🌍 World Religions — Unit 3: Islam

Orientation

Islam is, by most counts, the second-largest religion in the world, with approximately two billion adherents across every continent, and it is a faith your students will encounter with growing frequency, whether through immigration, media, interfaith dialogue, or simple curiosity from a neighbor or coworker. Unlike Judaism, Islam did not grow directly out of the soil of the Old Testament covenant community, but it did emerge in close contact with both Judaism and Christianity, in a seventh-century Arabian peninsula where Jewish and Christian communities were already present, and it consciously positions itself as the final and complete revelation superseding both. Understanding Islam accurately, rather than through rumor or caricature in either direction, is essential for any pastor who wants to engage Muslim neighbors the way Paul engaged the Athenians — with careful observation before confrontation, and love that does not flinch from the truth.

This unit will trace the origin of Islam in the life of Muhammad, examine its central text and central practices, explain the great historical division between Sunni and Shia Muslims, compare what Islam teaches about Jesus with what Christians actually believe, and close with practical guidance for gospel conversations with Muslim friends. As with every unit in this course, our aim is neither contempt nor a soft-pedaled tolerance that refuses to name real differences, but the same disciplined combination Paul modeled at the Areopagus in Unit 1: patient understanding joined to clear, urgent proclamation of the risen Christ.

I. Muhammad and the Origins of Islam

Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born around A.D. 570 in Mecca, a trading city in the Arabian peninsula that was also home to a major pagan pilgrimage site, the Kaaba, housing hundreds of tribal idols. Orphaned young, Muhammad grew up under the care of relatives and eventually became a respected merchant, marrying a wealthy widow named Khadijah. According to Islamic tradition, in A.D. 610, while meditating in a cave outside Mecca, Muhammad received the first of what Muslims believe were a series of revelations delivered to him by the angel Jibril (Gabriel) over the next twenty-three years — revelations Muslims hold to be the literal, verbatim words of Allah, later collected into the Qur'an.

Muhammad's early preaching in Mecca, calling the polytheistic Arab tribes to abandon their idols and worship the one God, met fierce resistance from Meccan leaders whose economic and religious interests were tied to the pilgrimage trade around the Kaaba. In A.D. 622, facing increasing persecution, Muhammad and his small community of followers migrated to the city of Yathrib, later renamed Medina — an event called the Hijra, so significant to Islamic identity that the Islamic calendar dates all years from this migration rather than from Muhammad's birth or first revelation. In Medina, Muhammad's role expanded dramatically: he became not only a religious leader but a political and military one, eventually leading his followers back to conquer Mecca in A.D. 630 and unifying most of the Arabian peninsula under Islamic rule before his death in A.D. 632. This trajectory — prophet, then statesman, then military commander — stands in sharp contrast to the pattern of Jesus' own earthly ministry, and it shapes, to this day, important differences in how Islam and Christianity have each historically understood the relationship between religious authority and political power.

It is worth a pastor's attention that Muhammad regarded himself as standing in continuity with, not opposition to, the biblical prophets. Islamic tradition holds that Allah sent many prophets before Muhammad, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, each bringing essentially the same message of submission to the one God, and that Muhammad was simply the last and greatest in this line — the "seal of the prophets." This claim of continuity is precisely why a Muslim neighbor will often already hold Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in genuine esteem, and why gospel conversation with a Muslim friend can often begin from figures and stories both faiths already recognize as significant, even while the two traditions understand those figures very differently in the end.

II. The Qur'an and the Five Pillars

The Qur'an, meaning "the recitation," is Islam's central sacred text, organized into 114 chapters called surahs, arranged roughly from longest to shortest rather than chronologically. Muslims believe the Qur'an to be the final, perfect, and unchangeable word of Allah, superseding all previous revelation, including the Torah given to Moses and the Injil (Gospel) given to Jesus, both of which Islam affirms were originally true revelations from God but holds were later corrupted or altered by Jewish and Christian communities — a doctrine that has significant implications for how Muslims regard the Bible Christians actually possess today. Alongside the Qur'an, Islamic tradition also draws heavily on the Hadith, extensive collections of reports about what Muhammad said and did, compiled by later scholars and used to guide Islamic law and practice on matters the Qur'an does not address directly.

