What the Quran says about Christians and Christianity: 7 answers

Quran 5:17 says that those who claim God is the Messiah, son of Mary, have disbelieved. Quran 5:72 repeats it, and 5:73 says the same of those who say God is “the third of three.”^[1] A Christian reader will see a rejection of the heart of the Nicene creed, and the critic is right about that. No classical commentary softens it. Islam holds that God is one and that Jesus was a servant and messenger (Quran 4:171; 5:75).^[2]

Two limits are worth stating. The verses are aimed at a stated belief, introduced by “those who say,” and 5:74 follows at once by asking whether they will not turn to God and seek forgiveness.^[1] Quran 98:1 also groups disbelievers among the People of the Book (ahl al-kitab, the holders of earlier scriptures) with the idolaters, which is a real feature of the text.^[3] Christian creeds likewise hold that Muslim teaching about Jesus falls short. Two religions that disagree about who Jesus is will each call the other mistaken, and that is a doctrinal difference to be stated plainly.

Critics say the Quran misdescribes the Trinity as God, Jesus and Mary. They point to 5:116, where God asks Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods besides God.^[4] The concession is easy to make: no Christian creed places Mary in the Godhead, and Christian scholars have said so for centuries.

Muslim readers answer in different ways. Some take 5:116 as addressing a veneration of Mary found among certain groups in the Christian world of the time, which the Quran confronts directly. Others read it as a question put to Jesus on the Day of Judgment whose point is that he never claimed divinity, and not as a full description of any church’s creed. Quran 4:171 also tells the People of the Book not to say “three,” and 9:30 correctly records the Christian title “Son of God.”^[4] The scholarly question is how far the Quran describes the creeds as written and how far it describes what some believers practised. That question is open, and an honest reader can hold it open.

Quran 5:51 says: “do not take the Jews and the Christians as awliya.” The word awliya (singular wali) means protector, patron or ally, someone to whom one hands over one’s security and loyalty. “Friends” is a weaker English rendering that makes the verse sound broader than the Arabic.^[5]

Al-Tabari records three accounts of the occasion. In one, the Companion Ubada ibn al-Samit renounced his alliance with the Jews while Abd Allah ibn Ubayy kept his; in another, two men under pressure planned to seek the protection of a Jew or of a Christian in Syria. Al-Tabari judges none of the three sound enough to prove, and reads the verse as aimed at anyone who allied with Jews or Christians against the believers out of fear.^[5] The Quran itself draws the line elsewhere. Quran 60:8 says God does not forbid kindness and justice toward those who did not fight the believers over religion, and 5:5 permits eating the food of the People of the Book and marrying their chaste women.^[6] A marriage with a Christian wife cannot coexist with a ban on all affection. Critics may still say that a verse about political loyalty can be read broadly. That is possible, and the commentators who limit it to alliances in conflict are the ones the text itself supports.

Quran 9:29 commands fighting those among the People of the Book who do not believe in God and the Last Day, “until they give the jizya” (the tax on non-Muslims under Muslim rule) while “humbled.” Christians are included, and the verse is harsh in tone. See the site’s article on jizya for the rate, exemptions and later practice.^[7]

The verse belongs to Surah 9, revealed around the Tabuk expedition of 9 AH. The early biographies, including Ibn Ishaq, say the Prophet marched north in great hardship after reports that Byzantine forces were gathering. There was no battle. Local rulers, among them the ruler of Ayla, made treaties and agreed to pay the tax.^[8] The same sources link the expedition to the earlier clash at Mu’ta.^[8] A critic calls Tabuk unprovoked. The sources record a reported threat as the reason, and modern historians weigh that report differently. The jurists read 9:29 as governing a state of war, and classical law protected the lives, property and worship of those who paid.^[7]

At the conquest of Mecca the Prophet entered the Kaaba, found images painted inside, and had them erased. Sahih al-Bukhari names pictures of Abraham and Ishmael holding divining arrows.^[9] A later history of Mecca by al-Azraqi mentions an image of Mary with the child Jesus, and its reports differ on what was done with it.^[10] The removal itself is not in dispute; it was the clearing of a sanctuary of idols, and no Christian community was its target.

The deathbed words are sound. Aisha reports that in his last illness he said: “May God curse the Jews and the Christians, who took the graves of their prophets as places of worship.” She adds that he was warning against what they had done.^[11] Scholars read it as a prohibition addressed to Muslims against turning graves into shrines. The words are strong, and their stated subject is a practice.

Quran 5:82 says that the people nearest in affection to the believers are those who say “We are Christians,” because among them are priests and monks, and they are not arrogant. Quran 3:113-115 says the People of the Book are not all alike: some are an upright community who recite God’s verses at night, and their good will not be denied.^[12] Quran 2:62 promises a reward to Christians who believe in God and the Last Day and do good.^[13] Some early reports read 2:62 as superseded by 3:85, while many scholars reject that.

Quran 5:46-47 says God gave Jesus the Gospel (Injil) with guidance and light, and tells its people to judge by what God revealed in it. Quran 29:46 says to argue with the People of the Book only in the best way and to say that “our God and your God is one.”^[14] Quran 3:55 and 57:27 speak of Jesus’s followers with honour and mercy.^[14] The same book that rejects Christian doctrine praises Christian people, and any account that leaves out one half has misread it.

Ismail al Faruqi recounts the visit of a delegation of Arabian Christians to Medina in 630. The Prophet received them as guests, allowed them to pray in his mosque, and argued with them for three days. Some accepted Islam; the rest remained Christians and were granted the protection of the Muslim state, with a companion sent as the Prophet’s representative in their land.^[15] In Essential Writings he adds that the Prophet sent them home with gifts under the protection of a Muslim escort, and that Muʿādh ibn Jabal went with them to organize their affairs.^[16]

The same volume prints the charter that ʿUmar gave the Christians of Jerusalem (Aelia) in 15 AH. It secures “their churches and their crosses” and says that “they shall not be coerced in any matter pertaining to their religion”. It also sets the jizya and, as al-Faruqi gives it, bars Jews from living in the city.^[17]

Critics also cite a hadith in Sahih Muslim: on the Day of Resurrection God will deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say, this is your rescue from the Fire.^[18] A related wording has Muslims arriving with sins like mountains that are forgiven and placed on Jews and Christians. The objection is that Islam teaches substitution for Muslims while rejecting it for Christians.

Al-Nawawi read the first wording alongside the report of Abu Hurayra that every person has a place in Paradise and a place in Hell. When a believer enters Paradise, the disbeliever takes the place in Hell that the believer would have had, because the disbeliever deserves it by his own unbelief. The word “ransom” means that God has fixed a number to fill the Fire, and the unbelievers, entering it by their unbelief and their sins, stand in the place of the Muslims who were exposed to it.^[19]

For the wording about sins like mountains, al-Nawawi states that God forgives those sins for the Muslims and sets on the Jews and Christians the like of them for their own unbelief and sins, so that they enter the Fire by their own deeds and not by the sins of the Muslims. He says that this reading is unavoidable because of the verse that no bearer of burdens bears the burden of another, and that the word “places” in the report is figurative.^[19][20] Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz made the narrator swear that his father had told him the report, and al-Nawawi records that Umar and al-Shafi’i both called it the most hopeful hadith for the Muslims.^[19]