Stories of the Prophets, and on other commentators and poets. Here Jesus’ life is filled with detail. Mary serves in the place of prayer with her cousin Joseph the carpenter. Gabriel appears to her in a cave. Herod seeks the child, and the family flees on a donkey to Egypt, where Mary spins cotton and gleans grain for twelve years.

Many stories of Jesus’ childhood resemble the later Christian infancy legends rather than the Gospels. In one story he amazes his teacher by explaining the hidden meaning of the alphabet. In others he finds stolen treasure, changes water into food and wine, and raises the dead. One early description pictures him as barefoot, owning nothing, praying through the night and walking on the water.

Zwemer’s point is not that these stories are worthless. Many Muslim mystics and poets loved Jesus as a model of humility, poverty and prayer. His point is that this portrait is not drawn from eyewitnesses. It is drawn from the Qur’an’s few verses, from legends that circulated in the Middle East and from imagination. The Gospels, by contrast, were written within the lifetime of those who had seen and heard Jesus (Luke 1:1–4; 1 John 1:1–3). A pastor today can respect a Muslim’s love for the Jesus of these stories while inviting him to meet Jesus in the Gospels themselves.

5.Not Crucified, but Raised to God

The great dividing line is the cross. Zwemer’s chapter opens with another writer’s words: “The Cross of Christ is the missing link in the Muslim’s creed.” The key verse is Qur’an 4:157–158, which says that the Jews did not kill Jesus and did not crucify him, but “it appeared so to them,” and that God raised him up to Himself. Yet other verses seem to speak of his death: in Qur’an 3:55 God says He will take Jesus and raise him to Himself, and in Qur’an 19:33 the infant speaks of the day he will die. Zwemer concluded that “especially in relation to His death, the statements are contradictory.”

Tradition tried to explain what happened. The most common answer is a substitution: God made someone else look like Jesus, and that man was crucified in his place. The stories disagree about who it was. Some say Judas the betrayer; others say a volunteer from among the disciples, or a guard, or a man with another name. Meanwhile, the stories say, God lifted Jesus alive to heaven. Most Sunni Muslims hold this view today. A smaller modern group, the Ahmadis, teach instead that Jesus survived the cross and later died a natural death. Either way, Islam denies that Jesus died for sins.

Muslims believe Jesus will return before the end. Qur’an 43:61 is often read as calling him a sign of the Hour, and the hadith tell more. Zwemer summarizes a tradition reported by Abu Hurayra: Jesus will descend, judge justly, break the cross, kill the swine and end the special tax on Christians and Jews, which Muslim scholars take to mean that he will call all people to Islam. He will kill the Dajjal, the false messiah of the last days. He will live on earth forty years, marry and have children, then die in Medina and be buried in the chamber where Muhammad lies.

The Gospels tell a different story, and they tell it with one voice. All four Gospels describe the crucifixion in detail, and the apostles preached from the first that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Even non-Christian writers of the first and second centuries, such as Tacitus, mention Jesus’ execution under Pontius Pilate. The Bible also teaches that Christ will return, but as Lord and Judge, not to confirm another faith (Acts 1:11; Matthew 25:31).

6.What Islam Denies and What It Affirms

In his chapter on the person and character of Jesus, Zwemer argues that the Muslim view of Christ is shaped more by what it denies than by what it affirms. The Qur’an says Jesus is like Adam, created from dust by God’s word (Qur’an 3:59). It condemns those who call the Messiah the Son of God (Qur’an 9:30), and it says it is not fitting for the Merciful to take a son (Qur’an 19:88–93). So Islam denies his deity, his eternal Sonship and his existence before his birth. Zwemer adds that Islam has no priesthood and no sacrifice for sin, and so it has no place for Christ as the great High Priest (Hebrews 4:14–16). For this reason, he says, the cross remains a stumbling block.

Yet Zwemer is fair about what Islam affirms. Jesus is an honoured prophet with titles no one else receives. He is born of a virgin. Tradition holds that he was sinless, and one hadith says that only Mary and her son were untouched by Satan at birth. He healed the sick and raised the dead. He is alive now with God. These are real points of contact, and Zwemer wants missionaries to see them clearly.

Zwemer then shows how Muslim teaching gives Jesus a new chief role: to announce Muhammad. Qur’an 61:6 has Jesus foretell a messenger named Ahmad, and Muslim writers read several Bible passages, especially the promise of the Helper in John 16:7, as prophecies of Muhammad. Zwemer argues that these readings do not fit their context; in John the Helper is the Holy Spirit (John 14:26). His summary is memorable: in his view Muhammad “leads his followers to the portal, but he fails to open the door.”

