Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus
A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity
By Nabeel Qureshi
Category: Religion & Spirituality | Reading Duration: 19 min | Rating: 4.1/5 (140 ratings)
About the Book
Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (2016) traces a young man’s dramatic spiritual journey from Islam to Christianity. Packed with insights into the faith he grew up with as well as the faith he adopted later in life, Quereshi’s story will challenge Christians, Muslims, and all those interested in the world’s greatest religions.
Who Should Read This?
- Believers interested in interfaith dialogue
- Anyone questioning their own faith journey
- History buffs
What’s in it for me? Intimate insights into a spiritual journey.
For many Christians, conversion is a profound act of grace. In Christianity, God, the infinite omniscient creator, chooses to reveal himself to humanity. Central to this belief is the doctrine of incarnation, which teaches that God took on human form in Jesus Christ. It is through Christ that God becomes knowable to finite and ignorant humans. In Islam, by contrast, Jesus is revered as a prophet, but he is neither seen as divine nor as the son of God. Muslims believe that God has sent numerous prophets throughout history, with Muhammad being the last of this line. The Quran, which Muslims believe to be the direct word of God, was revealed to Muhammad and serves as the ultimate guide for believers.These contrasting views of how we come to know God – through his son Jesus or through his revelation to Muhammad – go to the heart of the differences between the overlapping creeds of Christianity and Islam. They also play a pivotal role in this Blink, which recounts how and why a devout Muslim converted to Christianity after coming to doubt Islam’s view of Jesus. Nabeel Qureshi’s Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus isn’t a theological treatise, however. Rather, it’s a deeply personal account of an often-arduous spiritual journey toward what he sees as the miraculous revelation of God’s truth in his own life.
Chapter 1: Born into Islam
At dawn in Muslim countries, sonorous cries echo over rooftops and across sleepy villages, towns, and cities. The words are a statement of the core beliefs of Muslims everywhere:“Allah is Great! I bear witness that there is no god but Allah! I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah!”These are the opening words of the adhan, the call to prayer, but they are also a reminder to Muslims to dedicate their lives to Allah from the moment they awaken. For many Muslims, these are the first words they ever hear. In accordance with a tradition going back to the prophet Muhammad, parents whisper them to newborns. When Nabeel Qureshi was born in 1983, his father spoke them into his ear, just as his father had 30 years earlier. For two decades, that proclamation of faith reverberated in Nabeel’s heart and mind. Nabeel’s parents hailed from Punjab, a region in central-eastern Pakistan, but they had lived in the United States since the 1970s. His father served in the United States Navy; his mother raised the children. Both were Ahmadis – members of a nineteenth-century Islamic revival movement that reshaped the religious landscape in what was then British India. Because of his father’s job, the family moved a lot, but the Qureshis attached themselves to the local mosque and Muslim community wherever they went. Nabeel, the oldest of three children, received a rigorous religious education. At the age of four, he began learning to recite the Quran in the original Arabic; later, he began studying the books of commentary in the family’s study. His father was an amateur apologist – someone who seeks to logically and persuasively justify their beliefs. It was from him that Nabeel inherited his love for theological debate. It was a patriotic American family, but the Qureshis also saw themselves as outsiders. As Nabeel’s mother told him when he was 10, people would always see him as a Muslim first and foremost. If he excelled academically, people would remark on what an excellent Muslim student he was; if he became president, he would always be the Muslim president. That, though, was no bad thing: whatever else he was, she said, he would always be a Muslim. That was his identity and his calling. For the first twenty years of his life, he saw it that way too. Nabeel not only embraced Islam – he also sought to be an ambassador for his faith.
Chapter 2: East and West
Adolescence is hard. Psychologists sometimes refer to this period in our lives as a time of “regime change.” As we leave childhood behind, we begin to realize that the identities our parents have built for us are too small to contain the selves we wish to create and inhabit. Breaking out of these molds is a fraught process at the best of times. In Nabeel Quereshi’s telling, it’s especially difficult for the American children of Muslim immigrants. Adolescents like Nabeel don’t only experience the pull of a new personality – they also feel the pull of a new paradigm. People from Eastern Islamic cultures, he argues, typically assess truth through lines of authority rather than individual reasoning. Critical thinking within these cultures is mostly left to specialists. In religious matters, for example, the task of examining theological questions falls to the ulama, the learned scholars of Islamic doctrine and law. In the culture of Nabeel’s parents, elders occupy a similar position of authority: children are expected to show their respect and love for parents by obeying them. In the Quereshi household, questions were seen as a challenge to authority. Such ideas were at odds with the values Nabeel was learning in school. There, he was being taught to think critically and test claims of truth for himself. However, his parents saw this as a form of impertinence. In reality, it was a culture clash. As Nabeel puts it, their son was cut from a different cultural cloth. He wasn’t the fine Pakistani linen they believed him to be – he was more of an Asian-American cotton blend. Despite their patriotism, his parents fought hard to keep their children from becoming “Americanized.” That term wasn’t about nationality – it was about culture. It was about alien ideas and norms. It meant disobeying elders, dressing less conservatively, and spending more time with friends than family. At its worst, it included vices such as cursing and drinking.Despite feeling the pull of what he calls the “Western paradigm,” Nabeel internalized aspects of his parents’ worldview. That shaped his understanding of Christianity. Like his parents, he conflated Western immoralities with Christianity. The West is Americanized, the idea went, and it is Christian; it follows, then, that it’s Americanized because it’s Christian. And if Christianity produced a promiscuous, domineering Western culture, it must be ungodly.
