World Hijab Day 2013
Yesterday at my University, a World Hijab Booth was set up to amazing success. Got a few pics incoming, but here’s a preview for now:
More to come soon…..
Category Archives: Muslim and Non-Muslim Dialogue
Dr. Shabir Ally responds to James White’s Complaint of his event with Dr. Crossan (Of the Jesus Seminar)
James White asked:
But, I will say this—it will be a kindly discussion. Having engaged in nine debates total with these gentlemen, I know at the very least it will be pursued in a kindly fashion. But I remain confused as to its real reason.
Dr. Shabir Ally has responded by saying:
WHY A DIALOGUE WITH DR. CROSSAN?
Some of you have wondered how we may respond to those traditional Christians who think that Dr. Crossan does not represent them, and that therefore we should not be engaging in dialogue with Dr. Crossan. In answer to that, we should say that Christianity is quite diverse, and no one person can speak for all of Christianity. Any Christian scholar with whom we have a dialogue will probably have both supporters and detractors. Indeed, this has been my experience over the years.
The various denominations are well known. If, for example, we have a dialogue with the Catholics, the Protestants may say that they were not represented. The obvious solution to this problem is for us to have dialogues with both Catholics and Protestants and with all the other denominations, as much as time will permit.
More to the point here, there is a concern that since Dr. Crossan is liberal in his criticism of the Bible, and he does not represent traditional Christian beliefs, he is not suitable for dialogue. But here again we should realise that Christians span a wide spectrum from ultra-liberal to ultra-conservative. Again, the solution is for us to have dialogues one after another with persons representing various shades of the full spectrum.
Because the conservatives are louder in their complaints when we engage with someone who does not represent them, we may get the impression that the conservatives are the only ones who deserve to represent Christianity. But we should realise that even among conservatives some do not represent others. Some are not conservative enough for the others. I have at times been convinced that I am debating with a conservative Christian only to be surprised later at the complaint from other conservatives that the person I debated with is not a true Christian, or something of that nature.
It so happens that we are not the ones who invited Dr. Crossan to come to Toronto. He was going to be here anyway. We just tagged on the dialogue to make maximum use of his presence here. He was invited by a church that falls under the umbrella of United Church which is one of the largest Christian denominations in Canada. Many Christians will be paying to attend his lectures in that church. There he will be delivering a series of five lectures on various aspects of his research into the historical Jesus. Even if some of those Christians disagree with him, some others, at least the Christians who invited him to speak in their church, obviously feel that his findings should be shared. So, he does represent some Christians.
In fact, I feel that Dr. Crossan represents many Christians today. Some of us Muslims tend to assume that Christians generally hold on to traditional views about Jesus. But you may be surprised to find that one important leader and scholar after another confesses that they no longer believe in some significant aspects of the tradition. For example, many no longer believe that Jesus died for their sins. They think it would be odd of God to demand and receive a human sacrifice. Many no longer believe that Jesus is the Son of God in a literal sense. They actually believe that he is a man and a prophet.
This tendency to reject things in the Gospels has shifted to the far left. Many no longer believe that Jesus performed the kinds of miracles described in the Bible and the Quran. Many no longer believe in the virginal conception of Jesus. This extreme may be surprising to many Muslims. But, as I have pointed out in several of my debates, once one starts looking closely at the Gospels, as one must, one sees enough problems to make one hesitate to accept the major claims about Jesus.
If we did not have the Quran, we too would have been skeptical of the claims made about Jesus in the Gospels. Hence our responsibility is to share the message of the Quran with our Christian friends. And we need to share this with all Christians, not just the ones who refuse to look at the problems in the Gospels. It is our hope that some of those who reject traditional faith in Jesus because of the problems in the Gospels may embrace Quranic faith in Jesus. And those who refuse to see the problems in the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus may see a clearer light on Jesus shining from the Quran. So, let the dialogue continue and proliferate.