His chapter on Jesus’ teaching makes a related point. The Qur’an contains no direct quotation from the New Testament, and Muslims generally cannot describe what Jesus taught. The Gospel, or Injil, is praised in the Qur’an, yet its content is largely absent. Zwemer concludes that Islam leaves out the incarnation, the atonement and justification by faith, and so it stands opposed to Christianity on both the person and the teaching of Christ. He states this more sharply than CTS would, but the basic observation stands: the Qur’an honours the name of Jesus while denying what the Gospels say is most important about him.

7.“What Think Ye of the Christ?”

The last chapter turns from study to mission. Zwemer’s motive is the glory of God. Muslims need the gospel, he writes, because salvation comes by God’s grace through Christ’s atoning death, not by belonging to any religion. He is careful to apply this to Christians too: “The Christian is not saved because he is a Christian.” Difficulties in Muslim lands do not cancel the command to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19).

How should Christians preach Christ to Muslims? First, begin with points of contact: the virgin birth, the miracles, the sinless life, the honour Muslims give to the prophets and to Scripture. Second, preach positively. Zwemer believed that the clearest way to answer error is to present the full truth about God, Christ and the Trinity, rather than to attack. Third, know the Qur’an, the tradition and the life of Muhammad well, and speak with sympathy and respect. Fourth, help the hearer feel the weight of sin through the Sermon on the Mount and the sinless life of Jesus, and then point to the cross, where God’s mercy and justice meet. Above all, let Muslim friends read the Gospels for themselves and meet Jesus there.

At the centre of it all stands one question, the one Jesus put to the Pharisees: “What think ye of the Christ?” (Matthew 22:42, KJV; the NKJV reads, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?”). Every conversation, Zwemer says, should come back to this. Zwemer also believed that witness to Muslims would bless the church itself, forcing Christians to understand more deeply the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection and the Trinity. He quotes his colleague Temple Gairdner: “Islam forces us to find the Trinity in our hearts.” He ends the book with the Nicene Creed, the confession of faith he hoped Muslim converts would one day make their own.

8.Taking It to Heart

1.“Nothing Has Sprung from Nothing”

Tisdall opens with an old Greek saying, “Nothing has sprung from nothing,” and applies it to Islam. A religion that has shaped so much of the world, he argues, deserves to be studied as history: what did it receive from the world around it? He does not retell the life of Muhammad, which earlier writers such as William Muir had covered. He works mainly from the Qur’an itself and uses the hadith (the reports of Muhammad’s words and deeds, collected later) only where they explain the Qur’an or are accepted by all Muslims.

He first describes the Muslim belief fairly. Muslims call the Qur’an “Recited Revelation”: the very words of God, written on the “Preserved Tablet” in heaven and brought down by the angel Gabriel. The hadith rank second. Tisdall then tells how the Qur’an was gathered. Zaid ibn Thabit collected it at the command of Abu Bakr after many reciters died in battle, and the caliph Uthman later sent one standard text to the provinces and had other copies destroyed. It is worth noticing that Tisdall, a critic, concludes that the text has come down with only minor variations, so that its wording can be studied with confidence.

Then he states his thesis. He rejects the claim that the Qur’an came down from heaven and asks instead what Muhammad drew from others, from whom, and how much came from his own character and setting. He hoped the book would lead Muslims to re-examine their faith, help students of religion and assist missionaries. That double aim, scholarship and persuasion, runs through the whole book. It explains both its strengths and its weaknesses.

2.Old Arabia and the Hanifs

Tisdall’s first source is the religion of Arabia before Islam, the period Muslims call the Jahiliyya, “the time of ignorance.” He argues that belief in a high God called Allah never disappeared there. People swore oaths by Allah, yet worshipped lesser gods such as al-Lat, al-Uzza, Manat and Hubal as go-betweens. The Ka’bah in Mecca was already called the “House of Allah” and held many idols. Tisdall lists pilgrimage rites (the Hajj) that Islam kept: the pilgrim’s garment (ihram), walking around the Ka’bah (tawaf), running between the hills of Safa and Marwa, kissing the Black Stone and throwing stones at Mina.

Tisdall is not always on the attack. He examines a popular charge that verses of Sura 54 were copied from the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qays, finds those lines only in one late edition, and concludes that they were probably taken from the Qur’an rather than the other way round. A pastor should learn from this: a careful critic tests even the arguments that would help his own side.

In his last chapter Tisdall turns to the Hanifs, a few men in Mecca, Medina and Ta’if who, before Muhammad began to preach, turned from idols and sought “the religion of Abraham.” The best known is Zaid ibn Amr, who refused sacrifices to idols, opposed the burying alive of baby daughters and worshipped “the Lord of Abraham.” Others included Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a cousin of Muhammad’s wife Khadijah. Tisdall argues that nearly every teaching reported of Zaid reappears in the Qur’an, which itself calls Abraham a hanif, an upright worshipper of one God (Qur’an 3:67). He closes the book by claiming that Muhammad’s own personality and changing circumstances shaped the rest, and he ends with a severe judgment on Islam that CTS does not repeat.