Chapter 3: Friends and sparring partners
Spreading the faith is an important concept in Islam. In the Quran, believers are called upon to “invite all to the way of your lord with wisdom and kind advice.” Muslims call it dawah – an Arabic word meaning “to make an invitation.” When Nabeel went to college to study biology in 2001, he searched out opportunities to discuss religion and make the case for Islam. Christians also believe in evangelizing – spreading the good news of Jesus Christ. This pillar of their faith is based on verses like the Great Commission found in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus instructs his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations.”It was at college that Nabeel met a Christian philosophy student called David Wood. Both young men believed in the truth of their respective creeds and the importance of converting non-believers. But Nabeel and David didn’t just butt heads over faith – they also became inseparable friends. It was one of the most important relationships of Nabeel’s life. Growing up in Virginia, Nabeel had known plenty of Christians, but their faith had always seemed a barrier to any kind of friendship. And because they hadn’t cared about him unconditionally, Nabeel hadn’t cared to hear their message. That changed with David. He took Nabeel seriously, which made Nabeel take Christianity seriously. During their years at college, they conducted an open-ended conversation about God, the New Testament, and the Quran. They sparred over the historical case for the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the deity of Jesus. Their debates and arguments were heated, but their bond was too strong to snap under the strain of disagreement. Looking back, Nabeel came to believe that God sent David into his life to share the Gospel in the context of their friendship. To spread God’s word, one must know – and love – the people to whom one brings the good news of Jesus Christ. As Romans asks, “How are they to believe in him of whom they’ve never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” David preached; eventually, Nabeel’s faith in Islam was replaced by his faith in Christ. How did that happen? To answer that, we need to take a closer look at the contents of Nabeel and David’s theological skirmishes.
Chapter 4: The historical Jesus
David had a question for Nabeel. Their debates had gone back and forth. What, he now asked, would convince Nabeel of the truth of Christianity? Nabeel thought for a moment. The case for Christianity, he said, seemed to rest on two claims: that Jesus died on the cross and that he rose from the dead. David agreed – those claims were indeed a good litmus test. So how did Nabeel come to accept them? Answering that question takes into the heart of a complex theological argument. Let’s break it down. Christians believe that Jesus was crucified, died, and rose again. His resurrection is evidence of his divinity, validating Jesus’s claim to be the son of God. This is a foundational tenet of their faith. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul underscores its importance. “If Christ has not been raised,” he says, “your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” Despite revering Jesus as a prophet and ascribing numerous miracles to him, Islam sees things differently. Its view of Allah is premised on tawheed, meaning “oneness” or “indivisibility” in Arabic. For Muslims, God can only be God. This belief rules out the possibility of God incarnating in human form as Christians believe he did Jesus. The Quran thus claims that Jesus was not crucified. As Nabeel discovered, this puts it at odds with historical evidence. The crucifixion isn’t only reported in Christian sources – it’s also mentioned by non-Christian sources like the Roman historians Tacitus and Josephus. The consensus among historians, irrespective of their beliefs, is that Jesus was crucified. Some Muslims sidestep this discrepancy by appealing to the swoon theory. This posits that Jesus didn’t die on the cross but merely fainted or “swooned” and was later revived. Nabeel didn’t accept this argument either: the brutal skill of Roman executioners is well documented and sources record the deaths of criminals by crucifixion The Gospel, meanwhile, describes Jesus being pierced and blood and water flowing out of his wound – a sure sign of death. There’s also good circumstantial historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ. The early church, for example, was built on this teaching. Even disciples who had once been opposed to Jesus’ message like Paul were willing to die for this belief, suggesting, at the very least, that they truly believed in the resurrection. As David put it, “liars make poor martyrs.”
