The Charge of Ignorance

ISLAM versus CHRISTIANITY     II.

The Charge of Ignorance

One of the Christian critics, whose insulting tone has made his remarks unworthy even of reproduction, has asserted: "Islam is an off-spring of Christianity, though a bastard off-spring. That is why the Quran speaks so reverently of Jesus. In fact, but for the Christian monks and scholars who gave the Prophet of Islam his lea ding ideas on religion, Islam would not have come into existence.   But the Prophet was too ignorant to understand the implications of religious truths, to realise the beauties of the Christian religion and to transmit the Divine Faith of Christianity in its pure form      

The main point which the vituperative eloquence of this enemy of truth means to drive at is that the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Allah's blessings be with him!) was not a divinely-inspired Teacher and that the Holy Quran is not the Word of God.

This allegation can be examined from different lines of approach. But the most direct and the most convincing line of approach for making a Christian comprehend fundamentally the truth of the Islamic religion is to examine those 'leading ideas' of Islam which have a direct bearing on Christianity itself, i.e., the Quranic teachings concerning Jesus, the Bible and Christianity. If it can be shown that what the unlettered Prophet of Islam taught in the words of the Holy Quran about Christianity, in that age of intellectual backwardness, has been fully endorsed and supported by the researches carried out by the most eminent Biblical scholars of the West, in this age of unprecedented intellectual advancement, no further arguments and evidences are necessary to prove that the Holy Quran is the Word of the All-Knowing God. For, how else could an unlettered Teacher reveal those truths which could be unearthed intellectually only through the advanced researches of the modern age. This we intend to do in detail in these pages in the form of a series of essays. To initiate the problem, however, an introductory sketch of the argument may be presented first.

According to the teaching of the Quran, every country of the world had its divine messen¬gers, who were, one and all, human beings, and who were sent to mankind, at different periods of history, ever since the first beginnings of human life on earth. Belief in all of them is an article of the Islamic faith. The religion preached by all those Messengers or Prophets was the same, namely, Islam (lit, submission to the Will of God), though it received its perfection of form in the Quranic Revelation. Therefore, all the divinely-inspired teachers of mankind, including Jesus, are