Do Muslims have a relationship with God? 5 answers

The objection starts from something true. Many people find that faith in God changes their habits, heals old wounds and gives them a sense of being known. The psychologist William James gathered accounts of such experiences across traditions in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and he treated them as a serious part of human life.^[1] A Muslim has no reason to wave the testimony away.

Muslims report the same things. Many describe the pre-dawn salah (the five daily prayers) as a time of company, the Quran as a voice that answers their situation, and repentance as a turning point after which they are different people. The Quran presents this change as part of faith: “God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves” (13:11). The question is therefore whether the Islamic sources describe a relationship, and the next entries show that they do.

The strongest form of the objection says that a God who commands is remote. The Quran says otherwise in plain words: “We are closer to him than his jugular vein” (50:16). When people ask about Him, the answer is: “I am near. I respond to the call of the caller when he calls on Me” (2:186). God also says: “Remember Me and I will remember you” (2:152).^[2]

Love is part of the picture too. One of the names of God is al-Wadud, the Loving, found with al-Ghafur, the Forgiving, in 85:14, and 3:31 says: “If you love God, follow me, and God will love you.” The daily prayer is described as a dialogue. In a report preserved in Sahih Muslim, God says that He has divided the prayer between Himself and His servant, and answers each line of the opening chapter of the Quran as the worshipper recites it.^[3] A critic may say that a script is not a conversation. Muslims reply that the words of salah are a frame, and that the supplication (duʿāʾ) offered in them and outside them is spoken in the worshipper’s own words and about the worshipper’s own life.

The Christian testimony centres on a sinner who is forgiven and then changed. Islam shares the shape of that story and differs on the mechanism. The Quran says: “O My servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of the mercy of God. Indeed God forgives all sins” (39:53). Repentance (tawba) needs no priest, no ritual intermediary and no sacrifice. The sinner turns directly to God with regret, stops the wrong and resolves not to repeat it, and where another person was wronged, makes amends.^[4]

A report in Sahih al-Bukhari (Book of Tawhid) has God say: “If he draws near to Me by a hand’s span, I draw near to him by an arm’s length; if he draws near by an arm’s length, I draw near by a fathom; if he comes to Me walking, I come to him running.”^[5] Christians hold that sin requires an atonement, which Christ provided, and that this is the ground of the relationship. Islam rejects that doctrine, teaching that no soul bears the burden of another (6:164) and that God forgives by His own mercy.^[6] The two positions are different, and each side should state the other fairly: for the Christian, forgiveness is costly and personal to Christ; for the Muslim, it flows from the mercy God has already described in His own words.

For many Christians, “Father” is the word that makes the relationship intimate, so its absence in Islam can look like coldness. The Quran gives its reason in sura 112: “He neither begets nor is born.” In 19:88–93 it says the idea that the Most Merciful has taken a child is so grave that the heavens might almost burst, and that everyone in the heavens and the earth comes to Him only as a servant.^[7] The concern is protecting the oneness of God (tawhid) from any language that suggests He shares His nature with a son.

Islam does not lack relational vocabulary. The Quran says the most beautiful names belong to God (7:180), and a well-known report in Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Tawhid, speaks of ninety-nine of them.^[8] Among them are al-Rahman (the Most Merciful), al-Ghaffar (the Constant Forgiver), al-Latif (the Subtle, the Kind) and al-Qarib (the Near). The Prophet also reported that before God created the creation He wrote a book, “My mercy has preceded My wrath”, kept with Him above the Throne.^[8] Here “servant” (ʿabd) is an honour. The Quran uses it of the Prophet at the moment of the night journey (17:1) and calls the believers “servants of the Most Merciful” (25:63). Whether that vocabulary feels as warm as “Father” depends on the listener, and a Christian may fairly say that it does not.

The reply on X makes experience the proof and sets scripture aside. The difficulty is that people of many faiths report transformation and closeness to God, and so do people in traditions that disagree with each other about who God is. Experience therefore shows that something real has happened in a life, and cannot by itself decide which tradition describes it correctly. This applies equally to Muslims: a Muslim cannot say that his own sense of nearness proves Islam, for the same reason.^[1]

For that reason Muslims also point to the content and history of the revelation: its account of God, its preservation, and its claims, which can be examined. A person may think that those arguments fail, and that is a position one can hold in good faith. The invitation is to weigh both together. Testimony tells us what faith has done for someone, and the content of the scripture and its history help to show whether what the person believes about God is accurate.

A separate objection goes further than “no Father.” It says the Quran withholds love outright. “Allah does not like transgressors” (2:190). “Indeed, Allah does not like the disbelievers” (3:32). “Allah does not like everyone self-deluded and boastful” (4:36).^[9] Set against a line like John 3:16, where God is said to love the world while it is still at odds with Him, the Quran’s God can look like He loves on approval only, extended to the obedient and withdrawn from everyone else.

The verses are real, and a Muslim should not soften them. Read across the Quran, though, they describe a response to conduct, not a quota on humanity drawn at birth. Every example names an act: transgression, rejection of clear signs, arrogance. Nobody is excluded from God’s love for being born in the wrong family or the wrong country. The door stays open to the same people the verses describe, for as long as they are alive to walk through it.^[10]

Classical theology also separates two things English flattens into one word. Rahma, mercy, is universal and unconditional in scope. “My mercy encompasses all things,” God says in the Quran, and the classical commentator Ibn Kathir read that as covering every part of creation in this life, believer and disbeliever alike.^[11] Mahabba, the specific love tied to approval, the kind the “does not like” verses withhold, is the narrower category, and it tracks conduct. A disbeliever stands outside mahabba while he disbelieves. He has never stood outside rahma, the rain that falls on him, the heart that still beats, the chance to change that has not run out.

The weight behind that mercy is not a side note. A report in Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari has God declare, “My mercy prevails over My wrath.”^[12] That is the general disposition the specific verses sit inside. And because the condition the verses name, disbelief, rejection, arrogance, is a state a person can leave, “Allah does not love the disbelievers” is not a sentence passed on a class of people. It describes where someone stands today, with the terms for standing elsewhere stated in the same book.

A fair comparison still finds a real difference worth naming rather than arguing away. The Christian account in Romans puts God’s love first, reaching the sinner while he is still an enemy, before any turning on his part.^[13] The Quranic account puts the turning first: rahma surrounds a person unconditionally, but mahabba, and the reconciliation it names, waits on repentance the person has to initiate. A Christian can reasonably say that difference in sequence matters more than Muslims usually grant it. A Muslim can reasonably say that a mercy wide enough to cover the disbeliever’s every breath, and a door that stays open as long as he is breathing, is not a small thing to call conditional.