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is valid until heaven and earth passes away MUSLIMS BELIEVE that God is very much in control of His creation. This is expressed in the following verse of the Qur’an (ayat al-Kursi): “God – there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of existence. Neither drowsiness overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs [...]

AT SOME point whilst I was still at school my heart began to turn away from Christianity. I believe a large part of this was teenage selfishness – seeing life in a wholly negative light, despite its reality. And maybe, too, there was a shyness of my beliefs. I remember Frasier from St. Andrews congratulating [...]

THE QUESTION asked of me regarding the acceptance of one book of the Bible and rejection of others, could equally be asked of the various denominations of the Christian Church. For in fact it is the case that there is great difference between denominations even now with regard to which books are accepted as canonical [...]

THIS IS a question I was once asked when I sought to draw attention to the teachings of the Letter of James. This has been my way on various occasions, for historic parallels have been drawn between early Judaic-Christianity and Islam. The question, of course, is a perfectly fair one and it is one which [...]

THE NATURE of the news media is that in general it only reports bad news; the exceptions may include sports news, visits by statesmen and royalty, finance news, and the like. We would not expect to see a report on the news dealing with the wonderful weather which hit Albania today, or the absence of [...]

TO CONSIDER the issue of tolerance, we must work in the light of the teachings of the religion, not with the situation of the day in mind. For while we may wish to argue that Christianity today is a tolerant religion, this could not be said of all times in history. If Islam were to [...]

“LO! MEN who surrender unto Allah, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere (in righteousness) and women who persevere, and men who are humble and women [...]

DURING MY days of ignorance, when caught in the grip of sin, I used to say, ‘God curse me, let me burn in hell.’ As an agnostic living in the slipstream of a contemporary reinterpretation of heaven and hell, such a remark was so easily said. It was as if to say two things: I [...]

OF THE Christians, I have only ever heard Roman Catholics use the phrase God Willing. We just need to turn the pages of English history to discover that there is good reason for this. It was only a few centuries ago that the Anglican Church engaged in theological debate on the topic of freewill and [...]

I HAVE dipped into several books on Islam authored by Christians and the most common charge seems to be that the Qur’an misunderstands the Trinity. Christians do not worship three gods as Muslims often claim, these authors argue, but one God made up of three co-equal parts. This claim, I believe, is itself based on [...]

THE QUR’AN addresses those who do not believe in God and asks them to consider the world around them, in which the signs of creation are evident. This is how the non-Muslim, A.J. Arberry, translates one such verse: ‘Have not the unbelievers then beheld that the heavens and the earth were a mass all sewn [...]

It is an undeniable fact that Christians and Christianity are often derided in the popular press, in comedy, in literature and numerous other outlets. More often than not these occurrences go unchallenged and even unquestioned. When the attack is on Islam by contrast, the argument goes, the response is one of public outrage. ‘They would [...]