3.Stories from Jewish Tradition

Tisdall’s longest chapter traces Jewish material. He follows the German Jewish scholar Abraham Geiger, who in 1833 had asked what Muhammad took from Judaism. Large Jewish communities lived in Medina and elsewhere in Arabia, so contact was easy. His examples are vivid. In Qur’an 5:31 a raven shows Cain how to bury his brother; in a Jewish book, Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer, a raven teaches the same lesson, though to Adam. The next verse, 5:32, says that whoever kills one soul is as if he had killed all mankind, and it presents this as a rule given to the Children of Israel. The Mishnah, a Jewish law collection completed about AD 200, teaches almost the same thing (Sanhedrin 4:5).

Tisdall offers more. Abraham is thrown into a fire by idol-worshippers and saved (Qur’an 21:68–69), a story he traces to a Jewish reading of the city name “Ur” as “fire.” The Queen of Sheba, the hoopoe bird and the glass floor (27:20–44) appear in an Aramaic commentary on Esther. The calf that made a lowing sound (20:88) is found in Jewish tradition as well. Tisdall also lists ideas: seven heavens, seven gates of hell, and the rule that the fast begins when a white thread can be told from a black one at dawn (2:187), which he compares with a rule in the Mishnah.

Some of these parallels are strong and still accepted, especially where the Jewish source is clearly older, as the Mishnah is. Others are weaker than Tisdall thought. Most scholars today date Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer to the eighth or ninth century, after the rise of Islam; it even names two wives of Ishmael Aisha and Fatima, which suggests a writer living in a Muslim world. So influence may have run in both directions, or both books may draw on older stories told aloud. The date of the Esther commentary is also uncertain.

4.Christian Legends and the Infancy Gospels

Tisdall argues that Christianity had made little progress in Arabia and that Muhammad probably never met the plain message of the Gospels. What he heard, Tisdall thinks, was a popular Christianity full of legends and of honour paid to Mary. He believed no Arabic New Testament yet existed, and modern scholars agree that no Arabic Bible translation from before Islam is known. So Tisdall looks for the Qur’an’s Christian stories in the apocryphal books, writings outside the Bible, mostly from the second century and later, that filled gaps in the Gospel story with legends.

His examples are well known. The Companions of the Cave (Qur’an 18:9–26), young men who sleep for centuries, match the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, told by the Syriac preacher Jacob of Serugh (died 521). Mary given to the temple, fed by angels, with her guardian chosen by casting lots (3:35–44), closely follows the Protevangelium of James of the second century. Mary giving birth beneath a palm tree that feeds her (19:23–26) resembles a later account in which a palm bends down at the child’s command. The baby Jesus speaking from the cradle (19:29–33) appears in the Arabic Infancy Gospel, and Jesus making birds of clay that fly (3:49; 5:110) is told in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Tisdall also notes that the Qur’an calls Mary “sister of Aaron” (19:28), which he took as a confusion with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron.

On the cross, Qur’an 4:157 says that Jesus was not killed or crucified, “but it appeared so unto them” (Pickthall). Tisdall points out that Basilides, a second-century teacher described by Irenaeus, taught that another man died in Jesus’ place, a view the early church rejected. How did such stories reach Arabia? Tisdall thinks Muhammad heard them by word of mouth, perhaps from Mary the Copt, an Egyptian Christian woman sent to him from Egypt; of one story he writes, “Muhammad probably learnt the tale from her.”

This is the strongest part of the book. The Protevangelium, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Jacob of Serugh clearly come before Islam, and scholars of every background recognize these parallels. But some details need care. The surviving Arabic Infancy Gospel is late and its date is debated. Mary the Copt reached Medina only around 628, long after Sura 19, a Meccan sura, was first recited, so she cannot be its source. Tisdall’s Buddhist parallels to the palm tree and the speaking infant have found little support.

5.Persian Parallels

Persia ruled parts of Arabia, such as al-Hira and Yemen, and Meccan merchants traded in Persian lands. Tisdall notes that a Meccan opponent, al-Nadr ibn al-Harith, told Persian hero tales of Rustam and Isfandiyar to compete with Muhammad’s preaching. He also notes that the Qur’an records critics who dismissed its message as old stories of earlier peoples (25:5) and who said a foreigner was teaching Muhammad (16:103). Salman the Persian, an early convert, is mentioned too.