Most interestingly, a comment left under Dr. Shabir’s post highlights just how much of a problem Dr. Crossan can be for the Christian faithful:
Dr. Crossan is an actual monotheist — He believes Jesus was a prophet and nothing more … He criticizes the traditional beliefs about the Bible and about Jesus. In fact it was Dr. Crossan and his companion Dr. Borg that set my mind free from these blasphemous beliefs which ultimately lead to my reversion to Islam. Mainstream Christians will say he doesn’t represent them — and that’s 100% correct. Because he uses his critical thinking abilities and has authentic faith not blind faith. He studies and dismantles the Bible and Christian doctrine and looks at it for what it really is not what he believes it to be. He is a scholar and let me tell you from first hand experience… Christians do not like scholars, they prefer a preacher who can tell them what to believe instead of a scholar that will tell them to think for themselves. May Allah guide us all.
It is with great interest that myself and the larger Christian-Muslim dialogue community looks forward to the Dr. Shabir Ally and Dr. Crossan event.
and God knows best.
Can any Christian be certain of Christianity’s Doctrine of Salvation?
For most, the answer would be yes. They’ve confessed and professed their faith in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. They faithfully read the scriptures (Old and New Testaments) and attend Church gatherings regularly to engage in prayer and worship. However, I intend to raise an honest question to the Christian – how certain can you be of your salvation?
It is my belief that the Christian should be concerned, worried about his salvation. Why is this? I say this due to having read the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. For countless peoples who faithfully obeyed and put into practise what YHWH instructed them to do in the Hebrew Bible, he reneged on this doctrine of salvation by faith and works. He then allegedly instituted a new doctrine of salvation, while revealing such things as life in heaven, the punishment of hell, his multi-personhood (the Trinity) and finally the promise of the death of His Son.
Christians seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that if YHWH could hide such important doctrines such as his very Triune nature, the existence of an afterlife and an entirely new doctrine of salvation, that this strongly indicates that there is no certainty he’d hold on to this current doctrine of salvation. The Christian faithful need to realise, that if God can change his mind on salvation once, what is there to demonstrate he won’t do so twice? It then must be accepted, that in the future, God can very well change his doctrine of salvation again.
Many will respond by saying that God has sent His son, he’s given us through the faithful predecessors his plans for us in the New Testament – all that we need to know, is with us here already. However, the Jews before Christ also claimed the same. They had one God, one scripture and they found the new Christian belief to be a heresy – the New Testament clearly indicates their opposition to this new faith. When Christians emerged unto the scene, they found themselves debating fiercely with their Jewish counterparts, indicating that such and such Messianic Prophecy was hinted by such and such verse (two of the more popular examples are Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 53). Many Christians will then use the Book of Hebrews (of the New Testament) to illustrate to the Jew how the Old Testament sayings and beliefs should have been interpreted.
There is nothing to show that the God of the Christians and Jews won’t do this a third time. Just as the Jews before them, Christians too already have certainty in their eschatology and soteriology, their faith and the future is certain to them, the promise of God is what they hold to. Yet these same Christians today consider the Jews who rejected Christ to be sons of the devil and evil (John 8:44-48), enemies of the Christ (Luke 19:27), there is nothing to stop me from concluding that should the Christian God change his mind again – today’s Christians (just as the Jews before them) may very well be considered sons of the devil for rejecting God’s new plan of salvation. I mean, if Christians can look down on Jews and be perplexed as to how they can reject the new covenant, who should complain when another new covenant comes and today’s Christians reject it as a heresy (just as the Jews before them did with the Christian beliefs).
The very existence of Christianity as a ‘new’ covenant, surely has to bother Christians as to what ‘other’ covenants God may have in store for the future. For if his mind can change once, who is to say it won’t change again?
What is CL Edwards doing?
CL Edwards is one odd Christian polemicist. He debated me in January of 2013 and thereafter seemed to fall into obscurity. His website lacked updates and he didn’t debate anyone else for a significant period of time. In fact, he was allegedly attending a seminary during this time. Eventually he popped back on to the radar again when he debated MDI’s Br. Shadid Lewis, a debate which left many wondering why would any organization give CL Edwards a stage – clearly whatever seminary training he was receiving was absent and not demonstrated during his debate.
Shortly thereafter, I offered up a few challenges, Bob Siegel and Pastor Samuel Green took up those challenges but CL Edwards, possibly embarrassed after his debate with Br. Shadid, never even cared to respond. Eventually he changed his website’s theme, added an article every once in a while, nothing new, nothing scholarly, just copy pasted arguments from AI’s website, sometimes he’d post a video or two. Recently WordPress notified me that CallingChristians had received 1 or 2 views from CL’s website, I checked it out and I began to laugh.
