What Islam Offers and What It Cannot Deliver

Two coursemates and one long argument

Here is a scene, built to be recognisable and not reported as fact. Two final year students share a table in a library at the University of Ibadan, a week before examinations. Tolu is a Christian who has sung about the blood of Jesus at six in the morning since he was small. Zainab is a Muslim who has read the Quran through more times than Tolu has read Romans. She is not trying to win anything. She simply asks him why Christians make God so complicated. One God is easy to understand, she says, and you people have three.

Tolu does what many of us would do. He rebukes the question. He says something about the devil confusing her mind, and the conversation, which could have been the best one of their four years, ends at the photocopier.

I want to say the plain thing first. You cannot rebuke an argument. You can only answer it. And you cannot answer it until you can state it in words that the person who holds it would nod at. That is the work of this essay. Muslims in Nigeria are our classmates, colleagues, landlords, in laws and customers, and across many northern towns they are the large majority. A faith that is only comfortable arguing with people who already agree with it is not very confident.

So the first half of what follows gives the Muslim case at its best. The second half answers it. I will try to be fair in both, and I will say where I think the Christian answer is weaker than we usually pretend.

What a Muslim friend would put on the table

Islam presents itself less as a rival to Christianity than as the correction of it. The message, a Muslim will say, was given to every prophet, including Moses and Jesus, and then blurred by later hands. The Quran is the final and unblurred form of it.

From that starting point come eight claims. God is one, undivided and unshared. Every believer has direct access to him, with no priest in between. Each person answers for his own deeds and nobody else carries them. Islam offers a whole way of life, from prayer to business ethics to inheritance, and not a mood on Sunday. The Quran has been kept safe in a single text. Muhammad is the last prophet, so nothing can come after him. Five daily prayers give the day a spine. And the worldwide Muslim community, spread over every nation, is a family that no border can cut.

Those are not weak claims. Nobody who has watched a whole mosque go silent and stand shoulder to shoulder, rich man next to poor man, can think they are weak. They deserve answers and not noise.

One more thing belongs here before the answers. Nigeria is a country that does not fully know its own religious numbers. The last census to measure religion was in 1973 and its results were never published, so every figure you hear is an estimate. Pew’s most recent estimate, drawn from household surveys and dated 2020, puts Muslims at 56.1 per cent of the population and Christians at 43.4 per cent, with other groups at 0.6 per cent (Pew Research Center, 2025). Neither of us is going away, and neither of us is a small minority.

One God and the love before creation

The first claim is the oldest and, to a Muslim, the simplest. God is one. The short chapter of the Quran that Muslims recite more than almost any other says it in a few lines.

“Allāh, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent.”

— Quran 112:2 to 4 (Saheeh International)

I want to honour what is going on in those lines. They are not mere abstraction. They are a guard against a real danger, which is that people make gods in their own image and then fight over them. Christians have done exactly that, and a Muslim who reads the Gospel of John for the first time and hears that God has a Son may well hear an echo of the old pagan stories of gods who fathered children. The Quran says to the Christian, in a verse about Jesus, that the Messiah was a messenger of God and his word, and then asks Christians to stop saying “Three” (Quran 4:171). That is a protest, and the protest has a history behind it.

So what does a Christian say? Not that the Son is a child God had with someone. No Christian creed has ever meant that, and a Muslim is entitled to hear us say so plainly. The claim is narrower and stranger. It is that God has always been relational in his own being, and that the love he is did not have to wait for creatures to practise on.

Here is the argument in its ordinary form. If God is love, and the apostle John says he is, then love was there before there was anyone to love.

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

— 1 John 4:8 (NIV)

Love needs someone to love. Before the universe, either God’s love had no object, which makes it a love of himself and nothing else, or God needed his creation to become loving, which makes him depend on what he made. The Trinity says there was always someone to love, because God has never been alone.