Tisdall then compares Muslim teaching with Zoroastrian books. The Night Journey and Ascension of Muhammad (the Mi’raj, linked to Qur’an 17:1) is set beside the Arda Viraf Namag, in which a righteous man is guided through heaven and hell. The bridge over hell (al-Sirat) is compared with the Chinvat Bridge, where Zoroastrians believed souls are judged. He also compares the maidens of paradise (houris) with Persian spirits called paris, the jinn with an Avestan evil spirit, and the “light of Muhammad” passed down through generations with the royal glory of Persian legend.

This chapter needs the most caution. Many of these ideas come from hadith and later tradition, not from the Qur’an itself, so Tisdall’s title promises more than this chapter shows. And the Zoroastrian books, including the Arda Viraf Namag, were written down in their present form in the ninth and tenth centuries, under Muslim rule. Some ideas, such as judgment at a bridge, are clearly older; in other cases influence may have flowed from Islam into the Persian books. Most scholars treat this chapter with great reserve.

6.How Muslims Answer

Muslims have long heard this argument, and the Qur’an itself records it. Critics said, “Only a man teacheth him,” and the Qur’an replies that the man they meant spoke a foreign tongue, while the Qur’an is “clear Arabic speech” (16:103, Pickthall). For Muslims the similarities are what one should expect. The same God sent the Torah and the Gospel, and the Qur’an presents itself as “confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it” (5:48). Where Jewish and Christian traditions preserve true events, Muslims say, the Qur’an tells them truly and corrects what was added.

Muslims also stress Muhammad’s situation. They understand the word ummi (7:157) to mean that he could not read or write, so he could not have studied Jewish or Syriac books. About the lots cast for Mary’s guardian the Qur’an says, “This is of the tidings of things hidden” (3:44): Muhammad was not there, and God told him. On “sister of Aaron,” a hadith in the collection of Muslim reports that people used to name their children after earlier prophets and righteous people, so the phrase need not confuse Mary with Miriam. Muslim writers add that the Qur’an’s versions are not copies: they leave out much, call the hearer to worship one God and shape every story around a lesson.

A Christian should give these answers a fair hearing. Tisdall argued that ummi means “gentile,” a person from a people without a scripture, and many modern scholars agree; yet the point does not settle the question of sources, since stories travel by word of mouth. Within the Muslim belief in revelation, the Muslim answer holds together. The real disagreement is whether the Qur’an is the word of God, and parallels alone cannot settle that.

7.Using This Book Carefully Today

Since Tisdall, most historians outside the Muslim community accept his general picture: the Qur’an speaks to hearers who already knew many Jewish and Christian stories. But they describe it differently. Scholars such as Sidney Griffith, Gabriel Said Reynolds and Angelika Neuwirth avoid the language of borrowing or copying. They speak of the Qur’an as a text in conversation with the Bible and its later traditions: it alludes to stories its hearers knew, comments on them and gives them new meaning. They also date sources more carefully than Tisdall could, and they set aside his judgments of Muhammad’s motives as beyond what a historian can know.

What should a pastor do with this book? First, do not begin with “your prophet copied.” It insults, ends the conversation and in some places brings danger. Second, be consistent. Sceptics use the same method against the Bible when they set Genesis beside Babylonian flood stories, and Scripture itself makes use of earlier material: Luke tells of careful research (Luke 1:1–4), and Paul quotes Greek poets (Acts 17:28). Likeness alone does not prove that a book is, or is not, from God. Third, leave aside the weak parallels: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer as a source, the Arda Viraf Namag and the Buddhist legends.

The most fruitful use concerns the sources about Jesus. The Qur’an’s picture of Jesus’ childhood matches writings from the second century and later, while the four Gospels come from the first century, from the apostles and their companions. The idea that someone else died in Jesus’ place appears among second-century groups, but the earliest witness is that Christ died and rose again (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). So a pastor can ask humbly, “If we want to know Jesus, should we not go to the earliest records?” He can also honour what Muslims honour, such as the virgin birth of Jesus and the purity of Mary. As Paul wrote, “Test all things; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

8.Taking It to Heart

1.The Author and His Purpose

Sir William Muir (1819–1905) was a Scottish official who spent decades in the government of British India and later became principal of the University of Edinburgh. He read Arabic and studied the early Muslim sources closely, and his multi-volume life of Muhammad was one of the best-known English works on Islam in the nineteenth century. Much of the second part of this book first appeared as an essay printed at Agra, in northern India, in 1855, when Christian missionaries and Muslim scholars there were debating whether the Bible could be trusted. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) reprinted it in 1878 with only slight revisions, adding three short chapters on the Qur’an itself.

Muir states his aim openly. He writes for Muslim readers and wants to draw their attention to the divine origin and value of the Bible. His claim is that the Jewish and Christian books are “never mentioned in the Corân otherwise than with profound veneration.” If that is true, then the Muslim who honours the Qur’an has good reason to honour the Bible too. The argument does not begin with Christian belief. It begins with the book that Muslims already accept.