It seems as if CL decided he was brave enough to ‘respond’ to a few articles of mines. As it turns out, he just copy pasted a few Facebook notes of some kid in India who tried to respond to my articles. This left me bewildered, a grown man who is attending a seminary and who didn’t even care to respond to my debate challenge – whereas the likes of Pastor Green did, decided to copy paste a nobody’s Facebook notes to respond to me on his website. I’m not sure what’s going on, but CL, if you are reading this, maybe it’s time you step up and actually do your own work for a change? Actually try to face me? Or not, it doesn’t matter, you’re fading into obscurity again and no one really cares about your website, your articles or your ‘seminary training’.
If anyone wants to see just how much fun I had with this guy back in the day, do check out this list of rebuttals. Poor chap, I did consider removing the link to these rebuttals, as they essentially were responding to a nobody, but they were just so much fun to write, I felt it difficult to remove them.
Funny guy.
If Islam is the truth, why are Muslim countries so backward and in turmoil?
This question presumes that there are Muslim nations in existence today. The truth is that our terminologies must be clear and consistent. There is no Muslim nation today, as a Muslim nation is one which operates according to the Shari’ah of God (the body of law which governs Muslims), Saudi Arabia does not fall under this classifications due to two easy to recall reasons, ribaa (interest) based monetary system and its rule by Kingship. There are however, Muslim majority countries.
Therefore there is a great distinction between being Islamic nations and Muslim majority nations. Given that we now have this understanding, the question begs itself, why are so many Muslim nations today lacking strong economies, full of war and lacking basic human rights.
The simple answer would be a historical one. If we were to take a cursory look of the list of the nations today that are currently Muslim majority but involved in conflict, poverty or some other social ill, we’ll soon realise that within the last century – they were all either colonized or involved in some lang drawn out conflict or the other and none of them have ever been under true Islamic rule. Afghanistan for example, has never had the opportunity to develop itself, for any nation to develop itself economically, infrastructurally and sociologically it requires long periods of political, economic and civil stability.
Saudi Arabia’s Infrastructural Development
So if we look at any Muslim majority country and weigh them against political, economic and civil stability, a significant majority of them would fail this cursory examination. The only few exemptions would be Saudi Arabia, and they fulfill all three criteria. If we look at UAE, they also fulfill the same criteria. However nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia cannot. Therefore, there is no relation between Islam and these nation’s misgivings, rather the problem is clearly rooted in historical ills associated with the lack of political, economic and civil stability. Most of these nations were also colonialised, their resources shipped back to the metroples of their day, their infrastructure underdeveloped and masses of their societies left impoverished and without any great foundations from which to develop their nations (look at my home region – the Caribbean as an ample example of this).
In conclusion, it isn’t a great mystery, lack of political, economic and civil stability will cause any nation to crumble, these are the pillars for which any nation needs in order for development and advancement to initiate. The great Western superpowers fulfill these three given criteria, and are successful because of it. Centuries of independence and development, versus budding nations with less than 75 years of independence, is an unfair comparison and a biased one at that.
and God knows best.
David Wood Fires Blanks
A recipe for disaster indeed! Moments after David Wood ran away after being called out on his spamming of a conversation between Pastor Samuel Green and I, he’s blocked me on Facebook. As you can see in the image provided, David began to spam a conversation because of a single comment I made in response to one of Samuel’s claims.
After much bravado, name calling, threats (to put me on his blog, been there; done that!), empty rhetoric and straw men, David decided to call a hasty retreat and shy away from facing me again – so he’s blocked me on Facebook! Isn’t this funny? David Wood enters into a conversation of which he’s not part of, spams it with 10’s of comments, insults me, tries to insult my God, tries to bait me into arguing with him, and he’s the one who ends up blocking me. That’s much like a robber who tries to hold you up with a gun, realises he’s firing blanks (an empty threat), and runs away!
That’s pretty much what happened. He showed up unannounced, attempted to get a reaction out of me by spamming and saying as much crude and crass things he could’ve conceived, and when he realised I wouldn’t give him what he wanted, the poor kid gave up. I almost feel sorry for him. All in all, David Wood has once again demonstrated that Christian polemicists are immature, infantile and irresponsible in their behaviour. In their haste to attack and disparage Islam, they are wholly unable to have a civilized conversation and must resort to brute force tactics, strong armed manoeuvres and rabid ranting to face contemporary Muslim speakers.