I don’t think that argument is a proof, and I would be a poor guide if I pretended it was. A thoughtful Muslim has a reply, and it is a good one. Love, like knowledge and power, is an attribute that belongs to God in himself whether or not any creature exists to receive it, and there is no need to turn God into a family to say so. A Christian cannot refute that in one move. What I can say is that the Christian doctrine did not arrive as a puzzle to be solved. It arrived because the first disciples met a man they could not describe as only a man and could not stop praying to, and they kept believing in one God throughout. The argument from love is not the reason Christians believe in the Trinity. It is the reason we find it fitting.

No priest and no one else’s burden

The second claim is that Islam gives direct access to God. A Muslim stands to pray with no priest, no altar, and no intermediary, and the Quran speaks of a God who is nearer than a person’s own neck.

“And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.”

— Quran 50:16 (Saheeh International)

I won’t pretend that Christians have always been as good as Muslims at remembering that. Anyone who has watched a worship service turn into a queue for a man in a robe to touch your forehead knows that some Christians behave as if God lives behind a counter. The Muslim criticism of that is fair and often deserved.

But notice what the New Testament does with the word “mediator.” It does not use it to say God is far off. It uses it to explain how a sinner can come near at all.

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy.”

— Hebrews 4:16 (NIV)

The question the Christian asks is not whether God is close. Everyone agrees he is. The question is how a person who knows his own heart can walk into the presence of a holy God without a word to say for himself. The letter to the Hebrews answers that Jesus does not stand in the doorway but holds it open, because he is able to save “those who draw near to God through him,” since he “always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25, ESV). On this view the mediator is the reason the door is open.

Which brings us to the third claim, that no soul can carry another’s load. The Quran says it clearly.

“And no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another.”

— Quran 35:18 (Saheeh International)

This is a serious moral instinct, and it is also an instinct Christians share. Nobody wants a justice system where a stranger takes your sentence without your consent. Most of us would be furious if it happened.

The point of the cross, though, is that nobody took anything without consent. Jesus said it himself, and the Gospel records it.

“No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”

— John 10:18 (NIV)

A burden carried by someone who was forced to carry it is exactly what both of us object to. A burden carried by someone who stepped forward, who had every power to refuse, and who did it for people who could not pay the debt, is something else. We can disagree about whether that happened. We shouldn’t pretend the Christian claim is the one the Quran is rejecting. Christians do not say God dumped one man’s guilt on another man’s account. We say God went himself.

The preserved book and the last messenger

The fifth claim is the one a Muslim most likely meets a Christian with, and it comes with real feeling. The Quran, says the Muslim, has been kept safe since the day it was sent down, and the Quran itself says so.

“Indeed, it is We who sent down the Qur’an and indeed, We will be its guardian.”

— Quran 15:9 (Saheeh International)

The Bible, the Muslim continues, has no such guarantee, and Christians cannot even agree which manuscript is the real one.

Here a Christian has to be careful, because many of us have said clumsy and unfair things at this point. The popular Christian line is that the Quran was edited by Uthman and the Bible was left alone, which is both rude and wrong. The classical collection of hadith, which means the reported sayings and deeds of Muhammad, records that a companion named Hudhaifa warned Uthman, the third caliph, that people were beginning to differ in how they recited the Quran, as Jews and Christians had differed before them. Uthman had copies made from an early written text and ordered that all other Quranic material, whether fragments or whole copies, be burnt (Sahih Bukhari, hadith 4987). A Muslim reads that account as an act of love for the text. A caliph saw a fire starting and put it out. I think that is a fair reading, and I don’t think it’s a scandal.

Equally, Muslim scholars do not claim that recitation has been uniform. The ten recognised modes of reciting the Quran all follow the Uthmanic written text, which was first written without the dots and vowel marks that later readers added, and the differences among them can be in sound, in grammar, and occasionally in shades of meaning. A paper from the Yaqeen Institute, which is a Muslim research body, sets out how those modes arose and also deals openly with the older readings attributed to Ibn Masud (Khatib & Khan, 2019/2024). A Christian who says “the Quran has no variants” has not read what Muslim scholars write. A Muslim who says “the Bible has no stable text” has not read what Christian scholars write either.