Chapter 5: Doubting the Quran
The Quran isn’t an Islamic analogue to the Bible. Muslims see it as the literal Word of God, not an incarnation of God – the Christian concept of incarnation doesn’t have an exact parallel in Islamic thought. But it encapsulates Allah’s mystery, wisdom, power, depth, and perfection. For that reason, the Quran is absolutely central to Islamic theology. Muslims revere the Quran because they believe it is an exact record of the words God spoke to the prophet Muhammad. Allah’s message to humanity, in other words, comes down to Muslims exactly as it was received over a period of 23 years between 610 and 632 CE. The unaltered nature of the Quran is a tenet of faith for Muslims. Nabeel accepted it on the authority of the scholars and elders who assured him of its truth. But the more he looked at the sources on which they based their views, the more he began to question it. After the prophet’s death in 632 CE, these sources record, there was a period of strife in the powerful Muslim community Muhammad had built in today’s Saudi Arabia. Many converts to Islam abandoned the new creed. Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr, fought the apostates. The Muslim community triumphed, but many of the prophet’s former companions lost their lives in these wars. Because the Quran had only been passed on orally, there was a real risk that large portions of God’s message to humanity would be lost forever. To prevent this catastrophe, Abu Bakr ordered a scribe to collect and compile all the Quranic verses in a single book. That was no easy task: many Muslims had forgotten verses revealed to them by Muhammad. On more than one occasion, Abu Bakr’s scribe could only find a single person capable of testifying to a particular verse’s authenticity. Later on, Muhammad’s third successor, a man called Uthman, ordered the standardization of the Quran. Uthman was worried that debates about the authenticity of verses would cause a civil war among Muslims, so he also decreed the destruction of all Quranic materials that didn’t make it into the new standardized Quran. Nabeel was shocked by these accounts of the Quran’s transmission. Islamic sources weren’t really arguing that the Quran had remained unchanged – they were instead claiming that the decisions made by men like Abu Bakr and Uthman had been divinely inspired. The Quran had changed over time. That was a direct challenge to Islam and the only way scholars had found of sidestepping it was to argue that Allah had willed such changes.
Chapter 6: Revelation
The linchpin of Nabeel’s faith in Islam had been removed; the entire structure of his belief was compromised. He abandoned the historical sources he’d been studying and turned to the Quran. He hoped to encounter Allah and receive his guidance directly. But there was nothing there for him any more. The Quran’s God, he now felt, was a cold, distant, and conditional God – a God who made no room for doubt and demanded absolute obedience. His Word was a book of laws, written for the seventh century. So he picked up the Bible instead. For years, he’d studied it, analyzing its arguments and subjecting its claims to historical scrutiny. But he’d never sought personal guidance in its pages. Not knowing where to start, he turned to the New Testament. There, he found these words: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Nabeel’s heart had stopped with his loss of faith. Now, a current coursed through his body, jolting it back to life. He continued reading until he came to these words: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” What kind of God was this who bestowed his blessing not on the righteous, the already perfect, but on those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness? It was a God who loved him – absolutely and unconditionally. Tears flowed down Nabeel’s cheeks. He read and read until, at last, his heart was full. In a daze, he stepped outside his apartment and saw something he’d seen countless times before: a man walking down the sidewalk toward the medical school. But he also saw something he’d never seen before.Nabeel didn’t know the man but he knew as he’d never known before that he had a dramatic story. Struggles. Broken relationships. A fractured sense of his own worth. This man, like so many of us, had been taught that his existence was nothing but the outcome of blind evolution. He saw himself as the byproduct of random chance and behaved accordingly, finding no hope or purpose or meaning in his life outside those fleeting pleasures we all pursue even though we know they bring us little but pain and remorse. He, like so many of us, was stuck in a cycle of despair. Nabeel wondered, Did he know that God loves him, absolutely and unconditionally? No, of course not – Nabeel now realized that no one knows this truth until those who do bring them the good news of Jesus Christ. That would be Nabeel’s calling from this day on.
Final summary
The son of Pakistani-American parents, Nabeel Qureshi was raised as a devout Muslim. Straddling a traditional upbringing and an American education, the adolescent Nabeel grappled with questions of identity and faith. In college, these questions intensified as he befriended a Christian with whom he engaged in theological debates about Christianity and Islam. Nabeel’s exploration of the origins of the Quran, contrasted with historical accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, led him to question long-held Islamic teachings, catalyzing his conversion to Christianity.
About the Author
Nabeel Qureshi (1983-2017) was a well-known Pakistani-American Christian apologist and speaker. Quereshi studied medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and religion at Duke University before pursuing a doctorate in New Testament studies at Oxford University. He authored several books on Islam and Christianity, including Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, a heartfelt account of his journey from Islam to Christianity, and No God but One: Allah or Jesus?