David Wood the Voyeur Wearing Women’s Lingerie – Self Admitted Cross Dresser
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say this again, David and his team are not intellectuals, they are not familiar with educational discourse. They are thugs, who are using Islamophobia to gain donation monies for their own personal uses, while riding the Right-Wing Christian train for fame. Good riddance!
David Wood Cowers from Calling Christians
After facing heat for inventing false evidences, David Wood, seeing his partner in crime about to be embarrassed, rushed to Samuel’s aid. I posted one comment, questioning Samuel’s calling of a du’a, as a Surah (both him and I knowing full well this is an Orientalist claim and not a Muslim claim, we tend to know the difference between a du’a for blessing the recitation of the Qur’aan and a Surah). As you can see in the image below, David entered into a rabid frenzy, copy pasting every hadeeth he could find from Samuel’s ill written article:
As you can see, for every one comment I make, he makes atleast five in return, finally towards the end he confesses he spammed me because of my questions towards Samuel Green. Interestingly, I asked David why he was misquoting ahadeeth and using incorrect translations. He decided to attack a straw man and claim I told him that he misquoted the da’eef (weak) hadeeth about the goat story from Ibn Majah.
I invited David to quote for me where I indicated that the goat story was the hadeeth I was referring to. After several loud mouthed claims, and a few snide remarks, he tucked his tail between his legs and forsook his crusade, realising that I never made that claim. Such is the ‘intellectual David Wood’, I asked one question, he got angry and spammed a conversation that had nothing to do with him. Realising he’d not be able to overwhelm me, or drag me into an insult match, he decided to invent a lie, and when called upon to qualify his claim, he ran off into the sunset – probably to try on more of his wife’s make up and underwear:
David Wood the Voyeur Wearing Women’s Lingerie – Self Admitted Cross Dresser
Sorry David, I enjoyed watching you panic and flee.
and God knows best.
A Village of 100+ Persons Accept Islam
May Allaah reward the hard work of the brothers, Ameen.
wa Allaahu ‘alam.
Response: The Triune God – The Greatest Conceivable Being that Exists
There have been many philosophical arguments developed to explain and rationalize the theology of the Holy Trinity. One such philosophical argument, revolves around the concept of the inter-personal relationship between the members of the Godhead. For a quick recap, the Trinity is defined as One God, quantified by Three Persons, who are co-equal, co-existing with each other in the Godhead (the Godhead in itself is undefined and beyond human reasoning but it is that which unites the three persons). In explaining the nature of the relationship between the persons in the Triune Godhead, Sam Shamoun referenced famed Christian Apologist, Dr. William Lane Craig in his article, “The Triune God – The Greatest Conceivable Being that Exists“. The argument is presented as such:
As the greatest conceivable being, God must be perfect. Now a perfect being must be a loving being. For love is a moral perfection; it is better for a person to be loving rather than unloving. God therefore must be a perfectly loving being. Now it is of the very nature of love to give oneself away. Love reaches out to another person rather than centering wholly in oneself. So if God is perfectly loving by His very nature, He must be giving Himself in love to another. But who is that other? It cannot be any created person, since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of His nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to His essence to create. So we can imagine a possible world in which God is perfectly loving and yet no created persons exist. So created persons cannot sufficiently explain whom God loves. Moreover, contemporary. cosmology makes it plausible that created persons have not always existed. But God is eternally loving. So again created persons alone are insufficient to account for God’s being perfectly loving. It therefore follows that the other to whom God’s love is necessarily directed must be internal to God Himself.
Brave 10 year old Stands Up against Christian Missionary
Br. Haroon Qureishi of iERA, recounts the event:
I was at hyde park speakers corner today and there was an offensive Christian missionary who was attacking Muhammad PBUH.
A little boy aged 10 took my chair and started challenging the man while the large crowd gathered around and started chairing on the little boy (Even non Muslims were cheering him on)!
Some time later his dad came and was shocked and impressed at what his son was doing!
MASHALLAH!
May Allah give us all confident children who will stand up for the deen inshallah.
Amazing stuff from the British brothers.
and Allaah knows best.
Calling Christians 
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