So I would put the difference this way. Islam believes God promised to guard his book and then did. Christians believe God sent his Word in a person, and that the writings about that person were carried by ordinary hands into thousands of copies. The New Testament is not preserved because it was one copy kept safe. It is known because it exists in a very large number of copies that can be compared. In the most recent count cited by Clay Jones, there are 5,795 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, against 1,757 for Homer’s Iliad and 210 for Plato (Jones, 2012/2013). Where copies differ, the differences can be seen, and the great majority are small things such as spelling and word order. The Bible does contain real textual questions, and I would rather say so myself than have a Muslim friend find out later. But a book with a wide paper trail cannot easily be quietly changed, and that is the sense in which the Christian case rests on multiplication and not on a promise.

The sixth claim is that Muhammad is the last of the prophets. The Quran says so in its own words.

“Muhammad is not the father of [any] one of your men, but [he is] the Messenger of Allah and last of the prophets.”

— Quran 33:40 (Saheeh International, first clause)

I cannot argue a Muslim out of that, and I don’t intend to try. What I can do is ask what we are both being invited to accept. A final messenger is a claim that something finished has been said. The Christian says it was already said, that the one who spoke is a person and not a book, and that after him there was only the telling of it. Which of the two is true cannot be settled by repeating either claim louder. It is settled, if it is settled, by looking at who Jesus was, and a Muslim has already said a great deal about that. The Quran calls him the Messiah. The conversation is not finished by this essay, and it should not be finished at a photocopier.

A whole way of life, honestly weighed

On the fourth and seventh claims, the whole way of life and the five prayers, I want to give more than most Christian writers would.

A faith that tells you how to pray, how to fast, how to give, how to do business and how to bury your dead builds a person who knows what Tuesday is for. Many Nigerian Christians have watched a version of our own faith shrink to a transaction. Plant a seed, claim a breakthrough, go home. Against that, a Muslim neighbour who gets up before dawn to pray is making a serious statement about who owns his time. I’ve no wish to talk down to it.

My question is the one the structure itself raises. What is it for? A soldier can keep perfect discipline and feel nothing for the general. A pupil can recite a poem he does not understand. The discipline matters, and a Christian who prays only when he feels like it is not being freer, only lazier. But Jesus pressed his own people on exactly this point. He warned against the prayer made to be seen, and told his listeners to go into a room, shut the door, and speak to a Father who sees in secret (Matthew 6:5 to 6). What he wanted could not be forced by a timetable. It had to grow from the inside.

The old prophets saw this coming. Jeremiah spoke of a day when God would say of his people, in the prophet’s words quoted in the ESV, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). I am not saying a Muslim has no heart. I am saying that every religion of commands, mine included, faces the same embarrassing fact, which is that people can obey perfectly on the outside and stay exactly as they were on the inside.

Where the offer meets the problem

That fact is where the answer turns, so I should state it properly.

Every honest person, whatever his religion, knows the gap between what he thinks he ought to be and what he is. It is rarely a gap of information. A man knows that he should not lie to his wife, and he does. A woman knows she should forgive her sister, and she does not. If you give either of them a better rulebook, a stricter timetable, a longer fast, you will get a more informed failure. Paul wrote what he found in himself in a way that most of us recognise at once.

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”

— Romans 7:24 (NIV)

Notice the question Paul asks. It isn’t “who will tell me what to do?” He knew. It is “who will rescue me?” No law answers that, because the law is the thing that showed him the problem. And no preserved book, daily discipline or worldwide family answers it either, though all of them are good gifts. The honest Christian claim is not that Islam teaches too little. It is that a person who needs rescuing needs a rescuer, and that God became that rescuer himself.

“Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

— Romans 7:25 (NIV)

A Muslim will hear that as a claim about a man, and a hard one. I understand why. The Quran is firm that God does not take a son, and I have no wish to pretend the difference is a small one. But the shape of the Christian answer should be clear to anybody who is listening. We are not saying that we found a better religion. We are saying that when people had tried everything they could try, God came himself, and the weight of what was wrong with us was carried by someone who did not have to carry it. If that is false, then Zainab has every reason to say so. If it is true, then it is not a rival offer at all. It is the answer to the question that every system, ours included, was asking.