Islamic practice centers on what are called the Five Pillars, the core religious obligations incumbent on every believing Muslim. The Shahada is the declaration of faith: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger" — the recitation of this single sentence, sincerely believed, is what formally makes a person a Muslim. Salat is the obligation of ritual prayer, performed five times daily at prescribed times, facing the direction of Mecca. Zakat is obligatory almsgiving, typically calculated as roughly two and a half percent of a Muslim's accumulated wealth, given annually for the relief of the poor. Sawm is fasting during the month of Ramadan, abstaining from food, drink, and other physical needs from dawn until sunset for the entire lunar month, commemorating the month in which Muslims believe the Qur'an was first revealed. Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca, required at least once in a lifetime for every Muslim who is physically and financially able, centered on rituals performed at and around the Kaaba. Together these five pillars structure the daily, weekly, and lifelong rhythm of Muslim religious life in a way analogous to, though substantially different from, the way Sabbath observance and the feasts once structured Jewish religious life before the Temple's destruction, which we studied in Unit 2.

III. Sunni and Shia: The Great Division

Islam's largest historical division arose almost immediately after Muhammad's death in A.D. 632, over a question of leadership rather than, initially, a question of doctrine: who should succeed Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community? The majority, who became known as Sunni Muslims (from a word meaning "tradition," referring to the practice of Muhammad), held that the new leader, called the caliph, should be chosen by the consensus of the community's leading figures, and accepted the first four caliphs — Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali — as legitimate. A minority insisted that leadership should have passed by divine right through Muhammad's own bloodline, specifically through his cousin and son-in-law Ali and Ali's descendants; this group became known as Shia Muslims, from "Shiat Ali," meaning "the party of Ali." The martyrdom of Ali's son Husayn at the Battle of Karbala in A.D. 680, killed by Sunni caliphal forces, became and remains a defining event of Shia religious identity, commemorated annually with intense mourning observances during the month of Muharram.

Today, Sunni Muslims make up roughly eighty-five to ninety percent of the world's Muslim population, with Shia Muslims concentrated especially in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and significant communities in Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. While the original dispute concerned political succession, centuries of separate development have produced real theological and legal differences as well, particularly around religious authority — Shia Islam places great emphasis on a line of divinely appointed spiritual leaders called Imams, descended from Ali, while Sunni Islam does not recognize any comparable ongoing office of infallible religious authority after Muhammad. A pastor should be aware that a Muslim neighbor's particular practices, emphases, and even calendar of religious observance may differ significantly depending on whether he comes from a Sunni or Shia background, much as a pastor learned in Unit 2 to expect real differences between an Orthodox and a Reform Jewish neighbor.

Beyond the Sunni-Shia division itself, both branches contain further internal variety worth a pastor's attention. Sunni Islam recognizes four major historical schools of religious law, differing in method and emphasis but generally regarded as equally legitimate within Sunni practice. Sufism, a mystical current found within both Sunni and Shia communities, emphasizes direct, experiential closeness to God cultivated through disciplined spiritual practice, chanted remembrance of God's names, and often the guidance of a spiritual master — a stream of Islamic devotion considerably more given to poetry, music, and inward longing than the legal and doctrinal emphasis more typical of mainstream Sunni scholarship. A pastor who assumes all Muslims practice identically will miss this real internal diversity, just as he would if he assumed all Christians worshiped identically.

