What do Muslims think of Jesus? It’s a question Dr. Sabeel Ahmed said he gets often.
To help educate people on the significance of Jesus in Islam, Ahmed’s group, The Humanitarians, a Muslim interfaith organization, is launching a monthlong campaign that includes billboards along high-trafficked areas in Arizona along with radio ads.
Ahmed, the group’s founder and outreach coordinator, said the intent is to highlight similarities between Islam and Christianity and bring people together during the holidays.
“We want to educate people on who we (Muslims) are and who we are not and show people that there are more similarities between the faiths than differences,” Ahmed said Tuesday during a news conference at the Islamic Community Center of Tempe.
Ahmed said Muslims recognize Jesus as one of Allah’s prophets. His mission, Ahmed said, was to invite people to worship God.
Note that since Christians regard Jesus as the Son of God, Muslims regard them as guilty of shirk, or polytheism, which for Muslims is the worst possible sin — or as some preachers, such as Nassim Abdi of Sydney have put it, is “worse than any sin.” I doubt that Ahmed will be telling his Christian audiences about why Muslims consider them guilty of shirk.
He said there are six articles of faith in Islam that include believing in all of God’s prophets. That includes Jesus, he said.
“If you don’t believe in Jesus, then you cannot be Muslim,” he said.
But the Muslim belief in Jesus as one more of the prophets in Islam — there are 124,000 prophets, according to Muhammad himself, though Jesus is the most revered prophet after Muhammad — has nothing to do with, and stands in opposition to, the Christian belief in Jesus as the Son of God. For as Sabeel Ahmed carefully does not tell his audiences, if you believe in Jesus as divine, “then you cannot be Muslim,” and you are, as noted above, guilty of “shirk,” which is “worse than any sin.” This is an ideological abyss that Sabeel Ahmed hopes his Christian friends won’t notice.
Muslims, like Christians, believe Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary, Ahmed said. They believe there is a creator and a higher power. Muslims also believe there is an afterlife and that people are accountable to God for their actions on earth.
Muslims are monotheists, and believe in an afterlife. This we are endlessly told by Islamic apologists. But what Sabeel Ahmed leaves out is the nature of that afterlife, and of how a Muslim can best achieve entry into Heaven, which is a very different place from the Christian Heaven. The Muslim Heaven is a sensual paradise with 72 virgins. And the surest way to enter it and enjoy its delights is to be a martyr, or shahid, dying while conducting violent Jihad against the Unbelievers. That is not information Sabeel Ahmed wishes to share with his audiences of trusting and unwary Christians.
Ahmed said Jesus is mentioned 25 times in the Quran, and that Mary, who is mentioned in the Quran 32 times, is the only woman mentioned by name in the religious text.
Again, the Muslim Mary (Maryam) is very different from the Christian Mary. She is revered; she has Sura 19 named after her; she is mentioned 32 times in the Qur’an –all of this is a staple of Muslim propaganda, that is used to impress Christians, and to conceal the basic difference: in Islam, Mary, no matter how revered, is not the mother of the Son of God.
There are more miracles related to Jesus in the Quran than there are in the Bible, Ahmed said.
More Taqiyya to keep us from focusing on the essential difference between Islam and Christianity. Jesus may in Islam be responsible for some miracles, but that does not make him divine, or the Son of God. He was appropriated by the early Muslims, downgraded to being a mortal man and a prophet. To worship him as the Son of God is inadmissible shirk.
The Arizona chapter of The Humanitarians bought two billboards on Interstate 10 — one near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and another in Tucson near Prince Road.
The billboards, which Ahmed said cost $10,000, state in bold, white letters three Islamic beliefs about Jesus: Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary; he is honorable and blessed; and God supported Jesus with the Holy Spirit.
The billboards were unveiled last week and will be up for a month, Ahmed said.
What do you think would happen if some group of Islamocritics tried to rent billboards which simply read as follows:
Qur’an 3:110: “Muslims are the best of peoples.”
Qur’an 98:6: “Non-Muslims are the most vile of created beings.”
Qur’an 5:51: “O you who believe! Do not take Jews and Christians as friends, for they are friends only with each other.”
Qur’an 8:12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.”
In the hadith of Bukhari (4.52.220), Muhammad claims: “I have been made victorious through terror.”
Nothing here is made up; everything is quoted just as it is written in the Qur’an and, in the last example, recorded in the “reliable” (Sahih) hadith of Bukhari.
Despite the absolute fidelity to its sources in the Islamic texts, is there anyplace in this country where such a billboard could be put up? No. Truth is no defense, when it comes to protecting the image of Islam. Free speech does not matter. Anyone who selects such verses is clearly trying to place Islam in a bad light. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, it’s Islamophobia. No such billboards will ever be seen.