Brotherhood in a country with two wounds

The last claim is the most moving, because it is the one Nigerians can see with their own eyes. The worldwide Muslim community is a family of a kind that no other religion on earth quite matches, and a Muslim who arrives in an unfamiliar city can often find a home within an hour. That is real, and the church could learn from it.

It would be wrong to move on without saying what everyone in this country knows, which is that we are standing on the wounds of one another. Churches have been burnt, and so have mosques. Pew’s note on Nigeria records that both Muslims and Christians have been attacked, kidnapped and killed by armed gangs, that Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have burned both kinds of building, and that in the Middle Belt a conflict between mostly Christian farmers and mostly Muslim herders has turned deadly (Pew Research Center, 2025). Counting the dead is fiercely contested. At the turn of October and November 2025 Washington put Nigeria on its list of Countries of Particular Concern, and a congressman’s office claimed that more than 7,000 Christians were killed in 2025 alone, a figure ABC News describes as widely disputed. The Nigerian government has answered that terrorists attack Muslims, Christians and people of no faith alike (ABC News, 2025). The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2026 report says the violence has killed nearly 53,000 civilians since 2009, and calls it an existential struggle for the country’s two largest religious communities, Christians and Muslims (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2026). On Christmas Day 2025 American missiles struck two camps in Sokoto State. Nigeria’s foreign minister said the operation was approved by President Tinubu on the condition that it be presented as a joint effort that was not aimed at any religion (Nigeria: Tinubu approved, 2025).

And it is not all in the past. In August 2026, about 600 people, mostly Muslims, were reported kidnapped in Niger State, some of them while at Friday prayers. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria responded with the sentence that I would like every pastor to repeat from his pulpit, “An attack on any place of worship is an attack on our collective humanity” (Onyulo, 2026). A Muslim mother in Plateau State told the same reporter that in all her years of Islamic teaching she had never been taught to hate or attack Christians because of their religion. I believe her, and I think a church that wishes to be honest with its own members has to say plainly that the gunmen do not speak for her.

That is the first thing, and I would put it before any argument. We do not blame a whole faith for the crimes of armed men. We do not ask a Muslim in Ibadan to apologise for a camp in the forest, any more than we expect a Christian in Kano to answer for every angry sermon. Christian history has its own chapters that I would not want read aloud at the dinner table, and I will not defend them.

The second thing is what the peacemakers have shown us. In 1992 violence broke out between Christians and Muslims in Kaduna State. Imam Muhammad Ashafa lost two brothers and his teacher in it. Pastor James Wuye lost his hand. Each of them dreamed of revenge against the other, until a mutual friend told them that together they could pull the nation together or tear it apart. In 1995 they founded the Interfaith Mediation Centre, which now trains young people, women and religious leaders as peace workers (Tanenbaum, n.d.). In August 2026 an international conference in Abuja produced a declaration, with Muslim and Christian leaders agreeing to set up a coordinating body, to run public programmes against hate speech, and to ask the media to report responsibly. The Muslim World League’s secretary general said that extremist ideas have harmed everyone (Muslim News Nigeria, 2026). The national chairman of the ruling party, Nentawe Yilwatda, said at the same gathering, “Let us preach truth without hatred, conviction without contempt, and truth without incitement” (Muslim News Nigeria, 2026).

I think that last sentence is as good a description of Christian apologetics as I have read. It’s also, I notice, harder than it sounds.

The question I would put to my Muslim friends is where their brotherhood rests. Mine rests on one man, who died for people who did not deserve him.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

— Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

That means the person who disagrees with me about nearly everything is still, in my own faith, someone Christ died for. I haven’t always lived as if that were true. Neither, I suspect, has the Muslim community always lived as if the worldwide family were true in the next compound. The difference between us is not who has failed less. It is what we say the foundation is, and whether the foundation is strong enough to hold weight when it is leaned on.

Come and sit down with them

If you are a Christian who has read this far, here is what I would ask. The next time a Muslim colleague or neighbour asks why you believe what you believe, resist the rebuke. Ask what she finds hardest to accept, and listen long enough that she hears you taking it seriously. Learn what the Quran really says about Jesus, because it says more than most Christians think. Find out where you both stand, and ask whether she would be willing to tell you what she thinks the human problem is. Then say, in your own words and without a verse used as a weapon, what you think God did about it.