2.The Qur’an and the Life of Muhammad

Muir opens with the place of the Qur’an in Muslim life. “The Corân is the ground-work of Islam,” he writes. Law, worship, ethics and daily conduct rest on it, and where it is silent, tradition fills the gap. Tradition here means the hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did. Muir notes how deep this devotion runs: in the early caliphate, a man who had memorized the Qur’an gained honour and influence, and that respect remains today. So anyone who wants to understand Muslims, he says, must study the Qur’an itself.

He then argues that the Qur’an is best understood alongside the story of Muhammad’s life, because many passages respond to events as they happened. At Mecca the message was mainly a call to worship one God and to prepare for judgment. After the move to Medina in 622, the hijra, the tone changed. Muhammad became a political and military leader. At first he hoped the Jews of Medina would accept him. When most of them did not, relations grew bitter. Muir traces how the direction of prayer, the qibla, was turned from Jerusalem to the Kaaba at Mecca, how the Ramadan fast was set in the second year, and how Abraham came to be presented as neither Jew nor Christian but a true Muslim. This background matters for Part Second, because many of the Qur’an’s sharpest words about the Jews come from these years of conflict.

3.How the Qur’an Was Gathered

Muir’s second chapter tells the story of the Qur’an’s compilation as the early Muslim sources give it. During Muhammad’s lifetime the revelations were not kept in one book. Some passages were written down by scribes; others were carried in memory, and teachers sent to the tribes took portions with them. Muir thought highly of the Arab memory of that age and believed it was a real safeguard.

About a year after Muhammad’s death in 632, many reciters were killed at the battle of Yamama. Umar feared that more of the Qur’an might be lost and urged the first caliph, Abu Bakr, to have it collected. Abu Bakr gave the task to Zaid ibn Thabit, the Prophet’s chief scribe. According to the tradition, Zaid gathered the material from “palm-leaves and tablets of white stone, and from the breasts of men.” His copy passed to Hafsa, one of Muhammad’s widows. Later, under the third caliph, Uthman, differences in recitation had spread, so Uthman ordered a revision of Zaid’s text, had copies sent to the main cities and had other copies destroyed.

Muir concludes that the Qur’an we have “contains the very words delivered by the Prophet,” though he grants that some early or short-lived passages may have been lost. He thought the remaining differences were minor, mostly matters of vowel marks and dots added later. He also noted that the party of Ali, who opposed Uthman, still accepted his text, which Muir saw as strong evidence that it was genuine. Here Muir is notably fair to the Muslim view of the Qur’an’s preservation.

4.A Book Arranged by Length

Muir then describes how the Qur’an is arranged. Its chapters, called suras, follow no order of time or subject. Apart from the short opening sura, they are placed roughly by length, the longest first and the shortest last. Since the short suras mostly come from the early years at Mecca and the long ones from Medina, the order is, in his words, “a direct inversion of the natural order.” He suggests that a reader who began at the end of the book would see more clearly how Muhammad’s teaching developed. Within many suras, he adds, passages from different times are joined together like pieces of a mosaic, so that the setting of a verse is often uncertain. The book includes his table giving an approximate time order of the suras, and he admits that any such order can only be approximate.

Muir also explains naskh, or abrogation: the teaching that a later verse can cancel an earlier one. Muslim scholars base it on Qur’an 2:106, which speaks of God replacing a verse with a better or similar one. Muir saw this as a way of dealing with tensions between passages revealed in different situations. This background helps students see why Muslims and Christians often read the Qur’an differently. A Christian reader who wants to quote it fairly must ask when a passage was given and what the commentators say about it.

5.Part Second: Muir’s Method

The heart of the book is Part Second, the Qur’an’s testimony to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Muir lays out his method with care. First, he gathered every passage that seemed to refer to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, even loosely, after reading the whole Qur’an again and again, so that no one could say he had chosen only the verses that suited him. Second, he gave each passage in Arabic and English, often with the explanation of well-known Muslim commentators such as Jalal al-Din and al-Baydawi. Third, he arranged them in time order, first those revealed at Mecca and then those revealed at Medina. He argued that these passages “extend over every stage of the Prophet’s mission” and show one unchanging view of the Bible.

Muir also notes two kinds of evidence he chose not to press. The Qur’an retells many Bible stories, about Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, John the Baptist and Jesus. And it often calls Jews and Christians the “People of the Book,” a name that assumes they possessed a real Scripture from God. Muir counted about fifty such phrases. He leaves these aside because the direct passages are enough.