IV. What Muslims Believe About Jesus, and Where Islam and Christianity Diverge

Perhaps surprisingly to many Christians meeting a Muslim neighbor for the first time, Islam holds Jesus — called Isa in Arabic — in very high regard. The Qur'an affirms Jesus' virgin birth, calls him the Messiah, attributes numerous miracles to him including healing the blind and raising the dead, and even anticipates his return at the end of the age. This shared reverence for Jesus can provide genuine common ground for gospel conversation, but a pastor must understand clearly where the Islamic and Christian pictures of Jesus diverge, because the divergence is not minor — it goes to the very heart of the gospel.

Islam firmly denies the deity of Christ; the Qur'an explicitly rejects the idea that God has a son, and rejects the Trinity as a form of polytheism incompatible with Islam's uncompromising monotheism, called tawhid — though the historic Christian doctrine is not belief in three gods but one God eternally existing in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a distinction worth making clearly when the conversation with a Muslim friend turns here. Islam denies that Jesus died on the cross at all — most Muslim interpreters hold that Jesus was taken up to heaven before the crucifixion and that someone else, in some accounts made to resemble him, died in his place, meaning Islam has no doctrine of atonement through Christ's death because it denies the death occurred. Where Christianity teaches that sin is a corruption of human nature inherited from Adam, requiring a substitutionary atonement that only God Himself could provide, Islam generally teaches that human beings are born in a state of natural submission to God (called fitrah) and that sin is a matter of individual acts of disobedience and forgetfulness rather than an inherited corrupted nature — a problem addressed through repentance, good works, and Allah's mercy rather than through a substitutionary sacrifice. On the Day of Judgment, Islamic teaching holds that a person's good and bad deeds will be weighed, and their eternal destiny determined largely on that basis, tempered by Allah's mercy, which is not guaranteed to any individual in advance — a picture of salvation resting substantially on human performance rather than on the finished, guaranteed work of a Savior, in sharp contrast to grace received by faith, which Ephesians 2:8-9 describes as "not of works, lest anyone should boast."

V. Engaging Muslim Neighbors and Friends with the Gospel

Following the pattern this course established with Paul at the Areopagus in Unit 1, a pastor engaging a Muslim neighbor should begin from real common ground rather than immediate confrontation. Muslims and Christians share belief in one Creator God, a high view of Scripture as divine revelation, a serious concern for personal morality and righteous living, deep respect for prayer and fasting as spiritual disciplines, and — as this unit has shown — genuine reverence for Jesus, however differently understood. A pastor who begins a conversation by honoring these shared convictions, much as Paul honored the Athenians' evident religiosity before correcting it, will find Muslim neighbors, who are often themselves serious and thoughtful about matters of faith, far more willing to continue the conversation than a pastor who opens with confrontation.

From that foundation of genuine respect, this unit encourages pastors to move the conversation, patiently and over time, toward the specific points where the gospel offers something Islam cannot: an atonement that has actually been accomplished rather than a judgment still pending on uncertain mercy, a Savior who is himself God come near rather than merely one prophet among many, and a righteousness received freely by faith rather than assembled anxiously through a lifetime of works whose sufficiency no one can be certain of in advance. First Timothy 2:5-6 states the Christian claim with precision suited to exactly this conversation: "there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all." This verse affirms the very monotheism Islam insists on — one God — while proclaiming the very things Islam denies: a mediating Savior who gave Himself, meaning He actually died, as a ransom, meaning His death accomplished something real for others.

Practically, pastors should be prepared to discuss honestly and respectfully the historical evidence for Jesus' crucifixion, which is affirmed by hostile Roman and Jewish sources as well as Christian ones and stands on far firmer historical ground than the later Islamic tradition claiming otherwise; the reliability of the New Testament text as it has actually come down to us, addressing directly the Islamic claim of corruption; and the actual content of what the Qur'an itself says about Jesus, since many Muslim neighbors have not studied these passages in depth themselves and are often surprised by how much the Qur'an affirms about Him. Above all, as with every religion this course studies, genuine friendship, patient listening, and the kind of hospitality Jesus Himself modeled with those outside the household of Israel remain the context in which these deeper conversations become possible at all.

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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