And if you are a Muslim who has read this far, you are more than welcome at the same table. I have tried to state your case in words you would accept. If I have got any of it wrong, I would honestly like to be told, because I would rather be corrected than be comfortable.

Tolu and Zainab are still at that table in the library. It is a week before examinations, and the photocopier is free. There is a second chance in front of them, and I hope he takes it.

References

Biblical References

1 Timothy 2:5 to 6 (ESV). The epigraph. One God and one mediator who gave himself as a ransom, the claim the whole essay is answering.
1 John 4:8 (NIV). God is love, used for the argument that love is part of who God is and not something he began to do at creation.
Hebrews 4:16 (NIV). Opening sentence only. Christians approach God’s throne with confidence, which answers the charge that a mediator blocks access.
Hebrews 7:25 (ESV). Quoted in two short phrases. The mediator opens the way and always lives to intercede.
John 10:18 (NIV). The atonement is freely given, not a transfer forced on an unwilling person.
Jeremiah 31:33 (ESV). Quoted in one sentence. The new covenant promises a law written on the heart, which is the answer to obedience that stays external.
Matthew 6:5 to 6 (ESV). Referred to in paraphrase. Jesus warns against prayer made to be seen and sends his hearers to the Father who sees in secret.
Romans 7:24 to 25 (NIV). The human problem and the answer, where the argument turns.
Galatians 3:28 (ESV). Christian unity rests on belonging to Christ, which is the foundation offered in answer to the claim about the worldwide Muslim community.

Other Sources

ABC News. (2025). US designates Nigeria “Country of Particular Concern” after Trump threat over alleged attacks on Christians. https://abcnews.com/Politics/us-designates-nigeria-country-concern-after-trump-threat/story?id=127148133
Jones, C. (2013, October 1). The bibliographical test updated. Christian Research Institute. (Original work published 2012 in Christian Research Journal, 35(3)). https://www.equip.org/articles/the-bibliographical-test-updated/
Khatib, A., & Khan, N. (2019, updated 2024). The origins of the variant readings of the Qur’an. Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/the-origins-of-the-variant-readings-of-the-qur%27an
Muslim News Nigeria. (2026, September 1). Abuja Declaration: Muslim, Christian leaders unite for peace, security (full report). https://muslimnews.com.ng/2026/09/01/abuja-declaration-muslim-christian-leaders-unite-for-peace-security-full-report/
Nigeria: Tinubu approved US airstrikes on terrorists in Sokoto but gave conditions, foreign minister says. (2025, December 27). AllAfrica. https://allafrica.com/stories/202512270024.html
Onyulo, T. (2026, September 23). As violence escalates in Nigeria, Christian and Muslim leaders unite. Word&Way (originally Religion News Service). https://wordandway.org/2026/09/23/as-violence-escalates-in-nigeria-christian-and-muslim-leaders-unite/
Pew Research Center. (2025, November 11). 5 facts about religion in Nigeria. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/11/5-facts-about-religion-in-nigeria/
Quran 15:9, 33:40, 35:18, 50:16 (Saheeh International). SurahQuran.com. https://surahquran.com/english-aya-9-sora-15.html (and the matching pages for verses 40 of chapter 33, 18 of chapter 35, and 16 of chapter 50)
Quran 4:171 (Saheeh International). SurahQuran.com. https://surahquran.com/english-aya-171-sora-4.html
Quran 112 (Saheeh International). Quran.com. https://quran.com/al-ikhlas/translation/en-sahih-international
Sahih Bukhari, hadith 4987. Sunnah.com. https://sunnah.com/bukhari:4987
Tanenbaum. (n.d.). Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye. https://tanenbaum.org/about-us/what-we-do/peacebuilding/meet-the-peacemakers/imam-muhammad-ashafa-pastor-james-wuye/
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. (2026). 2026 annual report. https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2026-03/USCIRF_2026_AR_3326_NEW.pdf

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Quran quotations are from the Saheeh International translation as displayed on Quran.com and SurahQuran.com. The publisher’s copyright line has not been confirmed and must be added before publication.