The Meccan passages begin early. Qur’an 87:18–19 says the message is found in “the former pages,” the pages of Abraham and Moses. Qur’an 35:31 describes the revelation as confirming what came before it. Qur’an 19:12 tells John the Baptist to take hold of the Book firmly, and in 19:30 the infant Jesus says that God has given him the Book. Qur’an 42:3 says God inspires Muhammad as He inspired those before him. When Muhammad was accused of inventing the Qur’an, it answered in 10:37 that the Qur’an confirms what came before. Muir draws the lesson: such an appeal only works if the earlier books were genuine and could be checked.

6.Attesting, Praising, Appealing: The Medina Passages

At Medina Muhammad lived among Jewish tribes, and the Qur’an speaks about their Scriptures even more often. Muir finds three kinds of testimony. The Qur’an attests the earlier books, saying that it confirms them. It praises them: already at Mecca it called the Book of Moses “a guide and a mercy” (Qur’an 11:17), and Muir lists its descriptions of the Scripture as a light and guidance for people. And it appeals to them. In Qur’an 3:23 Jews are invited to “the book of God” to settle a dispute. Muir asks what stronger testimony could be desired: Muhammad offers the Torah of his day as the judge that both sides accepted. In Qur’an 3:48 God promises to teach Jesus the Torah and the Gospel, and Jesus comes confirming the Torah that was before him. Muir saw here a claim that the Old Testament still existed uncorrupted in Jesus’ day.

The strongest passages come from Sura 5, one of the last suras revealed. Qur’an 5:66 promises blessing to the People of the Book if they observe the Torah and the Gospel. Qur’an 5:68 is plainer still. In Pickthall’s translation it says: “Ye have naught (of guidance) till ye observe the Torah and the Gospel.” Muir notes that this was given shortly before Muhammad’s death, when Islam’s teaching was nearly complete. The Qur’an, he argues, therefore cannot be meant to replace these books; it tells Jews and Christians to keep them. Muir adds, with some sadness, that many Muslims of his own day spoke of the same Scriptures very differently from the way their Prophet did.

A CTS note helps here. Students will meet the same verses in Unit 8 of this course: Qur’an 5:46–47 speaks of the Gospel as guidance and light and tells Christians to judge by it, and Qur’an 10:94 tells Muhammad, if in doubt, to ask those who read the Scripture before him. Muir’s work shows that these are not isolated verses but part of a steady pattern.

7.The Charge of Corruption and Muir’s Conclusion

Muir knew the Muslim reply. When a Christian quotes the Bible against Islam, many Muslims answer that the present copies are corrupted, and that whatever disagrees with the Qur’an must be a later addition. They point to Qur’an verses that accuse some Jews of concealing or distorting their Scriptures. Muir takes these verses seriously and studies each in its setting. He finds that the accusations are made against Jews of Medina in the years of conflict, and that none is made against Christians or their Gospel. Qur’an 2:85 rebukes Jews for obeying part of their Scripture and ignoring the rest, which assumes the Scripture itself was sound. Qur’an 4:46 speaks of those who distort words, “twisting with their tongues.” Muir, following the commentators, argues this describes spoken wordplay used to mock Muhammad, not changes to written manuscripts. The charge, he concludes, concerns interpretation and speech, not the text.

Muir then asks whether the Scriptures of Muhammad’s day were the books Jews and Christians actually had. Arabia was full of contact with them: Jewish and Christian communities in Yemen, Najran and elsewhere, trade with Syria and Abyssinia, converts at Medina. When the Qur’an speaks of the Scriptures, he says, it “means, and cannot but mean,” the Old and New Testaments as Jews and Christians kept them.

Finally Muir asks whether those books are the same as ours. He points to manuscripts older than Muhammad; to ancient translations, such as the Greek Septuagint and the Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Armenian versions; and to quotations in early Christian writers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Augustine. Even the passages Muslims object to, such as those on Jesus as Son of God and on His death, are found in these older witnesses. So the Bible we read is the same Bible the Qur’an honoured. His conclusion is that a faithful Muslim is bound to accept those Scriptures and to read and examine them. As Isaiah wrote, “the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).

8.Taking It to Heart

1.A Book Written in Cairo

Gairdner was no armchair scholar. He went to Cairo in 1899, learned Arabic deeply, and spent his life in conversation with Muslims, especially students and educated young men. His Preface is modest. He says the book is not based on original research but is “the fruit of ten years spent in the East,” in one of the great centres of Islam. He admits that he feels pulled two ways, between being an advocate and being a judge. His aim, he says, was to hide no fact and to weigh his words carefully, while confessing that he holds strong convictions.

He also names his sources honestly. For the life of Muhammad he leaned on two British scholars of his day, Sir William Muir and Professor D. S. Margoliouth. For the spread of Islam he used T. W. Arnold’s The Preaching of Islam (1896), which had argued that Islam spread more by peaceful preaching than earlier Western writers allowed. For the later chapters he thanked fellow missionaries and especially Samuel Zwemer, the American missionary to Arabia. Students should notice this. Gairdner’s picture of Muhammad depends heavily on Muir and Margoliouth, whose work is now widely regarded as too hostile in places, and on sources that were themselves written long after the events.

The Preface ends with the theme that runs under the whole book: the Person and work of “the Spirit of Jesus.” Gairdner warns that history is full of the empty shells of churches that once lived and now have, as he puts it, “little more than outsides.” Creeds, forms and church order matter, he says, but “the vital thing is that they be informed by the Spirit from within.” He closes with hope, recalling Ezekiel’s vision of the breath of God coming into the slain so that they live (Ezekiel 37:9–10).

2.What Does the “Reproach” Mean?

The 1909 book does not explain its title in the pages CTS could read, but Gairdner did explain it later. In the Preface to his 1920 revision he says he meant that Islam is a constant reminder to the church of its failure to represent its Lord truly. He even writes that if the church had shown Christ faithfully in Muhammad’s day, “Mohammed would have been a Christian.” That is a striking confession for a missionary. The reproach, in his first meaning, is not chiefly an accusation against Muslims. It is a rebuke to Christians.

Gairdner then admits that he had overlooked another, biblical sense of the word “reproach”: something so shameful that its very existence is a disgrace. Because the title could be read that way, he changed it in 1920 to The Rebuke of Islam. The change shows a man willing to correct himself. He did not withdraw his convictions about the truth of the gospel, but he did not want his book’s title to sound like contempt for Muslim people.

For a pastor today, this is the right place to begin. Before we ask what is wrong with another faith, Gairdner asks us to look honestly at the church’s own history: its divisions, its weakness, and the times it came too late or not at all.

3.A Map of Loss: The Extent of Islam

Chapter I, “The Extent of Islam,” opens in Damascus. There the great Church of St John the Baptist had become a mosque centuries before. Yet over one of its old doorways an inscription still stands, in words drawn from Psalm 145:13: “Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all ages.” Gairdner uses that inscription to frame the chapter. It begins with loss and ends with hope.

From Damascus he takes the reader on a long tour. He passes through Turkey and the Balkans, where Constantinople and Antioch, once great Christian cities, had become Muslim. He describes the ancient churches of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia surviving only as “islands.” In Egypt he notes that the Coptic Christians were far outnumbered by Muslims. He moves on through Arabia, Persia and Afghanistan, then to India, which he calls the largest Muslim country in the world, with about 62 million Muslims. He continues through Central Asia and Russia, China, Indo-China and the East Indies. All told he estimates some 230 million Muslims in Asia and Africa, spread across the map in a vast shape centred on Mecca.

Gairdner’s point is not only about numbers. He says Islam is unique among the world’s religions because it arose after Christ, claims to go beyond the gospel, and has replaced Christianity across wide lands where the church was once strong. Of North Africa, the land of Augustine and of the old church of Carthage, he writes simply: “The Cross has disappeared before the Crescent.” His numbers are now more than a century old and were only estimates even then. But his question remains: how did the church lose so much, and what must it learn?

4.Africa in 1909: “Too Late”

Africa receives special attention, and this part of the book speaks directly to many CTS students. Gairdner counts nearly 60 million Muslims in Africa, about a third of its people, and says Islam was then growing faster there than any other faith. In North Africa he counts about 22 million. In West Africa, he says, Islam had spread widely through trade and conquest, with some 30 million Muslims. He traces its advance up the Nile and into East Africa, naming the Sudan, Uganda and Somaliland, and he notes that Arab traders, including slave traders, had carried Islam inland. He even mentions Muslim communities in South Africa.

His judgment on the church is sober. The Christian mission, he says, had often come “too late” and too feebly, and so had made its task far harder. West Africa, he writes, seemed to “tell us of our great failure.” Yet he does not end in despair. He insists that the contest between the cross and the crescent in Africa was not yet settled.

History has proved him right on that last point. During the twentieth century the number of Christians in Africa south of the Sahara grew enormously, and today Africa is home to many millions of believers as well as many millions of Muslims, often living side by side in the same nations, towns and families. Gairdner could not foresee this. But his warning still holds: when the church is slow, divided or absent, others fill the space.

5.The World Muhammad Was Born Into

Chapter II, “Whence Came It?”, asks where Islam came from. Gairdner begins with the world around the year 600. The Byzantine Empire ruled the eastern Mediterranean from Constantinople, and the Persian Empire ruled to the east. The Christian church was large but deeply divided. Byzantine Christians, Nestorians and Copts were bitterly at odds over how to describe the person of Christ, and Gairdner notes that Christ’s prayer “that they all may be one” (John 17:21) had been largely forgotten.

Arabia, by contrast, was a land of tribes. They shared a language, sacred places such as the Kaaba in Mecca, a yearly fair and months of truce, but they had no king and lived by the law of the blood-feud. Gairdner calls it “a headless nation.” Its religion, he says, was a mixture of local gods with a distant high god, Allah, but it had no scripture and no prophet. Muhammad, travelling with caravans and meeting Jews and Christians, could see that other peoples had a Book and prophets. Gairdner suggests that he came to feel that Arabia alone had been left without a message from God.

Here Gairdner makes a point every pastor should weigh. What kind of Christianity did Muhammad actually meet? Gairdner argues that Muhammad probably knew very little of the New Testament itself, and that much of what reached him came through popular legends and writings outside the Bible, some of which denied the Trinity, Christ’s divine Sonship and His atoning death. Scholars still discuss exactly which Jewish and Christian traditions lie behind parts of the Qur’an, and Muslims, of course, believe the Qur’an came from God, not from human sources. But Gairdner’s main lesson stands: a divided church, quarrelling in Greek over fine points of doctrine, did not carry the plain gospel to the Arabs in their own language.

6.Muhammad’s Career as Gairdner Tells It

Gairdner then tells the story of Muhammad’s life, mainly from the early Muslim biographies as Muir and Margoliouth had read them. Muhammad was born about 570 and orphaned young. He was raised by his uncle Abu Talib, worked with caravans, and married the widow Khadijah. Around 610, while meditating in a cave on Mount Hira near Mecca, he experienced a vision and heard the command “Recite”; the word Qur’an means “recitation.” His early preaching in Mecca called people to one God, warned of resurrection and judgment, and spoke of Paradise and Hell. Gairdner gives the first believers credit: their steadfastness under persecution, he says, showed that they were sincere.

He goes on through the flight of some believers to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the boycott of Muhammad’s clan, and the pledges at Aqaba with men from Yathrib, later called Medina. In 622 Muhammad emigrated there; this is the Hijra, from which the Muslim calendar is counted. Gairdner also recounts the early report that Muhammad once recited verses honouring three Meccan goddesses and then withdrew them. CTS notes that this story appears in some early Muslim sources, but many Muslim scholars reject it as unreliable, so it should be handled with care in conversation.

In Medina, Gairdner says, Muhammad became ruler as well as prophet. He describes the break with the Jewish tribes, the execution of the men of one tribe after the siege of Medina, the change of the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca, and the entry into Mecca in 630, when the idols were destroyed and the Kaaba became the centre of worship of the one God. Gairdner is critical of some of these events and of the revelations that addressed Muhammad’s marriages. Yet he also credits Muhammad’s courage, zeal and leadership, and he calls him “a man of a unique type of greatness.” He suggests that Muhammad began sincerely but that his sincerity may have weakened as power grew, while admitting that no one can say for certain when. Historians today debate many of these points, and Muslim readers see Muhammad’s life very differently. A Christian witness should know these debates without using them to wound.

7.Two Kinds of Kingdom

The heart of Gairdner’s second chapter is a contrast between two kinds of kingdom. In ancient Arabia, he says, religion, politics and social life were one, much as in parts of the Old Testament. In Medina, Islam took that shape: the prophet was also head of a state and leader in war. Gairdner sets beside this the words of Jesus before Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). He calls that saying “the first Magna Charta,” a charter that set the kingdom of God free from the kingdoms of this world. Jesus refused the very path of earthly power that, in Gairdner’s view, Islam accepted.

In his 1920 revision Gairdner draws the lesson for mission. Opening the chapter on how Islam spread, he says its story is “a tremendous lesson in missionary methods.” Some methods the church might be tempted to use, but must leave alone. Others look like weakness, yet only they can succeed. He observes that for the Bedouin of Arabia, victory in battle seemed proof that God was on the winners’ side. Gairdner rejects that logic for Christians. The church may not win hearts by force, by political pressure, or by money. Its weapon is the Spirit of Jesus: truth spoken plainly and love shown patiently, “not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit” (Zechariah 4:6).

What, then, do pastors in Africa today take from this old book? First, honesty: the spread of Islam is partly a story of the church’s own failures, and repentance comes before argument. Second, urgency: where the church came “too late,” others filled the space, and the same is true in villages and cities today. Third, unity: Christians divided by pride and quarrels cannot show Muslim neighbours the one Lord they proclaim. Fourth, clear teaching: Muslims often meet a Christianity that is confused about the Trinity or the cross, so pastors must teach these truths plainly and biblically. Fifth, the right spirit: no force, no mockery and no retaliation, but faithful witness given with meekness and respect (1 Peter 3:15), trusting the Spirit who gives life.

8.Taking It to Heart